Training don don!

So I can't believe it, but we are finally finished. We had Monday and Tuesday this week to teach something, and then had to give our final exams for the summer school students on Wednesday. I just reviewed and we played games to take up the time. Teaching is really stressful and oftentimes uncomfortable. I hated not really being prepared and still having to stand in front of 50+ children trying to entertain them enough for them to not find talking more interesting than paying attention. I'm basically glad I won't be teaching Junior Secondary School. Hopefully I get the older kids that I'm wanting, and I think I will.

On Thursday after the exam was over, we had to do a life skills class. One of the three teachers in my room was sick, so me and the other teacher had to pull the class off just the two of us. We had planned this thief and cop skit we were going to act out to be able to talk about decision making. E went into the class and acted like I was sick like the other guy and she was just going to teach them a boring english lesson. I burst into the classroom wearing sunglasses that made me look like a menacing criminal, brandishing my pocket knife at a room of at least 30 children. I said it was a cutlass and that I wasn't afraid to use it and yelled “this is a robbery, I'm taking hostages!” I pulled a few students forcefully up front and told them I'd kill them if they tried to leave! I figured I might as well take the chance in Africa to threaten students with a knife because I could never ever do it in the states. They all laughed and had fun. The skit was entertaining, but probably not all that educational. The students had to bargain with me to get the hostages out without people dying and too much money being lost, because if most of the money was stolen, the school was going to close. Two students ended up getting killed and I got away with 2.5 million leones.

Yesterday, Friday, was the awards ceremony at the school. So like with any meeting in Sierra Leone there were many speeches and belabored activities. The Islamic missionary guy talked, the principal talked, our acting country director talked, and then we all passed out awards to the top three students in our respective classes. It was cool to give them recognition, and I'm sure all these students will succeed. A really smart girl in JSS 3 named Augusta gave the vote of thanks for the student body. I talked to her a bit afterwards. She wants to be a journalist and goes to a girls boarding school in Freetown. She likes to read, write poetry, and all sorts of other impressive smart things.

Last night we had guys night at this bar called Obama's. It was pretty fun but felt a little bit like hazing. We joined back up with the girls later and all had a big la-di-da with Salone 3 at the nice night club.

I went for a run this morning, and now I'm getting ready to go to town to buy everything I need to get for site. I've bought a mattress, a kerosene stove, and need to get a bunch of other stuff. After this we have the host family recognition meal thing. I'll be packing everything up today, PC will be picking the stuff up tomorrow, and I'll leave Bo on Monday. We'll spend a few days in Freetown being taken around by our LCFs (the language/culture/tech trainers that we have had for the past 10 weeks). There will probably be more la-di-daing, but now on the beach! Swearing in is on Wednesday, and we are all really excited to be done with all of this and sitting on our verandas at site. 

Ready for training to be don don

Not too much is new now. Still teaching two classes in summer school. This week wasn't as good as last week as far as my students doing well on their exams.

All of us are trying to figure out the thought process of the students that come out of the primary school system here. Most seem to just regurgitate random pieces of information they learned by rote and hope that some of the words stick in the right places. There isn't a whole lot of conceptualization going on I don't think just because their entire system of education is based on the rote method and they are never taught to think critically about solving problems. Like I said, the information goes into their heads in pieces, and it seems to only stick in memory. The information I guess is never really thought about once it's there, and so connections and parallels are never really seen to produce the sort of higher thinking problem solving skills that the American system tries to promote. Of course some students here seem brilliant and capable of thinking at a higher level past memorizing and regurgitating facts. Some seem to have original thoughts and can write intelligible proper english. Some writing from the bad students is absolute gibberish that they can't even read back to me when I ask them what it says.

It just sucks that the system is so strangling. This is all just my own opinion, and I'm sure it's not just the rote system that is the problem.. I'll be teaching at the upper levels, so suffice to say, I'll probably be sticking to helping the smart kids and mostly leave the hopeless ones on the wayside.. Hopefully if they have stuck in the system this long, they are hard working and smart. We'll see once school gets going in the next month.

I'm really tired of training. Everyone is. Today (Saturday, Aug 18th) we had a cooking demo we had to go to at 8. It took 4+ hours to cook everything, and I couldn't help but feel like I was wasting an extremely valuable weekend standing around. The chop was swit, at least. I'm completely exhausted of talking with people. Even people that I want to talk to, like this cool guy I met today at his pharmacy, Dr. Muhammed Fofana. I'm just exhausted, and the work is never ending. So yeah, bad day; can't wait to get to my house and have a small breather. 

