1 Year in Nam!!

I wrote this post last week and just got to internet today to send it (i spent the weekend in swakop :) But today we have officially been in Namibia for a year...it is so crazy to think about how long we have been here and how much everything has changed! I hope all is well at home...miss you!

Hello from Nam!!

I hope all is well at home. Everything is great here. We are going into the hot summer months, and it is pretty hot here! I forgot how hot it gets here. Luckily, the rainy season has started and we have been getting rain in the Bing…I am excited for everything to turn green again!

We are in our third and final term in school. I am just finishing up my first year teaching and living in Namibia. It has been a crazy but great year. I really could not ask for a better school to be teaching at. This term is especially chaotic because grade 10 is writing their national exam right now. It is kind of like intense confusing finals. If they fail these exams, they fail grade 10 and then are out of school. Talk about high pressure exams. Basically each subject has 1-3 exams and all the learners write them in the month of October. When these exams start, the rest of the school kind of shuts down. So our normally never really functioning on schedule school (I think we had maybe one day all last term where we actually taught on a Friday—no joke) is kind of at a standstill.

Here are a few stories from the past few months here in the Bing…

Homestead Visit

A couple months ago I went to buy electricity for our house (you pay as you go for electricity here). It is a little bit of a walk to go to the place where you buy it. But I decided to make the journey over the riverbed after school one Friday to ensure that we would not be electricityless for the weekend (its closed one the weekend). I started walking with some learners and when they found out I was making the trek over the riverbed by myself, some boys walking home that way were quickly found and told to “protect” me.

I ended up walking with some of my favorite grade 9 boys. So we were just walking and chatting and joking around. They escorted me to the shop and then told me we were not far from their homestead and invited me to visit. Soon we were off on another somehow long walk to go visit the homestead.

Once we arrived I was first greeted by their monkey chained up with an old rope to a tree on the edge of the yard. After watching the boys play with the monkey and them trying to convince me it was a “nice” monkey (I never quite believed them as it barred its teeth at me and hissed…supposedly it was because he had never seen white skin before), we went inside the house and I met my learner’s mom. The homestead is a traditional home made out of cow dung, which keeps it warm in the winter and cool in the summer. They do not have electricity or running water, but have a pump near by to fetch it. Inside, my learner’s mom was sewing on an antique hand crank sewing machine. She sewed duvets and handbags that looked surprisingly like Vera Bradley quilted bags…of course I thought that was funny. They had an outdoor kitchen where they made a fire everyday and cooked porridge in a three-legged-black pot. They also had chickens and donkeys on their homestead. Geraldo, my learner, showed me how they lived, ironed (with an iron where you put coal inside to get the iron hot) and farmed. It was one of the best experiences I have had since coming to Nam. Geraldo is so proud of his culture and his home and we just spent hours talking as he explained how he lived. I love seeing where the learners come from and meeting their parents and families. As I walked home from his homestead, I just felt this odd feeling of sadness. I realized how much I just miss being in a family. As I met Geraldo’s mom, brother and nieces and nephews and just saw the love that they have for each other, it just made me realize how much I miss my own family. That is one of the best things that living so far away from home has done for me, made me appreciate my family and friends even more.

The Village Drunk

So, in the village we have quite a few “mad” people-people who are always drunk or just a little crazy. There is this one toothless man who is always around smiling, greeting people and stumbling his way through the school yard. Sometimes he looks in the trash bins, sometimes he just sits under a tree, but you will just randomly see him. He is completely harmless and just a happy little crazy man.

Well, we have this “prize giving” ceremony at the beginning of third term. We give out certificates to learners who have a 75% or above in a subject. Not many learners get that, so it’s a big deal. Of course this ceremony lasts about 4 hours and has many dance and singing intermissions. We were watching some Damara learners do a traditional dance when all of a sudden the old drunk man comes sashaying into the hall and starts dancing with the kids. Everyone gets up and starts clapping and cheering for the man. He dances with the learners until the song is over, then all of the teachers shake his hand and he is gone as quickly as he arrived. I just kind of stood there laughing at what I was seeing and thinking about what would have happened if a crazy drunk came waltzing into an American school’s award assembly to dance with the learners. And then I realized that this is why I love Nam.

Yet Another Hair Story

So, I was leaning over a learners desk helping them to summarize an article we read in class (I think summarizing will be the death to me and my learners) when a single blonde strand of hair falls to the desk. I quickly go to brush it away when my learner picks it up and holds it up to the light. “It’s beautiful,” he says. I just stare at my damaged split end hair “shimmering” in the light (not from beauty but from grease, remember it’s about 120 degrees here). He puts it down and I go on explaining why rewriting an entire article is not summarizing it.

About ten minutes later I am back up at the front of the room teaching and have completely forgotten about the awkward hair incident, that is until I see a girl across the room with her hand in the air staring at something dangling from it. At first I wondered what is this crazy girl doing. Then I realized the invisible thing she seemed to be pinching was the same translucent thing that was planted on my head just 11 minutes before. My hair had been passed around the room with each learner touching it and holding it up to the light. I stopped my teaching for a minute, looked at her, laughed and went on. Usually the kids give me my hair back so I can “put it back”. But this hair never reached my hands again. I can only hope it was dropped somewhere along the semi-circle of learners and is not in some creepy Miss Aly hair shrine at the hostel.

Brand New Computer!!

