Once upon a time I scheduled a workshop...

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hey gang. it's been awhile huh? we got a box from sherbear tonight, pretty convenient as it's my first weekend home from pitt. loving it, if you were wondering. sher is now burning blogs to a cd so all i have to do is copy and paste. oh ya, definitely liking that system a little better. enjoy... - b

7 August 2009

This is a little bit of a rant about a recent attempt at being too productive on an island. I really should know better.

After our little vacation with family, I was feeling a bit guilty about running away from my loyal teachers at my home base here at Gambule Primary School. To make up for it, I wanted to get right back into the swing of things and have a sort of review workshop. The family left on a Monday and I got some stuff around for the usual “tea break” and staff meeting that Wednesday. Nothing major, just wanted to get back in the swing of things and maybe pencil in a potential plan for the rest of Term 2, which ends at the end of August. Tuesday before the staff meeting, Justin’s host papa came to invite us to a fundraiser to send his eldest daughter to nursing school in Port Vila. The fundraiser was set for Wednesday night. We really needed to go to that staff meeting, but we promised to send money with his son Kenny to buy some food and support the cause.

Turns out that that isn’t all that common of an idea. I showed up for tea break, all of the male teachers had gone to the fundraiser, including the headmaster who runs the meetings. They heard of a good excuse to drink kava and socialize and went for it. Strike one.

I was surprised when my next opportunity came sooner than expected. The following Monday, the ZCA came by the house to say he would be doing his observations and meetings at Gambule this week, and ask if I would like to join in with my mid-year phonics assessment and a workshop on Wednesday. Too good to be true. I definitely agreed. The next morning, I headed to class 1 to start the phonics assessment.

The phonics assessments are tedious. I have to keep reminding myself how beneficial they are and that each child really deserves my best attention and energy. I bribe them with stickers. I bribe myself with chocolate. The assessment is actually designed by Peace Corps Volunteers in Vanuatu to track how effective our workshops are. I go through the alphabet A-Z (but in a random order), asking letter names first, then letter sounds. Then, I have a list of sight words that I see how many each kid knows, a potential 200 total. Then comes the phonemic awareness questions. I ask questions about rhyme, first, middle, and last sound, syllable counting, and the like. Each assessment takes around 15-30 minutes, depending on how thoughtful the child is. Since it was the mid-year assessment and the results were really for the teachers and I more than any record keeping (as they are for the beginning and end of year), I just tested 10 kids from class 1-4. Still, it took me three mornings.

By Wednesday, I still had half of class 4 to go, but had enough information to brief the teachers on common mistakes. I also planned to remind them of just why skills like rhyming and syllable counting are important and refresh their memory of activities from my previous workshops that they could use to help. Sounds nice in writing doesn’t it? I showed up for the tea break this time to find one teacher and her “observer” (like a ‘para’ in the US) sitting outside the classroom that we usually meet in. The observer, a girl about my age named Regina, was signed up to provide refreshments for the day’s tea break and had made “gato.” Contrary to my initial thought, gato in Bislama (fried bread, almost like a doughnut) is not the same as gato in Spanish (cat). We sat on the little porch in front of the classroom and waited and storied and waited. We finally gave up and started eating the gato ourselves. The headmaster happened to venture by and asked what we were up to. He hadn’t seen the ZCA all day so just figured that he wouldn’t hold his meeting. I told him, “Be, mi mi gat sam samting blong talem aut lo yufala” (But, I’ve got some stuff to tell you guys). He seemed surprised, “O, tru?” and said we would have tea break the next afternoon. Strike two.

I’ll take a moment here to expand a bit on the shaky tea break schedule. It’s a complex one. Last year and the beginning of this year, the tea breaks were a time for all the staff to get together, eat cookies and drink juice and also have a staff meeting. A few weeks into this school year, a new headmaster came. For awhile, the two headmasters were sort of doing a co-rule thing. Then, the original one got really sick and, conveniently, wasn’t at school for about two months. During this time, some office of education higher up sent a note to the school stating that the original headmaster should no longer be headmaster, and the new one would be it. Probably something to do with small country politics. It’s an incredibly awkward situation since both of the men are from Maewo, so their families are all here; heck their probably related in some way to each other too. Anyhow, the “old” headmaster is now just teaching, while the other gets the official title. My hypothesis is one outcome of this changing of leaders that came into fruition while we were gone visiting my family is that the tea breaks became awkward because of the change up in leadership roles, eventually too awkward to bare and they unofficially fizzled.

Back to Thursday now. My planned agenda has now grown to include a mini-survey. That sounds good. I’ll ask the teachers to write something they have learned and are using in their classrooms from my workshops, something they’d like me to review, and something they’d like me to do a future workshop on. Good feedback for me AND it will remind them about the “Idea Box” of mine that is collecting dust in the corner of the primary school office.

