Technology at its best!

Today I found something amazing.  I'm sitting in an internet cafe, trying to figure out what young people do on the internet these days, waiting for my computer to charge, when I thought I might try to find my village on google maps.  And I did!


View Larger Map

My location: -30.069639,27.380488

To give you a bit of direction.  Zoom in first.  The structure in the middle is my host family's compound.  The red roof is my host family's house and the tin roof is a building with four rooms, one of which (the square farthest from the house) is my little room.  Yes, it is that small.  The three plots to the left of the house belong to my family and the property stretches to five trees on the right.
If you scroll past those trees (staying along the path) you will come to my school (past the long building on the left on the right side of the road)  It's composed in a rectangle with the southern side having no buildings.  The northern building has three classrooms: Form A, B1, and B2.  The east side has the kitchen (north east most building) the office (in the middle) and the staff room.  The west side has the store room (small northwest building) and three more classrooms for Form C, D, and E.
If you continue to follow the road you will reach the primary school (the schools are walking distance from each other).
In between the schools you will see our tap.  It's quite large.
If you follow the road north and east you will see the orphanage on the right side of the road (just before a lot of trees on the left)

Enjoy (I know I am).

Failures and Praises

I like having things go my way; don’t we all?  True, I have those moments where I just don’t try and I receive a mediocre result but when I put in time and effort I get results.  It’s always been that way.

Being a teacher is therefore very, very frustrating for me.  There are just too many variables that I can’t control: the weather, the materials available, but mainly my students.

I spent a long time thinking and writing this post and I’ll let you know that I’ve thought long and hard how I want to approach this.  I don’t want to complain; I do it enough and I don’t need the whole world hearing it.  But I want to be honest and share my frustrations with my friends and family.  So here is my compromise.

I may have mentioned before that I was involved with training the new education volunteers during the end of last year.  Training was still eye opening the second time around because the first time around I was so overwhelmed (and a little bored) that I missed some things.  Doing it the second time gave me a new perspective and strangely reminded me how unaccustomed I’ve become to the American way of things.  For example, teachers in the U.S. never really deny students use of the bathroom.  There may be consequences for using it during class but no teacher will ever tell a student that they can’t use it.  I deny that right to my students all the time.  I’m not proud of it but I have to maintain a sense of discipline and order in my class and if I let one student go then in ten minutes another student will ask to go too.  In America teachers don’t send kids to buy them items from a shop, fill up their water bottles, and clean their dishes.  Students here are also responsible for keeping their own classrooms clean; we don’t have a janitor.

You can blame these differences on different values and different culture but it really comes down to school isn’t just about learning; it’s about learning how to be a good citizen.  So students are made to fetch, clean, and everything else in hopes that when they become adults they will be able to do it all themselves.  Therefore students end up missing class for a variety of reasons.  The boys take turns fetching water for the cook and often miss class for that (the girls missed class for a week because the cook's daughter had a baby and was absent and someone had to cook lunch).  We miss class for mass since we are a church school and attending church is a priority.  We will miss class to practice for competitions.  Teachers will refuse to teach a class if they feel it is unkempt.  It’s been one of my biggest frustrations here because I like to plan ahead and when I miss a class I have to redo my plan for the week.  I have learned to only plan my lessons a day in advanced to reduce my frustrations but I still have to have some idea when I’m teaching a lesson or when I will be doing an activity with the class.

But my biggest frustration is my students.  As a teacher I want all my students to do well and I put in the effort to do as much as I can to make sure they do as well as they can do.  In the end, I’m always disappointed with the results.  I know there are many reasons why my students don’t do well.  For example a lot of my students have tough family situations.  They are orphans and are responsible for their younger siblings or have chores they are responsible for.  Or they stay with grandparents (which is very common here even if both parents are living) and have to help them.  I would say very few of my students have a family where they are encouraged to study and do homework at home.  I don’t mean that they are not encouraged to do well at school.  It’s just that school is at school and at home you have to work.

Other students struggle with English and all classes except Sesotho are in English.  As a school we punish students for speaking Sesotho so that they will improve and become more comfortable in their second language.  Recently I also helped the school open a library containing books in English.  But it’s still a struggle for my students and I know part of the reason the assessments are so poor is because they simply can’t understand what the question is asking.

