Nooooooo.
I've been to two barbeques this week, neither or which had sun. Admittedly the first one was held in the evening and so the only people braving the 'cold' and mosquitoes outside were those who had drunk enough to not to care, but the second one was yesterday and it poured with rain, in the middle of the dry season, just as we all arrived. BUT that was compensated by the amazing view from this guy's garden, which sloped down towards Lake Nakuru, and so you could see the lake with lots of mountains and dramatic clouds and tiny flamingoes in the distance.
Both barbeques were really nice as all the volunteers came, and we usually only manage to all get together once a week or so. We had lots of very very tasty food, but yesterday was a little sad as we were saying goodbye to our friend Mark, who's been here since September and is leaving tomorrow. However, the afternoon and evening were still extremely fun, with lots of silly eye makeup being put on everyone (including the guys) before we went out to Summit, and the attempted kidnap of a goat was also very funny (but sadly unsuccessful. I have to admit I had quite a large part in this part of the evening and spent a substantial amount of time running around with no shoes on trying to free the goat, singled out to be eaten the next today, and named 'Planty' by myself and Ben).
School this week has been amazing; I'm back to teaching my own class, who are all lovely and all rush to give me high-fives before I go home, but we're also taking Standard 3 for P.E. everyday, which is lovely. I got very attached to some of the lovely kids in Standard 3 and so we spend lots of time playing with them at break, and skipping and playing games in P.E. is a really nice way to still see them each day :) I also taught my first art lesson, as requested specifically by Standard 7 (who are all brilliant and well behaved and quite like friends rather than pupils), about faces and how to draw them. I was quite nervous beforehand, and wished that I could have a radio (and that the school had electricity for a radio...) to make it a really nice relaxed art lesson like I always had, but I really enjoyed it.
Saturday, 28 February 2009
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
The Masai Mara and 'Zoe, why did you exhibit signs of dying?'
The Masai Mara was AMAZING. We were staying in little buildings on a site just outside the reserve, and did three trips inside the reserve to see the wildlife, all bouncing along in these awesome safari vans which you could stand up in and peer out the roof.
I can't adequately describe how beautiful the wildlife was, but we saw zebras, giraffes, cheetahs, elephants, lions, crocodiles, hippos and a lot of very pretty birds. We got SO close to some animals, and just watching a group of four lions strolling around on the grass, sunbathing and eating was unreal. Knowing how powerful they were, it was insane being just 5 metres away from them. I also loved the elephants and didn't quite realise until now how weird elephants are as an animal!
We also visited a Masai village, which was really fascinating, but smelt rather bad as their houses were literally all built from excrement. They all lived in insanely small mud houses, with absolutely no light in them, and often 5 or so people living in one tiny little room, and all of the houses were built by a single woman, taking about 9 years to complete.
The Masai Mara itself wasn't how I expected it at all - I'd pictured an enormous desert with lots of sand and everything being yellow, but it was very green with a lot of bushes and trees, and absolutely enormous. One day we spent all day in the reserve and ended up in the middle of nowhere, surrounded entirely by grass and sky and cactus-trees wherever you looked.
Interesting points of the trip include me being really silly and jumping out of a safari van with no shoes on, straight into a poisonous thorn bush (it sounds like something out of Disney), and thus having a poisoned and painful foot for a few days, and the slaughtering of a goat, which was foul and started a lot of vegetarian-related debates.
I am now back in Nakuru, and shall now explain the hint of me dying. Basically, yesterday I woke up with a horrible stomach ache that just got worse and worse, and during the day managed to display almost every symptom of malaria. At the stage where I couldn't even sit up for more than a about 5 seconds without collapsing, someone decided it would be best to take me to a hospital, where I discovered that I thankfully do not have malaria, but do have some kind of bad bacteria in my stomach. Despite them wanting to admit me overnight and put one of those scary IV drip things into me, I escaped with a painful injection in my hand and went home. Today I am not feeling very normal, but I feel SO much better than yesterday, so I am happy :)
I can't adequately describe how beautiful the wildlife was, but we saw zebras, giraffes, cheetahs, elephants, lions, crocodiles, hippos and a lot of very pretty birds. We got SO close to some animals, and just watching a group of four lions strolling around on the grass, sunbathing and eating was unreal. Knowing how powerful they were, it was insane being just 5 metres away from them. I also loved the elephants and didn't quite realise until now how weird elephants are as an animal!
