Schools out for Summer

I can hardly believe that I have been in Livingstone now for two months working with the kids. Teaching the grade 7 class at Linda Community School couldn’t have been any better. The kids all love learning and are all anxious to get me to teach them as much as possible. The group of kids that I had for the first month took their examinations and will get their results in January. It is unfortunate that I only got a month with them because they needed a lot of work on their English, Math and Science. We worked very hard to prepare for the exams though and hopefully most of the class will pass the exam and be able to continue with their schooling.

Once my original class went to take their exams I got the grade 6 students to start preparing them for the same exam that they would have to take next year. This was a whole new group of students that were excited to have me as a teacher and start learning. We wasted no time at all. I started going through the Math and English that the children would need to know. It is frustrating with how little the children actually know. I had to start from the very beginning with addition, subtraction, nouns and verbs. The kids want to learn though and try very hard to do as well as they can. I had these kids for one month before school ended for the summer, last Friday.
The last day of school, December 1, coincided with World Aids Day. I talked with some of the teachers and organized to have the children put on a talent show instead of having classes on that day. The children organized to do traditional dancing, ceremonial dancing, songs about AIDS, and drama about AIDS. The day couldn’t have gone any better. I invited the other volunteers to come and watch the children as they performed for us and their classmates. There was a lot of dancing and singing to the boys playing the drums. It was amazing to watch the children, as they were all incredible dancers. The children performed for about two hours while we all sat in amazement.

After the performances finished, the boys invited us to play a football match. It was another poor showing for me at football, but I am getting better. The football match concluded when lunch was ready. I decided that because I wasn’t going to get a Thanksgiving dinner this year, instead I would have lunch with all of the children on their last day of school. I had bought all of the ingredients for the local women to cook us all lunch. The lunch consisted of nshima (the local staple of corn meal), rape (a spinach like vegetable), and tomatoes and onions. The kids even got a treat and we made meat balls to go with the vegetables. This doesn’t sound like much, but this is a typical meal for most of the people in Zambia. It was a wonderful lunch and it was great to get to eat with all of the children. They laughed at us eating the food, as we didn’t quite have the right form for eating with our hands.

I enjoyed teaching so much that I decided to stay in Zambia for the month of December to be with the kids and set up some more projects in the community. I was invited to stay on with the project to set up summer revision classes, sports coaching and organize some other projects for the volunteers to do once the rains started to come. I couldn’t turn down this opportunity to stay and do more in the community than I ever imagined.

With school finished it was time to do some work with the children that were around during the holidays. It was hard at first to get the kids to come to school. Most of them are expected to go and work for their families over the break. Most of them end up in the fields, getting the crops ready before the rain season. Once I talked with the kids though, I was able to get quite a few to come to school to do revisions. This is almost more enjoyable than teaching my class. I know all of the kids already and I get to teach whatever I want. For now it is back to basics, learning what these children were supposed to be learning for the duration of their education so far. The kids are having fun though and I play a lot of games with them to help them learn.

The afternoons are just as good as the mornings. We pick up the children and head to the community football fields which we now have access to use whenever we want. We head over to play football for two hours. I admit that I’m not much of a player, but the kids like the fact that they now have a coach. I made up some drills for them to do and we go through them every day after warm-ups and stretches. It is a great way to spend my afternoons and the boys are really enjoying themselves.