Compliments!

This is the term that often accompanies "Happy New Year" greetings in South Africa. Not too sure why this is, but the confusing usage of English phrases in this country is not exactly uncommon. So, compliments to all! I hope 2011 brings everyone lots of goodness.

I recently returned from an awesome Christmas vacation, and I again find myself faced with the post-vacation blues that comes with the transition back into village life after a break. Thankfully this time it seems to be going better than the last. This is probably due to the fact that I have a solid week before school starts for the year, giving me some time to get back into the swing of my slower-paced home here. So far my time has been filled with cleaning out my room because of the piles of dust and dead bugs that have taken over in my absence, washing all my clothes, towels, and sheets, reading my many newly acquired books, getting back into a running schedule, and jump-roping with the kids. Rough life here in Africa, I know!

This year's holiday season was spent on the beach, and needless to say, it was amazing. I was in Cintsa for Christmas week, which is the southernmost village of the Wild Coast, near East London. A group of friends and I camped at Buccaneers Backpackers for the week, a hostel which I highly recommend to anybody going to the area! We spent Christmas drinking cold beer, lying on the beach, and playing volleyball in the sand almost every night. Didn't feel mumch like Christmas normally does, but was nonetheless a glorious time. I then rang in the New Year in Durban, which I wasn't looking forward to as much as other places in SA but was a pleasantly surprising part of the trip. We spent a few days there swimming in the warm, warm waves, going to UShaka Marine World (which is half aquarium, half water park!), eating delicious Indian food, and dancing all night long with more Peace Corps Volunteers than I could count. Speaking of the food, bunny chow is the delicacy of Durban and a really tasty meal. It consists of half a loaf of bread with the inside scooped out and some form of curry in its place. Mmmmm it is so so delicious! Plus you are supposed to eat it without utensils, which makes for a fun, messy culinary experience.

Another highlight of this break was getting to see my friend Dana and her boyfriend Steve, who have just embarked on a trip around the world for the next 10 months! Check out their blog to find out about all the great places they go. It was awesome to get to see someone from home and catch up on missed experiences from the last year and a half. We are both so clearly in these new places in our post-college lives, but it was refreshing to see how easily good friendships fall back into place as if nothing ever changed!

Now it's time to get back into the swing of school. I'm not entirely sure how these next two terms will pan out at school, since as usual we have yet to create any sort of schedule and set plan. No big deal though, nothing I haven't dealt with at the last minute before! Missing you all and hope you are enjoying the snow for me. Crazy to think this time next year I will be back in Colorado reuniting with the wonderful cold weather....

And another school year is over..

The last few weeks have been marked by the steady downhill of schools getting ready to close for the year. Actually what I really must say is the last 5 weeks when the teachers started preparing for their exams, but luckily I was far too busy with the map project for it to really affect me.

The end of the 4th quarter here always seems to result in a chaotic mess of paperwork, grading, “invigilating” tests, inputting grades (called “marks”), and making the timetable, budget, and updating various policies for the upcoming year. As I have mentioned many times before… things here happen at about the pace of an immobilized snail, so one little piece of paperwork that needs to be done for the Department of Ed. can take weeks.

Luckily, as with most things at Bojelakgomo Primary, things function a bit better than normal here. Because they have the administrative assistant and a couple of volunteers helping, this tedious work was at least started weeks ago, and they clearly have a system of getting all of this done without it interrupting the kids’ work too much.

Inputting the marks into these pre-made excel charts (called “Schedules”) is my least favorite part of school closing, mostly because I always get stuck helping with anything that is tedious computer work. Attention to detail is not one of the stronger points of the Batswana. So last week I helped the volunteers input all of the grades for term 4, only to realize this week that we had to re-do 4 of the 7 grades’ information because of some sketchy saving jobs (or lack there of). Not fun at all!

Our stress reached a high point this week when I got in an argument with one of the volunteers I was working with. In the chart the Grade 3 teacher made us, she got the alphabetical order of a couple learners wrong. So when we had to put the grades into the pre-made schedules, I was explaining to her that we had to switch those 2 grades around since the names were in different places. She could not for the life of her understand why we had to do this or why it was such a big deal to “fuss” over details like this. Well, in this case not “fussing” over this kind of detail would have resulted in the wrong kid failing and having to repeat an entire grade…. so unfortunately it actually was quite a big deal. Finally she let me do it my way, but I don’t think she really realized why it was important to input the grades so carefully. This is most likely due to the fact that schools here are not as learner-centered as they are in the states, so one kid failing when they aren’t supposed to is not the biggest deal in the world.