We also visited a Masai village, which was really fascinating, but smelt rather bad as their houses were literally all built from excrement. They all lived in insanely small mud houses, with absolutely no light in them, and often 5 or so people living in one tiny little room, and all of the houses were built by a single woman, taking about 9 years to complete.The Masai Mara itself wasn't how I expected it at all - I'd pictured an enormous desert with lots of sand and everything being yellow, but it was very green with a lot of bushes and trees, and absolutely enormous. One day we spent all day in the reserve and ended up in the middle of nowhere, surrounded entirely by grass and sky and cactus-trees wherever you looked.
Interesting points of the trip include me being really silly and jumping out of a safari van with no shoes on, straight into a poisonous thorn bush (it sounds like something out of Disney), and thus having a poisoned and painful foot for a few days, and the slaughtering of a goat, which was foul and started a lot of vegetarian-related debates.
I am now back in Nakuru, and shall now explain the hint of me dying. Basically, yesterday I woke up with a horrible stomach ache that just got worse and worse, and during the day managed to display almost every symptom of malaria. At the stage where I couldn't even sit up for more than a about 5 seconds without collapsing, someone decided it would be best to take me to a hospital, where I discovered that I thankfully do not have malaria, but do have some kind of bad bacteria in my stomach. Despite them wanting to admit me overnight and put one of those scary IV drip things into me, I escaped with a painful injection in my hand and went home. Today I am not feeling very normal, but I feel SO much better than yesterday, so I am happy :)
Friday, 13 February 2009
A Little Bit More Detail...
As my last blog post wasn't exactly detailed I thought I should add a bit more before I go to the Masai Mara and get pre-occupied with leopards and elephants and the like.
Last weekend was a lot of fun; a lot of people, including my housemate Rebecca, went to climb Mount Kenya (I decided that 300 pounds was too much to spend on an inevitably painful 4-day climb up a sheer face of rock) and so some of the girls who were left decided to sleep over at Ellen and Amy's house on Friday and Saturday night. This was LUXURY. The house was huge and we had two pillows (I had no idea how much I'd missed this until now and this has prompted me to take to 'borrowing' cushions from the living room each night to put under my pillow at home), a huge television with Charmed playing on it, and a breakfast of cereal and eggs and beans and TOAST (our house has no toaster!) and pineapple :) It was sooo good.
So, aside from taking advantage of their lovely house, we spent Friday night watching many many films, slept in for a long time on Saturday and then went to Summit on Saturday night. Whereas Summit is usually free and has just the right number of people in it, this week there was an event with the 'best' DJs in Nakuru (they were awful) and so we paid 2 pounds for entry, got two free beers just for coming (these tasted foul and so we sold them to some men who claimed to be related to Barack Obama), and the whole place was way too crowded. Money and phones got stolen from people on the dancefloor, thankfully not mine, and some German men caused some chaos to say the least. We learnt never to go to events at Summit.
I also took two motorbikes this weekend :D Like the boda-bodas, they are motorbike taxies with a man driving and you sitting on the back. The first time was to Ellen and Amy's house and was fun but they went extremely fast and I spent quite a substantial amount of time wondering if I was going to die. The second time was in the dark on the way to Summit - Annie and I went on the same one and it was AMAZING just zooming along in the dark with the stars and screaming at our friends on the motorbike next to us.