The school also has many students who repeat grades.  I was oblivious to them last year but this year I am very aware of them since I know them from last year.  My school lets students take a class three times before it refuses to take a student back.  And I have quite a few third time repeaters in my classes.  And the reason they are repeating is not because they failed but because they failed miserably (we still let students who fail go to the next grade).  So two years of failing miserably and they aren’t doing any better this year.  How do you explain that?  And it’s not just one or two subjects but everything.  Maybe it’s a learning disability but to be honest I wouldn’t know how to spot one.  And with all the other reasons for students not to be doing well it’s not like such a student would stick out.  And some students just don’t care.

But in the end, when I try to reason it all out, I’m left with the possibility that maybe it’s me.  Maybe I’m not a very good teacher or maybe I’m just not trying hard enough.  It’s moments like this that I have to remind myself that I’m not in control of everything and I just have to let it go.  There’s only so much I can do for my students and only so much I can do with the time I have here.  So while all these concerns may bring me down I just have to wash my hands of it and look at what is working.  Maybe that’s not the best decision, maybe not even the right one, but it works for me.

Cultural Day 2013

On April 11^th my school celebrated Cultural Day.  I had missed the celebration last year since I was away for a Peace Corps workshop so I wasn’t sure what to expect.  In the end I had a lot of fun, ate some great food, and learned more about Basotho culture.  The students all came dressed in traditional Basotho outfits (some were dressed for their presentations).  As you can see blankets are a huge part of Basotho traditional wear.

Usually, I was told, the students wear the very traditional Basotho dress: animal skins.  Back in the day before fabric and Christianity came to Lesotho, Basotho used to wear animal hides.  The school would rent these costumes on Cultural Day and the students would them.  My teachers showed me pictures from previous Cultural Days; the girls are usually topless with an animal skin skirt and the boys where fur.  For whatever reason the school decided against it this year (it might have been because of the weather).  But one of my students did end up wearing the traditional Basotho garment.

 

Food

We required all the students to bring some sort of traditional Basotho food for the day (if you didn’t bring food, you didn’t eat).  Some of these foods Basotho still eat, others they rarely make.

Maize: the staple food of Basotho.  Maize to Basotho is like rice to Asians.

Pumpkin: Both steamed and cooked.  The green item is made with baby pumpkins (still green).

Papa (finely ground maize mixed in boiling water) and greens

Fried Papa

Maize and whole grain mix

Steamed, home-made bread

Dried peaches: Peaches grow everywhere in Lesotho

Fried Maize that was ground: apparently this is travel food

Skits

For the past few weeks, during their Sesotho class, the students have been preparing skits to present on this day.  They show various traditional cultural activities.

When a baby is born the mother is not allowed to leave the house.  On the next full moon the mother invites young people to the house to do various activities.  If the baby is a girl she will invite teenage girls to grind maize (the girl sitting on the ground in the pictures), sweep, and collect water.  If it’s a boy (there was no skit of this) then teenage boys will play with sticks.

Basotho women carry their babies (or in this case stuffed animals) on their backs, supported by many blankets.  This allows them to care for their child while giving them the motility to continue with their daily work.

This skit showed men catching rats in the field.  One set of men scare the rate (which would be found in long grass) towards one side of the field while another set of men wait to catch the rats when they come their way.

Traditional witch doctors are still found in Lesotho.  These girls depict a few scenes where villagers see a witch doctor for various reasons.  The girl in white is the doctor, the girl in orange is her assistant, and the other girl is a customer.

Boys doing a traditional dance.

The Form Bs depicted a traditional wedding.  The girl in the orange blanket is the bride, the boy in the teal and black blanket with a hat is the groom and the boy in the middle is the grandfather conducting the ceremony.  During a traditional wedding the family slaughters a cow and the bile is poured over the new couple to signify their new union.  The cow is then slit evenly between the two families and some of it is eaten.

Back in the day, when a woman was barren, they would have the woman walk around the village carrying a stone on her back.  They would then place the stone in a well and she would have to drink the water from the well.  This was supposed to give her children.

Gum boot dance: many Basotho men go to work in the mines and these boys did a dance commonly done there.  The mine culture is very unique since all the workers come from different countries and therefor have different cultures and languages.  I’ve heard the language spoken in the mine is a combination of all the different host languages.

These boys are showing a traditional sword fight.

And lastly the teachers broke out in song and dance to end the events.