So….my learners brought home a BRAND NEW COMPUTER!! We were invited to a “Teenage Talk Show” about teenage pregnancy in a town a few hours away. The Ministry of Communication was organizing it for four of the rural schools in our area since teenage pregnancy is a problem (apparently our school had the highest rate in the region last year) and village schools are less likely to get information on prevention etc. So, along with a couple other sponsoring organizations, organized an event where each school brought four learners to present about teenage pregnancy. It was a two day event where they brought in speakers to give information about teenage pregnancy for the first day and the second day the learners presented. Everything was video taped so the ministry could use the learners’ presentations in videos they would distribute to schools.

Of course the Ministry sent us no information about the event except the dates (which ended up being wrong) and that we needed 4 learners to present on teenage pregnancy. So another teacher and I got some learners together to work on a presentation (at this point we had no idea what the time limit was or what it should be like). The learners went to the clinic in the village a couple of times to interview the sisters and get supplies to put on our posters (they actually got syringes, needles and vials for the injection you can get to not get preggers…I’m not sure that would be allowed in the States). They worked hard and the two days before we were to leave for the presentation the learners and I were at school until close to midnight preparing. My learners that went are good speakers, but really knew nothing about making an outline and controlling how long they spoke for (they like to talk). Luckily, I was able to pull out all the tricks I learned from my public speaking days in college and we polished up their presentation.

Once we got to the workshop it was so nice. I was so impressed with the sponsoring organizations and how well run everything was. Usually things are a little sketchy and never really run like they are supposed to, but this went really smoothly. The learners from the other schools were great and I really enjoyed talking with the people from the Ministry. We gave our presentations on Friday and I think I was just as nervous as the kids! I could barely sit still. But they presented and totally ROCKED it!! I really could not imagine it going any better. They were poised but really passionate about what they were speaking about. They were also the only learners to quote statistics (thanks to Ande and Sara who facebooked me stats and articles about preggo teens in Nam ) and to really localize their presentation bringing in examples from our school. I was so proud, I could not stop smiling. At any rate, we were competing against one school that was really good. You could tell they had done this before and were a little cocky (it was our first time to do something like this). We actually ended up tying with them for first place and when we went into the tie breaker (each school had a learner give a two minute message to teens), we won first place! When it was announced we won first place and were taking home a brand new computer my learners came bounding across the room. We had a big group hug. I had tears in my eyes. They had just worked so hard for it and deserved it. After it was all over, the sponsors came up to congratulate me and tell me how awesome and talent my learners were. It was just such an amazing day. I honestly think it took us a couple of days to stop smiling. It is also great for our school as our one working computer broke the day we left for the competition!

One of the greatest things that has come out of the competition is that the kids who competed have been giving presentations on teenage pregnancy at school. They present and then we have an open talk discussion about sex. It is amazing how many crazy questions we get. The kids are able to answer most of them, but every once in awhile I will jump in with a fact or statistic. It has been amazing. We are going to try to do something like it every week and split up the boys and the girls. I think this could really make a difference at our school. We just have too many girls and boys who are dating older men or who have multiple sexual partners. So I am really really excited about the potential this activity has!

Peer Tutors

So, I have this peer tutoring program I have kind of started. We actually just finished the training last week. Literally the day after training ¾ of my teachers were going for the day to town to write the end of the year test. Now, this wouldn’t be so awful but Nam doesn’t do substitute teachers. So, when you have over ¾ of your teachers gone, it just screams “this day is going to be hell.”

One of the other teachers thought it would be a good idea to give all the teaching to the peer tutors. I tried to explain that tutoring isn’t really teaching and that they had just been trained and would be going into classes of 40 learners who barely behave for real teachers and didn’t have a lesson plan, but of course they decided to just throw them into the lions anyway.

The morning of the big teacher departure I had all the peer tutors gather up and told them to go to teacher who teaches the subject they want to teach and ask them for lesson plans. They would then become that teacher for the day and teach whatever she/he gave them to teach. The learners scurried off in pairs to get their lessons in order.

I was pretty much planning on this day being the day from hell. Maybe it is me becoming jaded or maybe I was just preparing myself for the worst possible situation ever and somehow hoping for the best. But I did not expect the day to go as fabulously as it did. It was almost flawless. The peer tutors were unbelievable. I told them I didn’t actually think they were listening during our training, but apparently they were. They had the learners participating in a controlled manner. They were asking great questions and were explaining in multiple ways and in the home languages if necessary. They split the kids into groups and gave the low learners extra attention. They even gave quizzes and activities at the end to assess whether or not the learners understood what they were taught. I was shocked. I almost cried at the end of the day when I heard learners talking about how great it was to have the tutors teaching and saw the pride smiles on the tutors faces. I guess it was just so nice to see something I had worked hard on actually be successful.



OK! Enough stories! I am sure you are bored and maybe haven’t even gotten this far. It’s OK…I know I write a lot, but you know I don’t get to internet much! I hope everything is well at home. I am not going to lie, I am pretty jealous that you all are in Fall at home. I miss sweaters, crunchy leaves, crisp days and apple cider. So wear a sweater, crunch leaves, breathe in crisp air and drink apple cider for me!

Love,
Aly

P.S. I celebrate my one year in Africa on November 2nd!

P.S.S. We are actually getting our new vols in early November. It should be around 22 education volunteers and I get to help with the training. I am actually really excited about it! 