I’ve been very busy over the last few weeks, with a whole
host of different projects. Although I’ve been busy at the school with my
teaching and planning, athletics, after school clubs and classes, etc., it’s
actually the work with the community that I’ve been loving the most lately.
1. Tses Youth Group. A few years ago, Tses had 2 different
youth groups, which met about once a month and focused on different things. In
talking with a pastor /village councilor (advisor for the local government), we
decided that the need for, and interested in, a local youth group probably
merited the recreation of one.
So once a week, for about two hours, I meet with the youth
of Tses! (here, “youth” means vaguely 20-30 year olds.) It’s so cool – when
they’re really given a chance to speak out and act on their ideas, there are
people staying here who have some really great thoughts about the future and
ideas to improve the social conditions of Tses. Already, we have worked on
forming a community English group (to improve English skills), a business group
(more later), a local Girls’ club (there are really high incidences of rape and
other abuse here, and especially as Tses grows with the big glass factory
coming in, we want to work to empower our young girls before these kinds of
things can happen to them), and a kids’ soccer league. It’s SO COOL to see
these people having ideas of what they want to have happen, and act on them!
I’ll try to get some pictures later, but seriously it’s really incredible to
watch them do their thing. It’s also great that there are some other volunteers
staying in Tses from the UK and Germany. They’re all younger (just out of high
school), but they’re really enthusiastic and are really very willing to help me
out with running all of these projects when I run out of free time to
coordinate them! It’s pretty fantastic! The British volunteers are taking over
the English classes, and the German volunteers will start working on the Girls
club with a woman from the church and one of the youth.
2. Tses Entrepreneurial Development Group. Out of the youth
group, there was a huge interest in business development (especially since Tses
will soon grow into a town)! We want to get started before people from
“outside” come and take all of the business/job opportunities. So a group of
~30 youth (and a few elders) have gotten together to try to start their own
small businesses.
3. Business Workshop. I pretty quickly got out of my league,
so next week FOUR other (business) Peace Corps volunteers are going to come run
a workshop for me! I’m really excited to see them, plus really excited that my
community will get the chance to think together about business plans, getting
their businesses registered with the government, and so on. This means we’ve
had lots of meetings and have been doing lots of fundraising to try to make it
happen!
That’s about it. My life in a nutshell. I don’t have any
pictures of these things yet, so I’m adding some pictures of my classroom and
stuff, just for fun…
see those big white sheets at the back? best idea ever. they're Sticker Charts, which my mom used when we were little as positive reinforcement for good behavior during the day... works the same with grade 8 and 9 kids when you give them a sticker for good behavior or for doign their homework! Victory!
some of the girls one afternoon
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