Another frustrating thing about the end-of-term grading is just the random changing of grades by the teachers OR by the Department of Education themselves, normally in order to push learners ahead so that there aren’t a bunch who are held back in a certain grade. Our district representative came to our school to collect the finished schedules from the schools in our area, and I actually watched her do this with just about every class. A learner only receives an 18% in a certain class? Meh, no biggie, just give them a 35% and call it good. Yes that’s right, a 35% is passing. Pretty frustrating watching this go down with a number of kids, without any regard to whether that individual learner merited such an action or whether it is really in their best interests to do so. It’s all about what the school can show for on paper, but not what the kids can actually do.

So Friday is the official closing day for the year, and schools don’t reopen until January 17th. I am spending Thursday and Friday in Kuruman preparing for Camp GLOW, then Saturday morning the 60 of us leave for Middelpos Guest Farm until December 15th. The camp has been a ton of work to plan and organize so I am thrilled that it will finally actually happen. Should be a great time for all. Around the 19th I will be headed to the Wild Coast for Christmas and Durban for New Years. I can’t think of a better way to finish out 2010, my only full year spent in South Africa!!! My how time flies….

World Map Project!

Well after a couple of weeks we have finally finished painting the world map on the outside wall of the school! It was a lot of work but ended up being really fun, and a good chance to get to know a lot of the learners who wanted to help. It's actually a pretty cool project that PCVs do around the world, and was created by a PCV in the Dominican Republic in 1988. Here's an article the Peace Corps recently released on the popularity of the project.

First step was to measure the space, paint a coat of primer, and the a coat of light blue for the ocean.










Then we drew the map section by section using a grid system. Each grid box was held up with string and sticky tack, and then moved over once the section was drawn.










Then came the painting!! With the help of a bunch of my 6th grade students, we took about 5 days to paint all of the countries. It was pretty fun and I think they learned a lot, namely in the geography and mixing colors departments. And I head about 80 comments on how huge Russia is, since it took forever to cover in yellow! The labelling was also a highlight, especially when they tried to pronounce some of the more difficult names...



















All the kids who helped with the painting...










South Africa!










All in all this was a really fun project. It was pretty cute there as we were finishing and the kids were finally able to see how it was coming together. They are even taking proud ownership over some of the countries they painted - I heard one of the girls talking to a younger kid bragging about how she was the one who painted China so nicely!!! It was also a nice change to finally be able to do something with my hands that people can actually see. Also special thanks to Hillary and Ryan, who helped with the tedious gridding and drawing portion!

Bojelakgomo Primary School

As promised, here is some info about my new school. I am working in another primary school (like before) but this one is only Grade R (kindergarten) through Grade 6. Ones the learners reach Grade 7 they move to the high school, Segopotso High School, which is right next door. There are 307 students here at the Primary School, which is much bigger than in Mecwetsaneng (where we only had 90).

The differences between this school and my old schools are vast. It actually continues to shock me everyday to see a school function so well and kids who are actually LEARNING (gasp… what a concept). The biggest difference that was noticeable right from the start is the fact that the school is not understaffed, and there is a designated teacher for each grade. This is due to the size of the school, since the Department of Education administers teachers to schools based on the number of kids attending. Which is fine in theory I suppose, until you get schools like my old ones that were so small they were only allocated 3 teachers for 8 grades…. hence why the school was such a disaster. I had a hard time finding my place in that mess. I decided at the beginning of the school year that their biggest problem was the amount of teachers, which is why I took over some classes and taught English and Life Orientation. While this is something I enjoyed immensely, I don’t believe it helped my school one bit. My principal and teachers used the fact that I was taking over their classes as a sort of crutch, and now they are going to have to re-adjust to having those classes back. I knew that teaching wasn’t very sustainable going into it (which is likely the case in PC worldwide), but I thought it was worth it to give some kids some sort of education that they weren’t receiving from their school. I also attempted to use my class as a sort of model for the teachers… how to follow lesson plans, how to not hit your kids when they disrupt the class, etc. A nice idea at first, but it was like pulling teeth just to get them to go into their OWN classes let alone into mine to see how things were going… so I don’t think that really did much. I discovered all of this early on in the school year, but decided that maybe Peace Corps can be a bit of a narcissistic experience and if teaching is what I get the most personal fulfillment from, then so be it! I did as much team-teaching with the other educators in their classes as I had time for, so hopefully that helped a little. I’m not convinced it really did anything though, besides enable them to use me to make their teaching load a bit lighter.