On Thursday, school was let out at noon and the schoolyard was full of hustle and bustle, building food stalls and organizing people for Children’s Day. What is Children’s Day, you ask? Well, I am serving in a country that loves to make up holidays. That sounds rash. I guess it’s just sort of like Mother’s and Father’s Day but for kids. Of course. And Children’s Day happened to be that Friday. So, you guessed it, too much going on in preparation for the big holiday and the staff meeting was cancelled. Strike three. A quick chat with the headmaster penciled me in for the following Monday afternoon.

At this point, I have to quite counting strikes or I’ll get frustrated. I can’t quit after three or nothing will get done. Or maybe that’s where I’m going all wrong, all this “trying to get things done” business. Maybe a refocusing of goals is in order. My favorite way to do this is to remind myself not to take life, and especially life as a PCV, so seriously. Another volunteer in our training group (the one who had served as a PCV twice before coming to Vanuatu) gave us lots of advice during training. The one that sticks with me the most is that there are three goals of Peace Corps. These are (paraphrased) to build capacity in the country (aka our project work), share our culture with another country, and share their culture with the USA. In this light, project work is only 33% of what we’re supposed to be doing here. So just calm down and enjoy this cultural learning lesson and fulfill the other 66% of your job for a moment there Sher.

Children’s day came and went. Monday morning I was in our office, sort of just putting in some face time and reorganizing stuff. Then, I noticed all the primary school kids running away from school. Mind you, it’s Monday morning, school should have just gotten started. Not that I’m counting, but can I handle a strike four?

I mosey up to the school buildings and find the (current) headmaster lounging on a half wall. “Olsem wanem?” (What’s going on?) I ask. Turns out some church in Australia donated some second hand clothes to the school. They canceled school so the teachers could organize, price, and set them out to be sold tomorrow. To me, that was grounds for an unorganized ending to the day and yet another missed chance to meet with the staff. The headmaster seemed to sense my frustration. He assured me they would just take a few hours and then I could just jump in a go right ahead. Sounds good. So I go back to the house, get excited and report the good news to Justin, and haul my stuff back up to the school. I think this time I’ll get them excited by showing them the new book, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, and the phonics workbooks that my mom brought with her. New stuff always gets them pumped.

I sit in the classroom as the teachers sort through the clothes, marking prices on the tags, or sometimes right on the clothes, in permanent markers. I remember how frivolous name brands are when a “baby GAP” onesie gets marked for 20 vatu, the same as a clearly used pair of girls’ underwear. The pile on the floor dwindles and I must have been so anxious I jinxed the whole thing, failing to acknowledge twelve other large cardboard boxes in the corner, also full of clothes. They would finish them all.

Now is the time to take my leave. I let one of the teachers know that I’m heading back to my house and ask her to please send a “pikinini” to come get me when their done. Two hours later, I head back up to check on them. The headmaster is there. He says they’ll finish, break for lunch, and then meet back at 1:00 for the staff meeting. Sounds good. Not a strike so much, just a postponement. I go back to my house for lunch and head back to the classroom at 1:12, just for good measure. The pricing party is still in full swing. I ask another teacher if they’d have lunch yet. Nope. They’re getting ready to. They ask why. I say I’ve got a bit of a workshop to discuss and am here for the staff meeting. They say the staff meeting isn’t until 1:00. I raise my eyebrows towards the clock. Oh. Try coming back at 2:00 then.

Back at the house. Justin is laughing. He wants me to try to find him a new pair of pants. He thinks this is funny. I am livid. These kids aren’t naked, they’re illiterate. If they’re going to cancel school for something, please, let’s make it at least somewhat scholastically driven.

Back at the school around 2:00 now. The staff are slowly dwindling in from lunch. By 2:34 the meeting starts. There is an agenda. Long story short, there are no short stories in Vanuatu. The agenda of the staff meeting takes over 3 hours to discuss. Then, at the end of all that, the headmaster looks towards me and asks if I have something to say. I have them all get up and do stretches. Then, I am very frank and tell them that at this point in the day I am very tired and my Bislama is poor, so I’m going to only go through a small bit of what I’ve planned. The survey. As they are filling those out, I beg and beg and beg them to please come to tea break next week. I tell them that even if they see other people leaving, that I’ll be there and I’ll have a workshop to run. And then I ask them to please put their surveys in my “Idea Box” in the office.

I find out on the next Monday that the “Idea Box” is no longer there. But that’s a whole other story…

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Photos

Alternative Project
No pictures of this gloomy workshop-less-ness. This is how I coped. Cinnamon rolls fresh from the, uh, fire.

Comments

[Grandma Brull]

Hang in there.
HI Sheridan and Justin. The headline says it all. How is everything going. We are all doing fine here. Did you ever get our package. Hope so. Take care and enjoy life. Grandma