This day was so exciting! I had been waiting to meet my kids and finally see where I would be teaching since I had arrived in Africa! My placement is at Faraja Orphan Center. It is about a twenty-minute drive from the Home Base and it is located in the middle of a small “suburb” with a river running through it. The school consists of a small open area, two squatty potties for the bathroom, a currently defunct kitchen and the schoolroom. The school and the neighborhood are located on a hill with the river running behind it. The river seems to be at a very low level, but my local volunteer Octavio told me sometimes it rises and overflows into the village during the rainy season.
At my school there are two teachers. Mr. Masawe and Jane, and Octavio is the local volunteer who has worked with the school and the incoming CCS volunteers for the past couple of years. He is an invaluable asset to any incoming volunteers. Mr. Masawe speaks very little English, and because my kids are so young (3-7) they are also not proficient at English. Octavio serves as a translator and interpreter between the volunteers and the kids and teachers. He also helps in the classroom by directing the kids’ attention and keeping them under control. Jane is also wonderful with the kids. She is a great teacher and is clearly very passionate about helping them learn. Both Joan and I are the volunteers from CCS that work at Faraja currently, and it is so wonderful to work with her as well!
I’ll start by talking about my kids. There are around 40 children in my school and each of them attends Faraja because he or she is too poor to go to another school. They are either without any parents, live with a single mother, or have both parents who are too poor to provide for proper schooling. In other more formal schools the parents pay for their children to be given porridge during break time and better facilities. Unfortunately, my kids don’t have this luxury. However, despite a few setbacks with money and lack of family, my kids are just like kids anywhere in the world. Don’t let my description of them fool you, that is their reality, but they are still wonderful, bright and energetic! They love to sing, to play games and to learn. They also love to tease each other and they really enjoy being active.
My classroom has three levels of students, rather than being broken up by age my students are separated by how much they have learned. The room contains three bookshelves that have books and supplies, a big blackboard, light blue desks and benches for the kids and a line running through the room for hanging things. The walls are covered in numbers charts, shapes, animals, days of the week and other learning materials for the kids. The workbooks for the children are small paper books filled with graphing paper. They are small squares books that have been used and re-used many times so they are falling apart, which sucks. I hope I can supply them with new books after I leave, or give them to CCS so that the next volunteers can take them to Faraja for the kids, along with some pencils J. Mwalimu Jane teaches the majority of the time, while Mr. Masawe watches or does business in his office. When we got there they both allowed us to teach after observing Jane and her teaching style. It is very fun to work with the kids, but it can be frustrating at times due to the language barrier. The kids at my school are learning both Swahili and English, so they are not completely proficient in either language. However, they understand and can communicate in Swahili with much more ease than I can, so I’m not concerned about their understanding of it. They have schedules for each day that usually consist of Swahili, English, Mathematics and English again with a break at 10 o’clock. On Fridays they have game and drawing time and everyday they spend some time singing songs. This is a fun time of the day because they get very joyful and Mr. Masawe loves to lead them in singing. He has a great voice and they really like to sing with him. As you know, I love love to sing as well so this part of the day is a lot of fun for me too! I am going to bring my guitar and teach them “this little light of mine” soon as well; I’m excited for that! In the classroom, the kids are broken up into three groups. The kids who understand a lot and are very proficient in the classroom are at the very front and face the board. The middle group faces the left wall of the room and this group tends to be the youngest. They understand the least and need the most guidance in simpler exercises. In the back we have kids that are way ahead of the rest of the students. These children were being sponsored to go to a government or boarding school in the past, and now they no longer have a sponsor so they have returned to Faraja. These kids speak English very well and understand much more complicated Math, English and Swahili exercises. They both have their own workbooks that they use for their in-class work. It is fun to have these kids in the class because the other students see them as leaders and look up to them. They help the other kids understand and they guide them in the classroom, which is very helpful.
I can’t lie – I do have a few favorites at my placement. Angella and Glory are currently my two favorite girls and Godfrey is currently my favorite boy. My first day I was able to connect to these three because they love to learn and they latched onto me! It is funny because once you enter the classroom the students automatically want to be close to you. They will often fight over your hand or sitting by you. I try to discourage this by standing or sitting with different kids throughout the day. When you enter the classroom they sing a welcome song and when you leave they sing a goodbye song for you. They also have a lot of religiously based songs that they sing throughout the day. They will sing them in English and Swahili and hearing the Swahili is so wonderful because it is such a musical language! I didn’t take any pictures the first day because I wanted to get to know my kids first, but there will be many of them to come!
So on my first day Joan was feeling ill, so I went to my placement without her. I had planned to observe how the classroom worked normally so that I could just expand on what Jane was already doing. Octavio helped me a lot, but I was definitely nervous! I went in and they sang me a song, then I sat down on a stool and observed Jane teaching them Math and English. She usually goes through some problems with them by giving a visual example. First she went through a problem where she had 10 oranges and subtracted 6. She drew both the oranges and the numbers for the kids to visualize the problem. After going through a few of these she had the kids recite numbers one through one hundred while she wrote exercises on the board. Then the kids got out their books and began to do the exercises. I wish I had been given a warning because this was utter chaos. I had kids running up to me and asking for me to draw a line in their books so they can start the exercises, asking for me to sharpen their pencils and just holding their books up to me without asking me for anything. I had thought helping kids in America could be hard – they have nothing on adorable Tanzanian children that speak little to no English and like to swarm the new mzungu volunteer. I spent the time prior to break sharpening a ridiculous amount of pencils, drawing a lot of blue lines and making a lot of check marks and “Good! J”s on a lot of little tattered notebooks. Before I knew it, it was break time. The kids quickly ran outside, down the road and to a place where they play. This place is a large square area behind some of the houses. It has a patch of dirt and a lot of weeds and garbage at the edge. After playing jump rope and running around I joined the kids and teachers in pushing the garbage toward the corner of the play lot area. This served as a major reality shock for me because it helped to assess the reality of these kids’ lives and how different their lives are from my own. After break we went back to the school and played hokey pokey and sang “You Are My Sunshine”.
Before I knew it, Sam was back to take me back to CCS. We had a great ride home listening to good old Swahili slow jams. This was a nice twist from my ride to placement that consisted of the Glee season one soundtrack J. Once back we had Swahili lessons and spent some time talking before dinner. After dinner we planned for the next day, I talked to my great roomies and tucked in our mosquito nets for the night. Joan and I planned our lesson for the next day and I told her everything about my first day. Soon after it was time for lala salama. I couldn't believe how tired I was, so sleeptime couldn't have come quickly enough for me this day!
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