Summer School etc

I just wanted to post something short since I'll be headed to the internet cafe sometime today. It's eid-el-fitr though, the end of Ramadan (Pray Day), so I'm not sure the place is going to be open. Muslims, most of the population, will be praying/eating/celebrating. My host family is Christian. We went and bought some pork. I don't know if any slight is meant by that? Probably not. Christians and Muslims seem to get along completely here.

Nothing much is all that new really. We started summer school, so I've been teaching two classes, Junior Secondary School 1 (JSS1) and 2 at this muslim girls school called Amadiya. Apparently 1500 girls are enrolled here during the regular school sessions.

I run a class with two other people. I'm teaching science and the other two are teaching english and math. I think I'm doing fairly well and just need to improve on board management, keeping a quiet class, clarity, speed, and volume of speech. The students seem to be enjoying the lessons I'm giving them in matter and energy. I've made some demos, and brought in local examples of elements, mixtures, and compounds. I was able to demonstrate chemical -> electrical -> magnetic energy transformations with an electromagnet I made from a curtain wire, a battery, and a nail I found in my classroom. Our one class, JSS1, is right out of primary school, so we aren't even sure most of them are understanding our english. You need to slow down your speaking a whole lot.

This will be a different experience from what I'll probably be doing in Mambolo (my village) for the next two years. I'm pretty sure I'll be teaching much older kids in the Senior Secondary School (SSS) 3 and 4. I hope to be a rolemodel for the older kids that have potential and desire to be scientists and engineers. There are a lot of randomly bright students here, like anywhere, and a whole lot of less than bright students. Being in Bo, a big city, is different as well. Kids that are coming to summer schools are ones that want to come or have parents that are interested in getting them educations.

I got the package from my parents! It only took a couple weeks to ship, surprisingly, and it is not at all tampered with. They sent me some cool books, delicious food, and other things that I really appreciate! I've been making a lot of paper airplanes and things using the book on paper airplanes they sent me. I'm again finding that a lot of kids here don't know how to share things. They also don't know how to take care of something and not destroy it in a short time. So I mean, they like the planes, but it's really annoying when every kid wants their own, saying "yu go mek fo mi!" and obviously don't understand when I say "A mek for una-ol!". There's a culture of just asking for things here, and it is starting to be pretty annoying. It can be as bad as someone you've never met saying "Give me money" just because I'm white. Our figuring is that people have gotten used to giveaways, but PC doesn't work that way. It just seems rude to me.

Now I'm at this internet cafe in Bo called Mars. This place is so expensive. I'll try to upload some pictures to my facebook.

Site visit and another village day

Okay..

So still catching up small. The week before last we found out where we are being placed for the next two years and then had a few days time to visit the place.

My village is named M---. It's in the Kambia district, a little bit north of Freetown. It's known for its rice farming and abundance of foods. I was able to eat a couple delicious papaya, a pineapple, and lots of coconuts. I think the children are going to be supplying me with lots and lots of delicious fruits. It is on this big river called the Great Scarcies that goes out to the Atlantic, and all of the rice fields around the area are fed by the river. The river is tidally locked, so it is pretty neat to see the level of water in the fields change throughout the day. Most people in the village are rice farmers of course, some are fisherman and boat makers, and a few are artisan type crafts people. I'm pretty satisfied with my village – it's beautiful and the people are interesting!

There are two main ethnic groups in Sierra Leone: the Mende and the Temne, and M--- is deep in Temne-land. So basically I'm going to have to learn another language, Temne, that is completely different from English. Krio, the lingua franca in Sierra Leone, is pretty similar to English, but I'm still not completely proficient in it. I'll be learning Temne mostly by talking to small children in Krio, so that should be fun.

I've inherited a ridiculous dog that chases motorcycles and runs at groups of children just to scare them.

Transportation to and from M---- is sort of difficult. I think 16 miles to the main road (main road is paved, road to main road is not) took close to 4 hours. I had a chicken at my feet and I think there were about 20 people packed into a minivan sized car (poda-poda). Transportation anywhere here sucks a lot. I'll just have to try different methods to try to cut down on the time..

My school is really great. The name is S--- SSS. We have a huge three story building with quite a lot of facilities that most other schools in this country just dream about. There are full chemistry and physics labs that are not being used well at all, so I've basically made it my project for the next two years to make these nice. We don't really have people that are qualified enough to know how to use the labs effectively. I'll be teaching physics, math, and I imagine also chemistry probably at the upper SSS level. I want to focus on the good upper level students, but I don't know how much good I can do them at this point. There is the WASC, the standardized test everyone must take for getting into universities here, and it's extremely difficult. Everything rides on it, unfortunately. We'll see. I'm sure I'll talk about my village and school a lot more in the future.