Anyways, enough ranting about that. So this school has a teacher for each grade, along with 3 community volunteers who help with teaching and administrative stuff, and a school clerk. So while I can see that being understaffed (in a really big way) was one of the factors affecting the school’s ability to function as a school and to educate the kids, I think the teachers and principal there had just given up because it was too much work. Had my old school had an effective and hard-working principal, I do believe the teachers would have at least tried to do their job a little better. I think my principal could see how bad the school was failing, but didn’t have the energy or desire to really change it.

Ruth (my new principal) is about as different as you could get from my old principal. She is extremely dedicated, hard-working, and actually holds her teachers accountable for the work they are doing. Because of this, the school actually works! What a concept! Just this week I have been helping them do IQMS observations, which is basically the system put in place for both the teachers to monitor and “grade” each others lessons as well as for the Department to come and monitor schools. Of course my old school was supposed to be doing this, but never cared about their own classes enough to monitor and give feedback on others.

It has been amazing observing all of the teachers in their classrooms. They do just about everything I was trying so hard to implement at my old school: planning lessons and following the lesson plan, continual assessment of the learners throughout the lessons, heaving kids come up to the board to do example questions instead of just copying from the board, asking questions to help improve their critical thinking skills… even simple things like displaying the learner’s work on the walls are done here already. They are strict with the learners but do not use any corporal punishment, and if you walk by the classes the kids are actually quiet and disciplined. They teach in English but explain in Setswana when comprehension is really needed, so that the kids are not resorting to route memorization of English phrases without understanding a word of what they are saying or why they are learning it (which is what you see in many classrooms here).

One of the biggest differences I see here is that the teachers actually seem to like their job and want to improve in any way they can to do their job better. They seem to be passionate with the kids and actually teach when they are supposed to. While of course this school is better off than my old one and probably needs less “help”, it has totally changed my opinion on where Peace Corps Volunteers should be placed. Schools like my old ones that are barely at a level of basic functionality can not really use much help from a PCV. Of course we can do little things here and there to make things run more smoothly, but we are in no position to entirely change how a school is run. The only situation where I can see this possibly working is if there is a principal who is willing to completely give in to change the entire system of their school, and who receives a PCV who has had significant school management experience (which is very rarely the case, on both sides of this). Principals here can be very stubborn and are often not willing to change how their school runs even in small areas here and there. And why should they be? This was the system they grew up in, and the system in which they have been working for years. So my thought on this is that your standard PCV (young, maybe some but not a ton of education experience) would be much better placed in schools like this that are already functioning quite well with motivated teachers who actually want you there and actually want to see improvements made in their school. This way we are able to actually help with the things we want to and are able to based on our qualifications and what the school really needs, as opposed to trying to fight the system everyday just to get the school in a place where it is actually running. Obviously this is easier said than done, as is it hard to weed out the schools who have no interest in really improving and changing and who want a PCV merely as a status symbol. So, while it was really difficult leaving my village, it helps knowing that I can actually be put to much better use here. I am so sad for my kids and the dismal future their education holds for them, but I am hopeful that some of them will make it out and be successful. This is something I was never going to be able to change single-handedly anyways, whether or not I stayed there for the full 2 years – or even longer, for that matter.

That said, I am really, truly happy as a clam here. I love coming to school everyday and I am excited about the prospects for projects in 2011. I have an awesome host family and I’ve met really great people in the village with whom I get along really well. While September I spent wondering what the hell I was doing in this country and how I could make my year go by better, I am now actually excited for year 2. OK, I hope that’s enough happy sunshine rainbow blog posting for everyone :)

Some Peace Corps stats..

Here is an interesting artice the Peace Corps recently released about the growth in PC this year. 2010 has seen both the highest number of applicants and volunteers currently serving in 40 years, with 13,500 applicants and 8655 PCVs. Also, I apparently fit into all of the statistical majorities concerning PCVs as a group being a young, white, degree-holding, female volunteer serving in an education program in Africa. Not terribly surprising but certainly puts it in perspective.

Peace Corps is definitely growing. In SA alone the education group coming next year will have 90+ people, while our group only had about 44 trainees (of which we are now down to 31). Bringing in new volunteers is great, but of course the increased budget would probably be better used improving what is already there. I can think of numerous improvements that could be made here that would drastically change how successful PCVs are in this country (better/more training, more accountability, more resources, etc.)... but alas that's just me. I'm sure South Africa is run differently than other PC countries, so I can only speak from my experience here. In any case it will be interesting to see how a much larger number of volunteers affects the program here!