Reassuring note for Nanny and Mum: we only ever get motorbikes with drivers we know are safe :)
In terms of school and teaching, this week has been really difficult. With Rebecca away, Annie and I still had full responsibility for Standard Three who were a nightmare some days. There were incidents of stealing, beating and cutting-themselves-with-razors-to-get-plasters. It was ridiculous. I felt extremely bad and incompetant some days as, because we can't speak swahili, some of the more complicated issues we had to pass over to the Kenyan teachers to resolve, which led to children (some of them innocent) being beaten. I felt so terrible and so guilty watching them squirming and sobbing as they were beaten because I should be able to discipline them myself and in a way that doesn't lead to them being harmed, but because I don't know how yet I had to pass it to other teachers, which is as bad as beating them myself . I am now busy thinking of ways to control them and determine what's going on without beating them or speaking swahili, but thankfully next week Standard 3's teacher should be coming back so I will return to my original Standard 4 class, who are far better behaved and who are all absolutely lovely.
To contrast with the above 'standard three are evil' paragraph, here are the best parts of my school week:
-- P.E. with Standard 4. I didn't really have any choice about this; I hadn't seen my class all week and then yesterday I was walking past their classroom door and heard 'TEACHER IT IS P.E. IT IS P.E.!!' I walked into their classroom and they all leapt up and down cheering :) We spent a very happy hour or so outside, them teaching me Kenyan games (and picking me to do all of them, cheering 'TEACHER TEACHER TEACHER' when I was competing) and all fighting to hold my hand and show me what to do.
-- Lovely girls in Standard 4 - a group of them ran up behind me and clasped their hands over my eyes, giggling at breaktime yesterday. I love them :) They are so sweet.
-- Hearing that Class 3 would be getting a BLACK blackboard. So happy. Their current blackboard is a very white shade of grey. All the kids have to wander up and stick their noses right in front of the board to read the tasks set for them. The blackboard is being painted black over the weekend :)
-- Being asked to take an art class by the headteacher. He wandered up to me on Tuesday and said that Standard 7 had been asking if I could teach them an art lesson for ages :) I have excitedly planned a lesson about how to draw faces :D
I have been through my blog today and added some photos to some of the older posts, so if you're interested then take a look :)
Last weekend was a lot of fun; a lot of people, including my housemate Rebecca, went to climb Mount Kenya (I decided that 300 pounds was too much to spend on an inevitably painful 4-day climb up a sheer face of rock) and so some of the girls who were left decided to sleep over at Ellen and Amy's house on Friday and Saturday night. This was LUXURY. The house was huge and we had two pillows (I had no idea how much I'd missed this until now and this has prompted me to take to 'borrowing' cushions from the living room each night to put under my pillow at home), a huge television with Charmed playing on it, and a breakfast of cereal and eggs and beans and TOAST (our house has no toaster!) and pineapple :) It was sooo good.
So, aside from taking advantage of their lovely house, we spent Friday night watching many many films, slept in for a long time on Saturday and then went to Summit on Saturday night. Whereas Summit is usually free and has just the right number of people in it, this week there was an event with the 'best' DJs in Nakuru (they were awful) and so we paid 2 pounds for entry, got two free beers just for coming (these tasted foul and so we sold them to some men who claimed to be related to Barack Obama), and the whole place was way too crowded. Money and phones got stolen from people on the dancefloor, thankfully not mine, and some German men caused some chaos to say the least. We learnt never to go to events at Summit.
I also took two motorbikes this weekend :D Like the boda-bodas, they are motorbike taxies with a man driving and you sitting on the back. The first time was to Ellen and Amy's house and was fun but they went extremely fast and I spent quite a substantial amount of time wondering if I was going to die. The second time was in the dark on the way to Summit - Annie and I went on the same one and it was AMAZING just zooming along in the dark with the stars and screaming at our friends on the motorbike next to us.
Reassuring note for Nanny and Mum: we only ever get motorbikes with drivers we know are safe :)
In terms of school and teaching, this week has been really difficult. With Rebecca away, Annie and I still had full responsibility for Standard Three who were a nightmare some days. There were incidents of stealing, beating and cutting-themselves-with-razors-to-get-plasters. It was ridiculous. I felt extremely bad and incompetant some days as, because we can't speak swahili, some of the more complicated issues we had to pass over to the Kenyan teachers to resolve, which led to children (some of them innocent) being beaten. I felt so terrible and so guilty watching them squirming and sobbing as they were beaten because I should be able to discipline them myself and in a way that doesn't lead to them being harmed, but because I don't know how yet I had to pass it to other teachers, which is as bad as beating them myself . I am now busy thinking of ways to control them and determine what's going on without beating them or speaking swahili, but thankfully next week Standard 3's teacher should be coming back so I will return to my original Standard 4 class, who are far better behaved and who are all absolutely lovely.