Today we had a village day. These are basically little field trips we take to four different villages in the surrounding area. We've had three of these total, and this is the last one we'll be doing. With this one my group had to put together a life skills workshop for the community and present it over an hour. My group did its talk on nutrition, so we made some visual aids and everything for it. It went surprisingly well given we only had a couple hours to plan it. The audience was mostly just adult community members and we got good reception. The other group talked about malaria and simple ways to stop and reduce the spread of the parasite. One woman had sort of a negative reaction to mine and the other groups presentations. She was arguing from the point of view that a lot of people can't afford to eat well and feed their children like we were telling them they should or buy mosquito nets and other things to limit malaria. Otherwise, everyone seemed to enjoy the presentations. I hope we helped someone. It's hard to tell a group of adults things they don't already know, and you feel like an ass when you do. The presentations were more for us as teachers than it was for them, really. 

PC doesn't like me putting up my exact location. 

Cholera? and other things I'll try to remember

Let me see.. where did I leave off? I guess it has only been a few weeks. Sorry about that. I'm just super busy between training, trying to do all the activities I want to do, and spending time with the fambuldem. It is hard to find time to get the computer out and write something. Right now I should probably be spending time with the family but instead I am writing a couple posts and eating nutella and protein powder. A de try small.

I got pretty sick the end of the week before last. I couldn't sleep Thursday night due to GI distress, and had felt malnourished and overworked the past few days to boot. I began taking oral rehydration salts in the morning, then felt terrible at training, got a small fever around noon, and went to the infirmary to sleep it off. I was there the rest of the day and figured I was in the clear since the fever had peaked and was going down. At the end of the day, I stumbled home and collapsed into bed, feeling absolutely not fayn. I called our medical officer (PCMO) who told me to take some anti-nausea meds. I go to do so but feel the need to go to the bathroom first. I walk to the bathroom, but begin to feel a loss of consciousness on the way. Not thinking, I start taking off my underwear to do my business, pass out and hit my head lightly (no concussion!) on the door. When I wake up, I think uhh what just happened, and to my unpleasant surprise found I have relieved myself all over my host families bathroom floor.

So now I feel a bit better so I clean and disinfect everything to try to save my family from the terrible bug I've got. I decide I ought to call the PCMO back and say "so, I just had a horrible experience". She tells me I need to get a friend to come over to check me for concussion and take care of me, so I call someone, M, and they get over to my house as quick as they can. I'm pretty disoriented, but feel (relatively) just fine, and am fully aware and conscious. We are just sitting on the veranda and me, my ma, and M are talking. Then, I apparently lose consciousness for over a minute, and I wake up to mi ma shaking me and M throwing water in my face. I've resoiled myself, and it takes me a bit to get my vision and hearing back to normal. So yeah at this point everyone is freaking out and I'm wondering hmmm.. maybe I did get a conscussion.

My mom and M pack some clothes for me, PC sends a vehicle out to my house, and me and M get driven to Bo national hospital. I sit around for a bit feeling fine, wishing that I didn't have to be giving everyone so much trouble (this is like 8 pm on a Friday). The doctor gets called in, and I talk to him for a little bit. I have a small fever. He thinks it could be malaria, of course, so he wants to give me meds for it. It wasn't malaria, and the PCMO just wants me to get an IV. While talking to the doctor, I pass out again and they take me to a room in a wheelchair. I'm pretty disoriented and having some visual distortions and am still wondering whether I got a slight concussion. I clean myself up and they get me into an uncomfortable bed and put an IV in my arm. M has to stay with me the whole night in a room that smells like death, and I feel pretty bad about it!

So yeah, feel just fine in the morning, but according to PC policy, I have to get driven to the PC compound in Freetown the next day. This takes like 4 hours. The sickness don don. I eat delicious indian food (I was starving) and get a stool sample for the lab which I still haven't gotten the results for. The PCMO is pretty certain it was cholera, but who knows. It was quick, but super terrible nonetheless while it lasted. I hope you enjoyed the terrible story!

The PC hostel is pretty great. It has 24 hr electricity, a nice kitchen, reasonably fast free internet, and was just a really relaxing atmosphere while I was there. The building is high up on a hill overlooking Freetown and the ocean on three sides. There were a few Salone 3s there with medical things, and about 10 Salone 2s that were doing their Close of Service (COS). In the end, coming here for a few days was a pretty good experience because I got to talk to all of the people that have been in country for two years. These are the people that we are replacing the sites of. Everyone is pretty interesting and has many crazy stories. Most seemed a little bit jaded about dysfunctional schools, (bad?) cultural aspects Americans don't really care for, terrible transportation, and lots of other things. Everyone was sad that they are leaving, but happy they are finished and going home to America, too. The generational aspect of PC is pretty strange feeling. I know I'll be in the same place in two short years, but it seems like they have gone through a lot.

I'm going to bed and don't feel like typing out the second post right now.