Day 2

Today was our first day in the classrooms volunteering...it was very eye opening! The schools here are all private and receive no government support, which makes it difficult for them to be able to pay teachers. Most of the schools rely on volunteers from CCSand the community to teach the children, which also means that there are no general guidelines for what the children need to learn, everything is done at the teacher's pace.

The school day starts at 8, but many of the children don't arrive until 8:30 or 9, so the teacher (her name is also Emily) has them count from 0-100 several times before leading them in devotional, prayer, and songs. At the start of the day all of the children are packed into one room, sitting two to a desk and some standing. However, after devotional the tougher children go to the classroom next door with a volunteer teacher, who is also the pastor's wife, and go through the alphabet and numbers again. The older children then get to sing and dance for another 15-20 minutes until hopefully everyone has arrived.

Emily and I separated with the classes, she went with the younger children and I stayed in the class with the older ones. The older class has an actual teacher as opposed to the volunteer teacher for the young kids. My job today was to just observe how she taught the class, so that tomorrow I will be able to teach a lesson in English. Today the children mostly worked on math, doing simple addition and writing/identifying numbers 0-30. I was amazed to see how big the learning gap was between the children in this class, there were some kids that knew how to write and read the numbers, while others could hardly say numbers at all. Once they finished math they moved on to English by singing the alphabet through several different ways including, big letter and little letter,  letter/word association, and the alphabet song. Again, the teacher doesn't help them through it, just tells them to continue.

Many of the children don't participate in the counting and alphabet activities, which makes it difficult for the teacher to be able to assess them. The teacher, Emily, knows that some of the kids are struggling, but she says there isn't much she can do because they don't have enough teachers and only get volunteers rarely. The students can also just get up and go home whenever they want and the teacher cannot stop them. I got to see this first hand today when a little girl came in crying non-stop, disrupting class...Emily sent her home for the day! There were also two young children in the class that refuse to go to the other classroom. One of the children is a little girl who doesn't speak, wave, or acknowledge people at all, and refuses to do school work...she just sits and stares all day long! The teacher told me that she hasn't found anything yet to get this little girl involved in class, so she just sends home work every night and hopes that the child is doing it and not her parents.

Whenever they learn new thing or even review things, the teacher calls it out, then has them say it with her several times. Everything that these children learn is through repetition by the teacher because they don't have text books, which has pretty much turned the children in to parrots. When she tells them to sit down they all shout out "we are sitting down" which I found hilarious...you wouldn't see that at home! The repetitive nature of the teaching here seems to limit the children's abilities to learn how to read and write because all they do is copy what the teacher says without having the tools to back up that knowledge. The learning/teaching style is completely different than what we grew up with.

The school Emily and I are working in is very structured as opposed to the absolute chaos that our fellow volunteers had to endure. Some of the other volunteers are working in the nursery school at the prison, they have over 100 children! Probably one of the biggest issues that all of the volunteers face is that their is no real structure to the day at the school, the children just run around and don't pay attention to what the teachers say. Which really should be expected given the age range in all of our schools is 2-6, it's almost impossible to keep that many kids interest for that long of a time frame. We are trying to come up with some games or songs to teach the kids that will get them up and doing things, so far we have decided on head, shoulders, knees, and toes...but after that I have no idea!

The food today was a little bit better than yesterday, but I'm still pretty confidant that I'm gunna lose a bunch of weight lol. For breakfast they served creeps, omelets, fruit, and papaya juice. I couldn't eat the omelets though because they had tomatoes and pepper...my two biggest food allergies! However, the creeps were amazing, I could have eaten like 10 of them...but I only ate 2. Lunch was spaghetti and meat balls, except the meat ball was a veggie ball, it was pretty tasty. We also had beans and rice, salad, and fruit with lunch. The beans and rice and the spaghetti were again really plain, they don't use any herbs in the spaghetti sauce and no salt in the beans (they needed it!) . Then for dinner the cook made pizza, one with veggies and one with spicy chicken. I ate the one with chicken, but took most of the chicken off and just ate the bread. So, I had to take a ton of Benadryl today just that I could be able to eat lunch and dinner!

Our cultural activities for the day included Swahili lessons and a trio into town to exchange money and go to the store. The Swahili lessons were taught by the director of one of the schools down the road, he works with all of the CCS groups to teach us conversational Swahili. We learned introductions again as well as how to say where we are volunteering and what we are doing at the schools, none of us were able to keep the conversation flowing because we kept looking and second guess what we were supposed to say. Which really that's the same with learning any language, you never have confidence at first. For now everyone is just practicing Swahili with their roommates and not really trying to use it anywhere else. When we went into town we were able to walk around a little bit, our guide showed us how to figure out where we are if we get lost and where to meet the van when we get picked up. We also got a chance to buy some small souvenirs and bargain with the people, which I'm not very good at so I let Emily do the bargaining. She actually ended up helping several of the girls bargain and would tell them to walk away if the people wouldn't negotiate, it was a lot of fun :)

The day today was pretty exhausting, I think I'm still a bit jet lagged, but all in all it was an awesome day!