2005-12-03 - 10:10 a.m.

3rd recent entry:

So, you may be asking: Keith what is it you do over there? I mean really, all I ever here about is you travelling to someplace that is not your site to celebrate some bizarre holiday, or travelling into the desert for days at a time jus for the high of a near death experience. It seems all you’re doing is wasting my tax money gallivanting across West Africa like you were on a two-year spring break. So here is a run down of current projects. (For those of you bred with this kind of stuff stay tuned for my next entry: I get Malaria and puke all over Alison on Taxi brousse):

English class: Short and sweet of it. I teach two free classes a week for two hours each to around 20 people from Atar (school teachers, high school kids and local business women)

Girls center: I am continuing to work at the girl’s center. This year I took over the English class, which is going great. In addition I am doing my other lessons concerning the environment, women’s rights and human relations.

School Garden: I’ve started a large school Garden at Ecole 3 (my school) and another at Ecole 6. I wrote a SPA grant that recently was accepted. When the money comes through I will install garden fencing at my school and also install new blackboards. The old ones are falling apart and in many classes are useless. In January I am holding a seminar for all of the school directors of Atar to demonstrate how to establish and maintain a school garden and how to use it in school lessons.

Environmentally Integrated lessons: This is my primary task as an EE volunteer. I have great new system set up to make sure I churn one of these out a week. For those of you who don’t know, this is when I take a normal lesson that a teacher was planning on presenting and I change it to sprinkle environmental elements throughout. A kind of environmental brainwashing (get em while they’re young).

Skits: Has been somewhat bumpy so far, but I have scheduled one school assembly a month to present skits (either health or environmentally focused). The kids are great and have been taking extremely well to the whole thing. I’ve just had a few run-ins with a certain teacher hell bent on blocking my progress.

Eco-club: My idea to hold a two-hour class every Friday afternoon was just passed. We are inviting the best kids from 6th through 4th year to come. The class will consist of games, songs, scientific experiments, story time and fun. These are all of the great things present in American elementary schools, but absent here. I am hoping to use the class as a demonstration to the teachers of what school can be like.

Pedagogical team: I was just appointed to be a part of a 7 member team that is organizing events throughout the city of Atar this year. This happened after I showed my action plan for the year to the DREN and he saw that my objectives were the same as the committee’s. It is an incredible thing for me and is really going to help me get done what I had planed for the year. Some of our activities include: organized sports days, skits presented in schools, environmental and health lessons, school libraries, end of year interschool competition (on sports, academics and art).

That’s about it. I have a few other big projects planned for March and June, but I won’t mention them till they are a sure deal.

previous - next