3rd Term

Sorry it has been so long! I sent my sister a looong post in early July, but she didn’t open the e-mail until a couple of weeks ago. So, I thought I would just write a little update.

I am writing this from Namibia…I just arrived back in Nam this afternoon. 36 hellish hours of flying/sleeping in airports, but I made it! I spent the last 2 weeks at home in America and they were fabulous! I just spent a lot of time hanging out at the lake with family and friends. It was amazing to see everyone and hear what they have been up to for the last 10 months. A few highlights were hanging out at Lake George with the fam, having a mini family reunion at the lake with my dad’s side, spending a few days with my Nana and Poppop, the Charles wedding (I was a bridesmaid in the wedding of two of my very closest friends Sara and Kevin), and the little party one of my mom’s best friends had for me at the lake (I got to talk about and explain what my experience has been in Nam for the past few months, show a lot of pictures and videos, and everyone brought me lots of Chanda’s Secret books, stickers and supplies…it was so much fun!).

Now that I am back in Nam, I am gearing up to start a few projects. Now, I am always starting a thousand projects, but I think I am finally pinned downs the ones that are reasonable and feasible…so here is a little more about what I hope to work on for the next 16 months!

Chanda’s Secrets

Chanda’s Secrets is a book I taught when I did my student teaching at Miami. It is a young adult book about a young girl who lives in southern Africa. It is an amazing and powerful book that deals with issues like death, HIV/AIDS, teenagers having sex with older men for gifts or money (something that is practiced a lot Namibia) and what people do to survive. When I read it when I was teaching, I really liked it, but when I reread it when I was over here I realized how unbelievably similar it was to my learner’s lives. One of the prominent themes is the secrecy, shame and stigma that go along with being HIV positive. HIV/AIDS is so prevalent here and so many people die of it. We bluntly talk about the disease, condom use and how to prevent the disease in schools from grade 1 through 12, but when someone clearly has the disease or has died from it, no one will ever admit to it. It is always said that the person has died of TB, cancer or just fell sick. This book really deals with this issue and how we need to speak of the disease, get tested and help each other.

Another great thing about the book is that there are no cultural references that I would need to explain. Usually books have so many American or British cultural references that you spend half of your time trying to explain them rather than teaching the book. There is no need to do that in this book because it is so similar to there lives.

I wanted to start teaching the book this term (this is our last term of the year), but I think I am only going to have about one solid month of teaching in this term and don’t think I will have enough time to properly teach the novel, so I am going to save it for next year. But I am soooo excited about teaching it!

Peer Tutoring

I am not sure if I have talked about this project before, so if I have you can skip this part . Basically, I just want to start a peer tutoring program at my school. We have too many learners and not enough teachers at my school and a lot of the times the teachers have a hard time explaining things to the kids. I started having tons and tons of kids coming to me for help in all kinds of subjects and just started finding learners who excelled in a particular subject to help the learners who were struggling. It really helped, so now I have a group of learners who I am training to become peer tutors and teach their peers who are struggling.

This has been a kind of learn as you go project. I really have no idea how to train tutors, but I think the kids and are having fun with it. I made them all fill out applications and interview, then I just selected the learners I knew would be serious about it. I want the learners to really be dedicated, and I thought it would be good practice for them.

I am finishing up the training this term and hopefully we will start the tutoring program within the first month of school.

Boys and Girls Clubs

We have a lot of issues at my school that revolve around sexual relationships. A number of my girls and boys date older men and in return receive money, clothes, gifts, etc. When a couple of the learners were explaining this to me I was clearly really really upset. When I asked what I could do about it, they suggested opening an “open talk club” for boys and one for girls where they can openly talk about all the issues that they are going through as adolescents. So, that is what we are starting. I have two grade 11 girls (the oldest grade in our school) and two grade 11 boys who will help me run each group. Then, we will invite all boys and girls grades 10 and 11 to join. The goal will be to talk about these issues in a safe place, but to also to work on leadership skills. The grade 11 learners will be in charge of helping me to facilitate and plan the group sessions, and then we will find the learners who prove to have leadership qualities to lead boys and girls clubs for grades 8-9. The kids and I are really excited about starting this club. I just really want all my projects to empower the learners. I want them to be mostly learner run. I think it’s important for them to start developing their leadership skills now. I hope it goes well!

Peace Corps Training Manual

We have a two month training before we are sworn in as PCVs, and in the training we have a lot of sessions on how to teach. The only problem is that there is no written manual on what to do. Teaching over here is very difficult, especially if you have had no formal training. So I am working with a few other volunteers to put together a manual to give all of the new teachers to teach them how to organize their classroom, write a lesson plan, manage their classroom, etc. I am so happy to be working on this project because I think it is something that can be added on to every year and a project that will really be able to help lots of groups to come.

Overall, life has been great in Namibia. I truly am really really happy here and know it’s the place for me. I have had some crazy things happen and have been extremely stressed, but I also have had so many amazing experiences.

Anyways…here are some of the moments that have gotten me through these last 10 months 

• The other day, one of my grade 9 male learners found a long blonde strand of hair in his exercise books (notebooks they write everything for class in). It must have gotten in there when I was grading his book (the meph—malaria pills—make us lose lots of hair…). In the middle of class, when I am really getting into this little speech about poetry, he stands up, holds up the hair like a prize he has won and starts talking about how nice and soft my hair is. I just freeze while he pulls and tugs on the hair, comments on the colour and passes it around to his group members. It eventually gets passed to me where I am instructed to “put it back on”. At this point I am laughing, toss the hair onto the ground and try to move onto our class brainstorm about childhood memories. Of course I laughed through the rest of my lesson reenacting in my mind this big too-old-to-be-a-grade-9 boy playing with my hair!
• The other day, I was running by myself. I am running on the same path I take everyday, and it is usually pretty uneventful. I actually rarely see people about ten minutes into my run. All of a sudden I see a four donkey donkeycart barreling down the same little path I’m on. Now, we have a ton of donkeycarts in our village, but a four donkey one is rare. And, they usually aren’t so fast. I literally jump out of the way just in time. I look into the cart planning on glaring at the crazy person who tried to kill me to find that no one is in the cart! It was a runaway cart! All of a sudden I see 4 small girls running after it screaming in Damara. It was so funny! I couldn’t stop laughing for a week straight.
• The other day I had to run home to take care of something quickly and missed the first 5-10 minutes of my grade 9 class. I assumed I would to come back to a class with learners up roaming around aimlessly and talking. I mean, I love my grade 9’s, but this was my talkative class and that’s just what the kids do when the teacher isn’t there (and the teachers are not there quite a bit). When I walked in, everyone was in their seat (surprise number 1) and no one was talking (#2). So I thanked them for being so good and asked them to get out their exercise books to start on the warm-up (we start everyday with a correct the sentence warm-up). Then, I looked at the board and a learner told me the kids had come in, sat down, did their warm-up in their books and even had a volunteer go to the front and do the warm-up on the board. I know this isn’t funny and probably doesn’t mean much in America, but I nearly cried I was so happy and proud of them! They followed my procedures even when I wasn’t there…and they are my crazy class!! I couldn’t stop smiling all day! Yes, this is how lame my life is…things like this make me happy!
I hope everything is great at home. It was amazing to see so many of you when I was home for these last two weeks. I can’t begin to tell you how much your support means to me. Please know that you are always in my thoughts and prayers!!

Love Always,
Aly