To contrast with the above 'standard three are evil' paragraph, here are the best parts of my school week:
-- P.E. with Standard 4. I didn't really have any choice about this; I hadn't seen my class all week and then yesterday I was walking past their classroom door and heard 'TEACHER IT IS P.E. IT IS P.E.!!' I walked into their classroom and they all leapt up and down cheering :) We spent a very happy hour or so outside, them teaching me Kenyan games (and picking me to do all of them, cheering 'TEACHER TEACHER TEACHER' when I was competing) and all fighting to hold my hand and show me what to do.
-- Lovely girls in Standard 4 - a group of them ran up behind me and clasped their hands over my eyes, giggling at breaktime yesterday. I love them :) They are so sweet.
-- Hearing that Class 3 would be getting a BLACK blackboard. So happy. Their current blackboard is a very white shade of grey. All the kids have to wander up and stick their noses right in front of the board to read the tasks set for them. The blackboard is being painted black over the weekend :)
-- Being asked to take an art class by the headteacher. He wandered up to me on Tuesday and said that Standard 7 had been asking if I could teach them an art lesson for ages :) I have excitedly planned a lesson about how to draw faces :D
I have been through my blog today and added some photos to some of the older posts, so if you're interested then take a look :)
Thursday, 12 February 2009
Friday, 6 February 2009
Be Careful What You Wish For...
...or you might end up with 130 children and mass chaos in your P.E. lesson.
Earlier this week I didn't feel as though I was being as productive as I could be at school, as I was only teaching 1 or 2 lessons a day and wasting a lot of time sitting outside in the dust and sun.
However, on Thursday, me and Annie discovered the reason that Standard 3 had no teacher the day we took them for P.E. It seems that their teacher is away marking exam papers, and no cover was arranged. Therefore, for the last 2 days, me and Annie have had full responsibility for a class of manic 7-8 year olds.
They are actually a NIGHTMARE. When you're teaching them a lesson, it's generally quite good because they do pay attention and pick up what you're teaching quite quickly. Unfortunately, once you set them an exercise and sit down to mark some books, you instantly get a whole stream of kids coming up to your desk going 'teacher he's beating me', 'teacher she's giving me rocks' and 'teacher he is making noise'. They all continuously hit each other for no apparent reason, and will not stop. Plus it's really difficult to determine who's actually hitting who as they all claim that they're not hitting people and actually 5 other people are hitting them.
The P.E. lesson with 130 kids was ridiculous; we took our class out for P.E. and within about 5 minutes the Standard 2 teacher came out and said 'My children are distracted by your P.E. lesson, do you mind if they join you?' And so before we could even think 'OHHHH this is not good', out came another 65 seven-year-olds from the nearest mud-hut. The Standard 2 children barely even speak English, and so two girls trying to control this swarm of children was physically impossible.
I'm making it sound like the whole thing's awful, which it isn't. The children are still very very sweet, and I've started a handstand/cartwheel/generally-throwing-yourself-about-in-the-air craze by doing one handstand one breaktime. It is very rewarding when you find that even one child has understood your lesson on question marks, and the children are some of the most hilarious people I've ever met. One boy is called Isaac and incredibly cheeky but with the biggest puppy-dog-eyes you've ever seen. I literally can't say no to anything he asks me. Yesterday, him and his friend were wandering around for half an hour clutching enormous, pineapple-like logs (I have no idea what these were), and they just looked so ridiculous that me and Annie couldn't help laughing every time we saw them. They knew this as well and just kept bouncing past me, grinning and parading these bizarre things at me.
I am SO tired now!
