Sustainability is the Key

Sustainability is the key

Sorry for the long time in between emails…sometimes when we get into routine it’s hard to know what to write about considering nothing “exciting” has been happening lately. I started writing a couple of blog entries about the weather and the fact that our house turned briefly into a hospital for Kabala expats but we realized that if we have to resort to talking about the weather, we probably shouldn’t have a blog. As it turns out, a couple of exciting things have happened in our lives lately (we’ll get to those later), but we decided to dedicate this entry and the upcoming one more to describing what we have been doing all this time within our respective workplaces, so that we can better answer the question: “so…what have you guys been doing anyway besides killing goats and learning how to carry things on your head?”

For me as a teacher, the majority of my time is spent with my students, which I have actually become very close to. I’m not a real emotional person, but I know that it will be hard saying goodbye to them. In fact, the other day when I was teaching them how to write letters, I accidentally made the fact that I am leaving in 6 months and most likely never coming back a little bit too clear. Half the class started crying, and my prefect was a wreck for about an hour (they knew I was leaving, but for some reason talking about it bluntly was too much for them). It was a sad, touching, and funny moment, actually. The best part about it is that when in the future when my FVC kids are choked at me for some reason (which is often), I can legitimately pull out the line: “hey, there are students in Africa who would LOVE to have me as a teacher, so suck it up!” We think often of those last weeks and moments here, and we know more and more that it’s going to be really hard for us to say goodbye to my students (which we both have grown close to) and our friends and colleagues. We’ve tossed around the idea of staying for another year, but there are just too many reasons why it’s not a possibility.

At CRC I have been working towards promoting effective teaching of reading to the students through starting a reading club and other ways developing games and sports, and teaching computer skills to the staff. It’s interesting coming from mostly a high school PE background, I never thought I would be such a champion for cause of phonics, but the impact of well-taught language and reading skills is so evident here. I wish often that I had some training in primary literacy or education, because I have relied mostly on common sense and what I remember from how I learned to read.

Partly because we have been supported so abundantly financially and through prayer by friends and family back home, and also for our own reasons, both Adrienne and I have felt a certain pressure to “do” something while we are here. Because of this, we started out with some vast ideas as to what our “impact” might be. We have really had to learn to be patient, and that it is much better to make one minuscule change that is sustained than it is to, say, eradicate poverty in Kabala for only one day. This slow shift in thinking has led us to do some things differently. For example, CRC received a laptop and a printer recently, which I could train the whole staff to use. After a while, it was very clear that training 1 teacher well would be a much more sustainable option. Also, I am not going to start any programs which other teachers are not going to pick up again next fall – I still hope to get a solid reading program set up before I leave.

Adrienne has made a couple of really great things happen in the clinic (and the school), but I will let her write about those.

Exciting (sort of) things: I lent out my bicycle on the 2nd of January to a friend so that he can go to the village and pick up his son. He guaranteed that he would return on the 3rd with my bike, but....the weeks passed without any word or sign of him or my bike. We (my colleagues at CRC and I) received word that he was residing (with a nice red bicycle “given” to him by a white man) in a village 20 miles away. So this morning the class IV teacher and I went on a motorbike ride (gorgeous scenery, btw), to collect the bicycle. We met his wife in the village, who let us know he left last night to go to a different village. Immediately after this small fib, the man came riding up on my bike smiling, as if we were meeting under normal circumstances. He gladly helped pack my bicycle on my Honda, and sent me back on the way. Long story short: I went to the village and collected my bicycle.

FYI: our living situation is a little tricky currently. CES higher – ups are visiting who take priority in the guest house, so we had to move out. We were panicking a couple of days ago when we were told we had to pack and leave the house by that evening, but we are now settled nicely into our temporary (6 weeks) living space, which is a large room in the downstairs portion of the CES office.