New address

I recently got a new address since my old one was my school's PO box. The new one is:

Kristin Mayer
Private Bag 1532
Post Net Suite 143
Kuruman, South Africa 8460

I also posted it to the side of my blog. Now you can all send me care packages again (wink wink, nudge nudge). Haha, just kidding. But seriously.... mail is always welcome :)

Site change and other updates

Well my computer seems to have kicked it, at least temporarily. The power button is broken and I am unable to turn it on... if anyone else have had a similar problem with Macbooks and knows how to fix it let me know!

Anyways thankfully last weekend I was able to borrow a laptop from another PCV, and I am again connected to the world.. yay! So now I suppose its time for some updates on moving and the new site..

I'll start chronologically. Exactly 2 weeks ago I went back to my site after staying with a couple of friends at their site. Which on a sidenote, was amazing and thanks to Casandra I got to eat some delectable mac and cheese. Yum! So anyways that Monday I went back to my site to begin the packing process. Thankfully my APCD (peace corps "boss" figure) had gone to my site a week before and informed my school they had decided to move me due to the security issues. My principal did NOT take it well, did not understand why they felt this was the only solution, and would not accept that i was unable to finish my service there. So I knew the actual moving day would not be an easy on. I packed up everything that afternoon and evening and stayed for one last night in my room. I'm thankful i was able to have a full ast day at least to spend with my host family. Monday morning some representatives from the Department of Education came to moving, and after a very tearful goodbye with my host family, teachers, and students, I was on my way to my new site.

My new village was actually just recently vacated by another couple from my group. In fact they were 2 of my best friends in Peace Corps and they both had nothing but great things to say about their experience in the village, so I was pretty happy it worked out that I could move there. The village is about 100km north of Kuruman in the Moshaweng valley, which is now basically just a large dry riverbed. There are a few other PCVs in this area, and one only about 5km from me! So nice to have someone close by.

Honestly I can't say enought about how much I love my new home. I absolutely adore it and I could feel that it was a perfect fit for me from the day I moved in! My host family (the Molefi family) is an older couple in their 60s and are incredibly nice and welcoming. AND they both speak english, so communication is significantly improved! I have a single room (bigger than my last) that has a seperate entrance and a door that goes into the house. After what happened at my old site I was pretty adament that I didn't want a seperate house and preferred to be in close quarters with a host family. I got exactly what I asked for and thankfully I absolutely love the family, so it's really a perfect setup for me! Another bonus to my new home... they have their own borehole (well) in their yard and RUNNING water in the bathroom right next to my bedroom! Which means there is a flush toilet! There is also a bath but nobody really uses it for bathing (its kinda gross), but it's amazing to have the running water right there and a drains! I was doing fine having to walk to my community tap for water at my old site but I will not pretend that it isn't awesome to not have to. Sadly the pump on the borehole is broken momentarily and in the process of being fixed, but im sure the running water will come back to me. I am eagerly awaiting its return.

I will write an entry dedicated to the new school(s) that I work in soon, because I have a lot to say about it and the massive differences from my old schools. Briefly though, my supervisor (Ruth) is the principal of the primary school in Laxey, which is maybe one of the best and most well-run schools I have seen in this country. My experience here so far has actually re-instilled my faith in the education system here seeing that there are, in fact, schools that are thriving even in poor and isolated rural communities. Of course there are a few things here and there that I will be able to help with when the new schoolyear begins in January (grades 3-4 English and math, library stuff/reading classes, and helping Ruth set up a parent/teacher conference thing that she wants to happen every term), but I will have a lot more freedom and time to do fun projects. In the next couple weeks I will be painting the world map on one of the school walls, and I am still busy planning Camp GLOW, which takes place December 11-15. I am sooo so excited for the camp and I think it will be a perfect thing to finish out 2010 with! There is also a high school right next door to the primary school, which I will also helping out at occasionaly (probably with a computer lab that was recently put together there).

Im getting rambly. All I can really say is that life is going great for me here! It was pretty traumatic going through the move and saying goodbye to my old village but for me this just reinforces that everything happens for a reason. I already feel at home and totally comfortable here, and I think this will be a fantastic place to finish out my service. I already get gaggles of adorable little children at my door every day so excited to have a new volunteer and someone new to play with! They have definitely already discovered that I am a sucker for the little cuties and don't mind playing with them after school because so far they've come over just about every day.

OK, that's all for now. I'll post some pics soon as well as more info on my new school. Missing you all and hope you enjoy all the haloween festivities for me!