Break Time

25 June 2009

This is the coldest June that I can remember. You win Southern Hemisphere. You win.

It's 5:00 pm and I have some pasta sauce simmering away on the stove. I gobbled down the rest of my homeade bread with my supervisor's homemade quince jam, so it will just be pasta to go with the sauce. When Mike and I ate a fresh quince off the tree in the fall, I wrote off quinces (quincii? is it a fish-like singular-plural? Do I use hyphens correctly? Ugh, English is difficult.) forever. That delicious spread that is in my cupboard has made me a convert though. Food has become a big part of my life, as you can tell.

Anyway, I'm nearly through with my second week of winter "holidays." It has been a bit of a random one so far. I began break by going and spending a couple days with Melody, then travelled to Bloemfontein in RSA (Republic of South Africa) to have a few sitdown meals where the wait staff actually knows what's going on, see a mall and attend a Confederation Cup game. We saw Spain beat Iraq 1-0, but cheared heartily for Iraq. It was fun, and I had my first Budweiser. Ever. That's right, I had my first Budweiser at a soccer game between Spain and Iraq in South Africa. I'm not sure what to make of that, but it sounds poetic. Well, loosely poetic. Okay, I retract that. It's just a weird place to have an all-American beer that is owned by a Northern European clongomorant. But, I digress.

Back to the game. I think my favorite part of the game was towards the end when the largely South African crowd began chanting. The two chants that I had translated were, "Enjoy! Enjoy! Enjoy!" and "A team on the right. A team on the left. Play in the middle." It was very cool to see 15,000 people just there for the love of the game. There was no roudiness, just people cheering for their team, or if they didn't have a team, cheering for good play. I left the stadium with a good feeling.

I also bought a telescope. It will arrive with the Peace Corps Country Director when he visits in a couple weeks.

So, after waiting for 3.5 hours on the taxi before it even left Bloemfontein and another 2 hours in transit I made it back to Maseru. I was eagerly greeted by 4 packages. One of them was much awaited and contained the mini-projector from my pals at NGC. It is about the size of an iPhone and works great when the room is sufficiently dark. My principal is going to raid the trash bins in Butha-Buthe when he goes down to retrieve some cardboard for blacking out the windows. Then, it will be time to blow kids minds. Not only with Planet Earth, but also with some graphic pictures of STIs that I got from the PC Doctor. The Clap was never so scary. I also got a phenomenal package from my sister with long underwear, chocolate, books, socks, basically everything that is good in this world. Next was Maggie's package with backdated letters, which were a great read one cold afternoon and a world map that will be going up in the library. Lastly I got a surprise package from Mr. Dan Judnick, a dude who graduated a year ahead of my at LMU and returned to LA just before I left after studies on the East Coast. Thanks man.

Needless to say, all the other PCVs in the office were fiercely jealous. Support from home as been a real blessing. Thanks y'all.

The next day I had a meeting to talk with my program director about what kinds of secondary projects I can do that might utilize my talents (or at least let me use math). The meeting got me a ride to Appropriate Technology Services, a government funded group whose purpose is research, development and dissemination of technologies that are appropriate for Lesotho. This includes food driers, efficient ovens, briquette makers that use junk paper and eventually some biogas digesters and other more time, money and labor intensive projects. The food driers and efficient ovens are especially interesting for Ha Sefako because there are a ton of peach trees and many of the peaches go to waste and an enormous amount of wood is used for cooking year-round and heating in the winter. So, those projects will hopefully take up some of my time come Spring.

Then I returned home, where I had great weather for one day. Then a storm came. In 48 hours roughly 5 cm (judging by the amount that accumulated in the wheel-barrow) fell. The wind has been horrific and steady and the temperature has been maybe up to 40, in the sun, during the day. So, I've been reading and baking bread and trying to stay occupied. It gets lonely, especially when the sun goes down. I have to try to plan out those last 3-4 hours of my day to try to keep busy so that I don't get bored and depressed. Winter nights were bad enough in the US with electricity and TV and the internet and friends. But, I'm figuring out things to do.

