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.