Installment 13; Spiders and coconut shells

I am suddenly becoming quite busy.  Partly because I have started working for World Vision. I didn’t mean to, I am supposed to be working with a different NGO. A lady from World Vision rang me up and told me that if I didn’t help her the literacy drive in the remote parts of the island would fall apart (people are very direct and emotional here). I paused, unsure how to form my ‘no’, and then I told her that I would meet with her and look at the program, but that I couldn’t be doing any training for her. If I had the spare time I should be helping more of the rural preschools. I met with her and looked at the program they are using.  It was a mess. They have two old workbooks, each only ten pages long. Neither the lady running the program, nor any of the World Vision ‘trainers’, have a background in education or literacy. I wasn’t surprised that people were not learning to read and write from the workbooks. World Vision works with the poorest people in the remotest areas. Those who pray to god for rain so that their family may have drinking water, who have never been to school, whose whole community are unable to read or write. People who are unable to make notes or record ideas and family stories, places where every family will be expected to lose at least one child. They do three year projects that teach adults, especially mothers how to read and write.  Reinstalling traditional writing and reading systems wiped out in colonisation is also encouraged.  World Vision uses local people to teach in local languages. Apparently these projects are not working. To cut a long story short I’m going to Fanafo next week. Into ‘middle Santo’. In Fanafo woman wear grass skirts and men wear vines around their wastes, with those small pieces of fabric that dangle down at the front (this doesn’t cover much when it’s windy). As I mentioned, the men from this tribe come into town every now and then, and so I have seen them before, I will be interested to see the women.  

 

My job will be to train 16 world vision trainers from the surrounding area, how to help their adult students develop literacy skills without resources, to teach them how to extend the workbooks and repeat activities in different ways. I am going into the jungle. I asked what I should take and the lady said ‘mosquito repellent’. Great.  I have been wondering whether mosquito repellant comes in more than 80 percent deet. It is funny how much people trust you to do these jobs here. Suddenly I am an expert, on everything. This is partly because only thirty percent of the country has finished secondary school. I have found even small ideas, games that everyone at home knows, like memory, become a goldmine for the locals. I think people think I just make it all up off the top of my head. The way teachers do things is very different at home, for a start we have paper and pencils. I don’t actually have a clue how to teach reading and writing with out paper and pencils, I am finding I have to be extremely resourceful. They do have some great stuff in nature here though that can be adapted and used to learn. Kids can draw pictures or write things down by dipping a stick into half a coconut shell full of mud paste, and then use a large dry leaf instead of paper. Leaves come in all sizes here, there are ones big enough to use as picnic blankets for the whole fam, loads of people also use them as umbrellas. Alternatively they can get half a coconut shell and walk around finding things that start with a particular letter, the ‘s’ one could have seashells, sticks, spiders etc (but in their own tribal language). I am finding many early literacy games and activities from home can be adapted. Anyway, I will tell you how Fanafo went when I return.