Workshopping Our Work

March 12, 2009
Time has passed since my last blog entry. The hottest months have been December and January with an occasional break consisting of big noisy thunder storms leaving volumes of rain water and flooding in a short amount of time. The sky darkens and storms can be seen at a distance. Thunder and lightning are a common occurrence. The wind and cool air are a welcomed relief from the heat. The rain, called pula in Setswana, is also the name of the currency. Rain is generally scarce and welcomed for the deserts which can provide grasslands for both domestic and wild animals. The weather reports are really very simple. The weather is described as warm or hot in various regions. Thunderstorms or clouds are occasionally mentioned for certain parts of the country. With the hottest months behind, the mornings are becoming cooler. Winters weather is coming in May, June, and July with the very cold nights.
The vacation period has passed and school has begun in a big way. My blogs have been infrequent recently since school has been so hectic with workshops, workshop planning, field trips, the beginning of the term planning before the new Form 4’s arrived in our school. Form 4 is the equivalent to the juniors in our high schools. But rather than narrating the day to day activities, I have chosen to write about a recent workshop for our 12 Peace Corps Volunteers, several Batswana Guidance and Counseling counterparts, and a few people from the Ministry of Education.
To review our group characteristics, we are life skill volunteers working in guidance and counseling centers in a total of 12 schools, including one primary (elementary), several junior highs and one high school centers throughout one large district in Botswana. We come from Boston, Rhode Island, Vermont, Illinois, North Dakota, New Orleans, Montana and California. The oldest is 69 and the youngest is 23. There are three of us in our 60’s, 2 in their 50’s, one in her 40’s and 6 in their 20’s. We have one male and the rest are females. Our backgrounds are diverse. Three are trained social workers with counseling and teaching experience in the schools, myself as a retired political scientist, and the rest have experience in working with children in a variety of areas including sports, English as a second language, behavioral conditioning, tutoring or working with generally at risk- students. As a group we are tall and short, heavy and thin, young and old, hardworking and serious, talkative and quiet, active and involved, and generally supportive of each other. Without exception we all persevere in finding ways to build capacity with teachers and students in regards to teaching life skills so student learn to make decisions, set goals, becoming aware of their feelings, and reducing risky behavior in their lives, among other things. Each of these skills is supposed to be instructed in terms of a student centered approach involving active learning as opposed to teacher centered learning which entails primarily lecturing. The reason for a different teaching style is to encourage behavior change on the part of the recipients. Our purpose is to prevent HIV/AIDS by helping young people make critical choices in their lives rather than accepting traditional beliefs. Some of these concepts you might have read about before in my blogs, but I want to emphasize them here so you can see main focus of our assignment..
The workshop was intended to evaluate our first six months working in the schools. What surprised me most was variety of activities we participated in formally in the schools and also in the community. The school centered activities focused on team teaching, planning teacher workshops, counseling and tutoring students, curbing corporal punishment and its abuse, serving on school committees, helping with clubs and activities for sports, peer health educator, the environment, HIV, journalism, learning English, computer skills, farming and business skills.
The community based projects varied from helping local libraries, beginning pen pal programs, initiating art exchanges between schools, working to create a local WAR Chapter (Women Against Rape), helping orphans and vulnerable children at risk economically or health wise, setting up life skills program for a juvenile rehabilitation center, teaching life skills to a weekend teen club for teens with HIV, creating a mentor programs for orphans and vulnerable children, and creating a bead making factory.
I found the process enlightening since the school system is so different from the that in the US with respect to the number of courses (generally 9), the kinds courses taught(including moral education, Christian education, developing studies, etc.), the emphasis on science(everyone must take chemistry, physics, biology and math for two years at my school), the 6 day schedule, the transfer of teachers by the central Ministry of Education, the standardized testing and evaluation of the students, at year end of each term and finally the lack of a good remedial program to take into account students who lack skills in particular subjects. While discovering how the school system worked, I discovered we volunteers had dabbled in diverse activities based on our backgrounds. As one Ministry of Education person said, “Peace Corps Volunteers are eager and like to fiddle with things.” But in general we all experienced being an outsider who did not always understand or agree with the existing system.
Being part of a pilot program of life skills, there is definitely some ambiguity in what our focus should be in the schools. The Peace Corps and the Ministry of Education perspectives do not always match, so our mission in Botswana may need to be to be clarified. But in the meantime we seem to be carrying on a wide range of programs both during the regular school hours and after school, in addition to projects in the community. Are we making a difference? Hard to say…..