Umm... I think that's about it for now. I hope everybody is enjoying warm weather and BBQs back home. Oh, and check out the US in the FINALS of the Confederation Cup on Sunday. They'll be playing South Africa or Brazil. They made it, I don't know how, but they made it. If they win, I will have some serious street cred in this part of the world.

Blessings.

Last Week of School

Tuesday June 9th

The weather here is schizophrenic. Sunday I started work on my keyhole garden (see picture above), and it was a little chilly but comfortable enough to work in a T-shirt. Come Monday 2 cm of rain had fallen and was still falling, the surrounding mountains were snowcapped and the wind was blustering. NOT COOL. That is just deceptive and rude.

More difficult than dealing with the cold was that it totally incapacitated my ability to spend the day outside. We are in the last days of finals, i.e. I have to go proctor my last final, and their last final, in 45 minutes, and yesterday I had nothing to do. I finished Freakonomics, an excellent short read that my mom sent me, studied biology, chemistry, calculus, electronic circuits and drew up some plans for an animal powered battery charging station. I still had lots of time to burn, so I ate most of a loaf of banana bread, a few pints of potato soup and ploughed through a Car and Driver.

This is not good if most of winter break is going to consist of miserable weather. I just don’t have the stamina to study all day without any hands on tinkering to use up some of my energy. Let’s all hope that this storm blows through and behind it is some nice 60 degree weather so that I can finish my keyhole garden, and go for hikes, and take pictures.

Wednesday June 10th

The weather has cooperated a bit and slightly relented. It probably got up into the low 40s today, which was nice. Also, the wind died down, which was arguably the worst part of the storm.

Now I’m just waiting for the water to boil for my twice, or thrice, weekly (depending on coldness) winter bath. It is surprising how quickly you just stop worrying about taking baths and changing clothes when it is cold. Actually, it may be a good indicator of general loss of brain function due to the sustained lowering of core body temperature.

Regardless, things are going well here. Like I said, I began my keyhole garden this weekend and was working on it today when my principal stopped by. He was excited to see that I’d started. We have talked about building a keyhole garden for an orphan in each of the 7 villages that are tributaries for students at the school, and when he saw that I had started mine he wanted to actually get started with theirs as well. He asked me to slow down my construction so that we could get maybe 10 students together to help me build it and in so doing learn how to build one of their own. So, when I get back from Confederation Cup (Spain vs. Iraq in Bloemfontein on the 17th) we’re going to get some students together and start work. Many of them literally don’t have anything to do during break, so taking a week or two of their 7 week break to slowly build a keyhole garden isn’t much of a sacrifice. A couple could actually get built. I’ll take pictures.

We also had our first Library Committee meeting yesterday and it went about as expected. Two student committee members were elected and a staff committee member was chosen. Then I asked them to give me feedback on how they wanted the library to operate and what kinds of books they want for it. General silence ensued, slowly followed by me and another teacher prodding them for answers. There is a culture of silence upon any group asked to answer a question in this country, be it a teacher asking students, or the principal asking teachers. The questionees do not respond. A clearly frustrating trait when you’re trying to lead a creative discussion about “What you want YOUR library to look like.” There is a good chance that the students have never had a brainstorming session, so I’ve got to go easy on them. They’ve also never spent legitimate time in a library, so they don’t have any ideas to synthesize. So it goes…

But perhaps the most positive experience I’ve had so far happened on Tuesday. After I proctored my last exam, I was at home trying to absorb heat and mark exams when I got a knock at my door. It was one of my favorite and most self-motivated students. It took a few tries, but he eventually reminded me that I had promised to teach him English. As some background, I sporadically take the best students aside to give them words of encouragement and make lofty promises in the hope that they will actually take me up on it. One finally took me up on it. This specific student, Kemelo, is a double orphan who lives with his grandparents in a VERY small, secluded village about an hour and a half away. Days when he is not in school, he has to take the cattle to graze. This leaves early mornings to meet. So, for 3 our 4 weeks over winter break I will be hiking in the morning cold to Saballa, which is about a 50 minutes hard walk, to meet Kemelo and have some private English tutoring. I find tutoring to be an order of magnitude more fulfilling than teaching students who are not interested, so I’m extremely excited about this development.

