Well, our first day is done, and that's an accomplishment in and of itself. It was an exercise in endurance and flexibility to rival any Olympic sport. Keep in mind, none of us have experience with teaching in any real capacity, and teaching in another language and in another culture is a huge obstacle.
Jessy and I (we're roomies for this part of the trip) woke up around 6:30 to the sound of honest-to-God roosters and children. Mostly children. I had underestimated the ability of children to be up at horribly early hours with enough energy to be laughing and running. I was similarly impressed by their commitment to playing... they were outside even though it's really freakin' cold in the morning.
So we physically got up around 7 and got ready to head out. Thembi, who was driving us, said that she'd be leaving around 8. To make a long story short, we left around 9... Africa time. Everything is plus or minus 45 minutes, and usually it's plus. So we arrived at the school at about 9:30 after stopping for loaves of bread (for breakfast for the kids). Considering our itinerary had said that breakfast would start the day at school at 8, we were somewhat behind schedule.
We'd anticipated having some time to warm up and get ready, but when we got there the kids were all there and ready to go, so we just jumped into the first activity. Basically we set up the camp, went over some goals, got some “community agreements” (listen when others talk, don't laugh, be respectful, etc), played a game to learn names and did a presurvey (of how much they think they know about the topics we'll be covering).
By the time we were done with ALL of that, only about... one hour had passed. Our thoughts upon realizing this: “Uh-oh”.
About here we decided to slow our pace a bit. Our next step was to do the first page in their “Hero Books”, but we quickly realized that due to some amazing oversight, we'd forgot all of the books that we'd spent an hour or more making the previous day. Oops! So we introduced the idea and had them all make covers for the books, and they'll get the books (with cover) tomorrow. Not a terrible setback.
After this we did another little game and then handed out journals. I suppose that I should mention how in love these kids are with their school supplies. I dunno if others agree with me, but I always loved school supply shopping. Every year I got new paper and pencils and markers and whatever else and no matter what it was, it was great. These kids clearly don't get that luxury, so when we handed out their little pencil cases and notebook for the journals... they were clearly really excited. The care they took in drawing and the joy they clearly got from using markers and colored pencils was so wonderful.
About this time (11 or 11:30) the breakfast sandwiches were done. Originally we'd been told not to start before breakfast was done, but since the day was mostly light-hearted activities we'd pressed on. We probably wouldn't do that another day because of the heavier material and because for some of these kids this might have been their first meal in a long time. Breakfast tomorrow might be their first meal since the lunch we provide the day before.
After the sandwiches were eaten it was nearing noon and we'd originally had lunch in this time slot. Ha. The women preparing the food started on lunch, which was going to take a good three hours. We're now thinking: “What are we going to do with this time?!”
So we moved to the trust hand activity. In that activity the students trace their hand and then write their name in the palm. The fingers they use to write names of people they trust. They also list their struggles and successes on the side. The exercise is supposed to help the kids visualize that they have people to turn to for help. It's a fun little activity and afterwards we put the hands up so kids could look around to see if other kids have similar problems (obviously, they often do). It worked pretty well, even if a few kids copied down the answers off our examples.
We did another journal question (What do you know about HIV/AIDS) and then had a discussion about that. The kids did seem to know quite a bit, especially that you should use gloves when handling blood, but I'm unsure of how well they understand WHY that is. I think a lot of the teaching here is done by a lot of copying down what is written and memorization. Hopefully I'll be able to better explain how HIV works to them. In any case, they didn't seem hesitant about participating here, although that may have been helped along by the stickers we gave them for doing so (they LOVED the stickers).
So then we did a little game about facts and myths about HIV, but it didn't get very far, so we abandoned it. Realizing that the kids were getting restless, the four of us were at the ends of our ropes, and that lunch would be happening pretty late, we dismissed the kids for games. We'd brought a soccer ball and frisbees and some clotheslines as jumpropes. I didn't really see the kids playing soccer (they seemed to be using it for basketball instead?) but I played frisbee with some kids the whole time. It was awesome because they had obviously never used a frisbee before, so they were even worse than me! I was looking like some pro. Unfortunately for me, the kids started getting the hang of it pretty quick, but I'm keeping up with them.
The jumpropes probably would have been fun to play with, but I'm gonna need to study how they do it a little more first. They have this weird style where the two spinners go really fast and the person jumping jumps for a few spins, but then catches the rope on their legs and the whole thing pauses. It's a weird start and stop action that looks pretty cool, but I'm not about to try my hand at it.
So after this was food, which was pretty well received. Chicken and rice and I don't know what else. I didn't really have anything aside from an apple and some juice, both of which I realized after having started that they were probably bad ideas. Generally when travelling to foreign countries you try to avoid fruit without hard shells (like apples) and the local water (which they put powder in to make the juice). Oh, well, I guess we'll see if I keep over!
We ended the day with some singing and dancing, courtesy of one of our translators, Eugene. That was another huge obstacle we faced... we'd been operating under the assumption that we'd have 4 translators. The day dawned and we had 2: Eugene and Hlengiwe. Granted, those two did a fantastic job and are simply wonderful people and great helps to us... but it pretty much eliminates our ability to break into smaller groups. We'd planned to have 4 small groups of kids, which each AYO volunteer would lead, along with a translator... but that idea had to be tossed. In any case, Eugene knew most of the kids already from teaching them English or something, so he knew how to keep them energized and entertained.
Okay, well, it's 10:00 PM here and I'm crashing hard. The end of our day was far less amusing; we drove home to Eugene and Hlengiwe trying to out sing each other, drove to the store for some last minute food supplies, got our car exchanged (I'll try to get to that story tomorrow), ate a scrumptious dinner of tuna sandwiches, rice, and oranges, prepared a far more flexible lesson plan for tomorrow, and that brings me to here. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get some sleep.
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