Earlier this week I didn't feel as though I was being as productive as I could be at school, as I was only teaching 1 or 2 lessons a day and wasting a lot of time sitting outside in the dust and sun.
However, on Thursday, me and Annie discovered the reason that Standard 3 had no teacher the day we took them for P.E. It seems that their teacher is away marking exam papers, and no cover was arranged. Therefore, for the last 2 days, me and Annie have had full responsibility for a class of manic 7-8 year olds.
They are actually a NIGHTMARE. When you're teaching them a lesson, it's generally quite good because they do pay attention and pick up what you're teaching quite quickly. Unfortunately, once you set them an exercise and sit down to mark some books, you instantly get a whole stream of kids coming up to your desk going 'teacher he's beating me', 'teacher she's giving me rocks' and 'teacher he is making noise'. They all continuously hit each other for no apparent reason, and will not stop. Plus it's really difficult to determine who's actually hitting who as they all claim that they're not hitting people and actually 5 other people are hitting them.
The P.E. lesson with 130 kids was ridiculous; we took our class out for P.E. and within about 5 minutes the Standard 2 teacher came out and said 'My children are distracted by your P.E. lesson, do you mind if they join you?' And so before we could even think 'OHHHH this is not good', out came another 65 seven-year-olds from the nearest mud-hut. The Standard 2 children barely even speak English, and so two girls trying to control this swarm of children was physically impossible.
I'm making it sound like the whole thing's awful, which it isn't. The children are still very very sweet, and I've started a handstand/cartwheel/generally-throwing-yourself-about-in-the-air craze by doing one handstand one breaktime. It is very rewarding when you find that even one child has understood your lesson on question marks, and the children are some of the most hilarious people I've ever met. One boy is called Isaac and incredibly cheeky but with the biggest puppy-dog-eyes you've ever seen. I literally can't say no to anything he asks me. Yesterday, him and his friend were wandering around for half an hour clutching enormous, pineapple-like logs (I have no idea what these were), and they just looked so ridiculous that me and Annie couldn't help laughing every time we saw them. They knew this as well and just kept bouncing past me, grinning and parading these bizarre things at me.
I am SO tired now!
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
Some real work
Getting back to teaching has been frustrating at times, but lovely overall :)
The children are all so sweet, and I feel good at the moment as I'm beginning to learn their names and recognise their faces a lot easier. We are usually walked to and from school by some little girls that live nearby (a girl called Leah in my class invited me to go and play skipping with her on Saturday which I am looking forward to!) and although it is extremely painful getting up at 5.45am so to get to school for 7 am, the walk is really pretty as we can watch the sunrise.
I felt very productive today as I did some one-to-one maths tuition with some of my class, marked 60 maths books, 'taught' three P.E. lessons (this actually consists of leaping up and down and pretending to be rats or lions or snakes usually) and taught my class about nouns for English. It was my first English lesson that I felt had gone really well; all the children actually seemed to understand it and were leaping up and down in their seats, going 'teacher, teacher!' when I asked them to give me some examples of some nouns. I love the feeling that I have taught them something and they've enjoyed it, or that I've just made their day a bit happier.
A little story:
Earlier we were sitting outside marking social studies (a mixture of geography and history) books when a girl from the standard 3 class (age 8-9ish) came out and mumbled something to us. We investigated and found that their classroom had no teacher in it, but half of the class was standing in a crowd at the front. We soon deduced that they were actually asking us to cane the children at the front as, clearly, their teacher had been half way through the task and just disappeared. We got them to sit down in silence and realised that they also had no work to do, and so made a deal with them where if they were quiet for 5 minutes we would take them out for P.E. We just ran around with them, playing silly games and making fools out of ourselves for about 45 minutes. Aside from the anger and annoyance I felt at their actual teacher for disappearing completely, and the sadness that these children actually believe they deserve to be caned for stupid, tiny things, it felt really good that just by being there we were able to improve their day, save them from being hit and allow them to enjoy themselves.