Um, I guess that’s about it for now. If you have any questions about life here, or day to day, or what-have-you, feel free to leave me a message. I’ll get back to you ASAP, which might be a few weeks.

First Semester Grades

I just finished marking (grading) my exams for the first semester. If I wasn’t in a better mood, and if I didn’t have insight into the local primary schools, I’d be pretty devastated right now.

The high score was 77 (of 100), which isn’t too bad, until you look at the following statistics:

Mean = 22.3
Standard Deviation =14.6
Median = 18

And a low score of 5.

Looking at a bin chart of the frequency of scores within a certain range tells the tale. It is nearly the inverse of (admittedly inflated) grade curves. A pass here is 50%, and just 4 of my 64 students passed.



Naturally, I went and had a chat with my principal. He knows the story. He is teaching seniors here and hopes that maybe 3 will pass the Cambridge Overseas Exam (for developing nations) in November. We began to talk about what we could do to improve the math proficiency of the students. I shrugged. Then said, “How many of the Form As passed math in Standard 7 (the last year of elementary school here)?”
“They all passed.”
“No, how many passed math?”
“Oh, we will have to look at the scores. Probably just the 4 that passed your exam.”
“Is it a requirement that they at least get a pass in English to get into high school?”
“No.”
I really didn’t think any more analysis was needed to identify what the problem is. The curriculum I am teaching is nearly identical to the Standard 7 curriculum. It is supposed to be a time for them to master the material, not to learn it. It is supposed to be a review to cement the concepts and skills. Instead, I have functionally illiterate students, most of whom did not pass the math or English portion of the Standard 7 exit exam, which means they got less than 50%, and it may even be as low as 40%, I’m not sure.

But, I don’t have the time or energy to go butt heads with the primary schools about their clear lack of teaching, teaching ability and moral duty to the children of the community to end the cycle of ignorance and poverty. So, here we are with 64 students in Form A, 4 of whom have gotten above 50%, and one of whom, the brightest in math, would have gotten a C+ in an American classroom, in math at the 5th or 6th grade math level. I’m stumped. I suggested we do individual counseling with students to help them create an educational roadmap to achieve what they want. This was smiled at. It’s honestly the only thing I can think of, but would require a massive change in culture at the school. It would be a huge increase in workload by the teachers. We have trouble enough maintaining simple directions, let alone a school wide program of student mentoring and career counseling. I would love to start meeting with two students a day, but they don’t understand English and I’m not exactly conversant in Sesotho. Any ideas out there?
That’s the current school situation in Lesotho. In other news, I’m working on building a keyhole garden and a little fire pit in the ‘yard’. I’ll put up some pictures when the projects have moved along a bit. There is also some local interest in homebrew windmill technology, which I’ve been researching a bit (I’m investing some time reviewing the circuits and mechanical-to-electrical energy sections in the new textbooks I received). If anybody knows of any good DIY windmill sites, I would appreciate some direction, as internet research is quite slow and expensive. Also, we’re hoping to get a small grant (like $50) to improve a foot bridge that half of the students use daily to cross a river. I think that’s all the auxiliaries.

OH. If you are interested in helping with the African Library Project book drive for Sefako High School, the deadline for shipping books to the container in New Orleans is November 20, 2009. So, if you’re attached to a school schedule somehow, you should still have 5 weeks to collect books before you need to ship them to the container. Please visit the African Library Project website for great tips for book drives!

OH OH. I am going to share a different mailbox in Butha-Buthe with some other PCVs so I have better access to my mail. The new address is in the sidebar.

Be well. Be happy. Be good. Cheers All.