The frustrating part of teaching is that the school is run extremely badly; there are timetables that are never stuck to (therefore my english lesson yesterday was taken over by a swahili lesson without warning, and we never know when exactly we'll be teaching), the teachers are lazy and very unwilling to give the children any individual help or work to make up lost time after the strike, and the school is so poor. When I think about the amount of money some people have and don't use in the UK I feel very angry because this school could do SO much with a relatively small amount of money. They have no running water (and so no plumbing and DISGUSTING toilets), a large stone trough used for washing hands, feet, drinking water and drank from by the occasional stray cow, and real mud hut classrooms. Just one more classroom would make so much difference as you could split the class of 74 ten-year-olds in half and make two reasonable sized classes! It makes me so motivated to try and find some funding from anywhere I can in the UK. Just the cost of a school uniform would do so much as the children aren't allowed to go to school unless they can buy the uniform. I know I sound like a charity advert or something but being here and seeing it makes you realise just how awful it is to have so much money not being used properly.
The weather out here is ridiculous at the moment, hotter than usual, so we physically can't sit in the sun for more than 5 minutes without feeling we're about to explode. I am jealous of the snow in England because it sounds very pretty :)
The children are all so sweet, and I feel good at the moment as I'm beginning to learn their names and recognise their faces a lot easier. We are usually walked to and from school by some little girls that live nearby (a girl called Leah in my class invited me to go and play skipping with her on Saturday which I am looking forward to!) and although it is extremely painful getting up at 5.45am so to get to school for 7 am, the walk is really pretty as we can watch the sunrise.
I felt very productive today as I did some one-to-one maths tuition with some of my class, marked 60 maths books, 'taught' three P.E. lessons (this actually consists of leaping up and down and pretending to be rats or lions or snakes usually) and taught my class about nouns for English. It was my first English lesson that I felt had gone really well; all the children actually seemed to understand it and were leaping up and down in their seats, going 'teacher, teacher!' when I asked them to give me some examples of some nouns. I love the feeling that I have taught them something and they've enjoyed it, or that I've just made their day a bit happier.
A little story:
Earlier we were sitting outside marking social studies (a mixture of geography and history) books when a girl from the standard 3 class (age 8-9ish) came out and mumbled something to us. We investigated and found that their classroom had no teacher in it, but half of the class was standing in a crowd at the front. We soon deduced that they were actually asking us to cane the children at the front as, clearly, their teacher had been half way through the task and just disappeared. We got them to sit down in silence and realised that they also had no work to do, and so made a deal with them where if they were quiet for 5 minutes we would take them out for P.E. We just ran around with them, playing silly games and making fools out of ourselves for about 45 minutes. Aside from the anger and annoyance I felt at their actual teacher for disappearing completely, and the sadness that these children actually believe they deserve to be caned for stupid, tiny things, it felt really good that just by being there we were able to improve their day, save them from being hit and allow them to enjoy themselves.
The frustrating part of teaching is that the school is run extremely badly; there are timetables that are never stuck to (therefore my english lesson yesterday was taken over by a swahili lesson without warning, and we never know when exactly we'll be teaching), the teachers are lazy and very unwilling to give the children any individual help or work to make up lost time after the strike, and the school is so poor. When I think about the amount of money some people have and don't use in the UK I feel very angry because this school could do SO much with a relatively small amount of money. They have no running water (and so no plumbing and DISGUSTING toilets), a large stone trough used for washing hands, feet, drinking water and drank from by the occasional stray cow, and real mud hut classrooms. Just one more classroom would make so much difference as you could split the class of 74 ten-year-olds in half and make two reasonable sized classes! It makes me so motivated to try and find some funding from anywhere I can in the UK. Just the cost of a school uniform would do so much as the children aren't allowed to go to school unless they can buy the uniform. I know I sound like a charity advert or something but being here and seeing it makes you realise just how awful it is to have so much money not being used properly.
The weather out here is ridiculous at the moment, hotter than usual, so we physically can't sit in the sun for more than 5 minutes without feeling we're about to explode. I am jealous of the snow in England because it sounds very pretty :)
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