I have had a lovely morning in Tulear so far- had probably one of the best showers I have ever had and went shopping in the market here. Granted Lucy and I got ripped off left and right but I can’t help not minding given the fact that It’s maybe a dollar I’m getting ripped off of and the people here obviously need it more than I do. Maybe it doesn’t help the larger issue but I’m such a sucker. Oh well. We also ate at one of two bakeries here this morning, simply divine.
Oh yes, thank you to everyone who messaged me after I posted my blog yesterday! (katz, Ellen, beth, and Erica ) it really made my morning, and thank you everyone else who has emailed, I’m going to try to get back to as many people today as I can but the internet is still incredibly slow.
So I just wanted to tell people a little bit about the teaching I’m doing. So far, I’ve just been under Lucy’s wing, but when she leaves (which will be seriously depressing) I’m going to take over for her. I’m really nervous about it but I’m going to do the best I can. Kids’ Club is an hour or two activity once a week, right now on Thursdays at 3, where kids of all ages (toddlers to teens) from Ifaty come to ReefDoctor and we teach conservation education based on a curriculum ReefDoctor has made up. As the teacher, I will be responsible for creating all of the activities to go with the curriculum. For example, the Chapter we are on now is on pollution and rubbish and will probably take 4 or 5 weeks to complete. We had the introduction to the Chapter this past Thursday and Lucy and I just kind of came up with some simple activities to teach the 3 main types of pollution (land, water, and air) and old trash (like wood, cloth, biodegradable materials) versus new trash (plastic, metals, batteries, etc). We had them sit in a circle on the beach and had them go around and go in the center and select a piece of trash we had already collected from the beach (the beach is pretty filthy, especially by the village) and sort it into two groups to see if they could see the difference between new and old types of trash. At the end we re-sorted everything so it was correct and then explained. We have to go through a translator, Christina (she speaks fluent Malagas, French, and English), so it’s hard not being able to directly communicate with the kids. We can exchange a few words together but not so many, mostly just things like ‘sua bibi’ (very good) and ‘salama’ (hello) and then random French. I really wish I was better at French, I’m kicking myself for not working harder at that in school. We then did a few more similar kind of activities that had them moving back and forth a lot so they wouldn’t get bored to teach the rest of the intro. It doesn’t seem like anything hard to plan, but without Lucy’s help I would have been dumbfounded. I’m hoping I’ll just kind of pick it up as I go. I try and think back to being a kid and the kinds of games we did in school but I don’t remember anything except thumbs up, seven up because that was like the only game I ever liked enough to pay attention to.
Adult English is also going to be more difficult than I had imagined. I have only been twice because diving has interfered a couple of times. The first time I went we were locked out of the school so we just sat outside and played 20 questions with the subject thought of having to be something found in Ifaty. There were extra volunteers there and it was a lot more informal so it didn’t seem so bad. But yesterday, we sat in the school and first played hangman with different colors in English being the words guessed as kind of a warm up and for the benefit of the beginners, there were actually 3 new people there. Then we split them into two groups: beginners and advanced. The beginners worked with one of the locals, Pepin, who used to work for ReefDoctor and who speaks English and French very well, and went over words for the different parts of the body in English. The more advanced boys had to pick out a picture in a magazine (there is actually an Our State North Carolina magazine at ReefDoctor – so random, and made me pretty homesick) and write a description about it then trade with someone else to read the other person’s description and look through the magazine to find the picture based on the description. It went really well. A couple of them are pretty good, it just blows me away how some of the people here (usually our staff and some of the English students) are already fluent in Malagas and French and then almost English. I took French for 5 years and Latin for 7 and all I know in Latin is “canis est in via” and my French isn’t too much better.
I am still uneasy about being in charge of the class because communication is difficult and I don’t want to bore them so if anybody has any good simple games they can think of let me know! Right now we have 20 questions, eyespy, hangman, the magazine thing, and maybe like two more. But it’d be great to have more ideas, and so far nothing has come to me.
We are about to go to a marine “museum” that located at the university of Tulear, even though its supposed to basically be a museum of death, as in there are too many stuffed turtles and things of that nature. The poor sea life here is just decimated, the population has far exceeded the resources and so many people have moved to the coast from inland because there has been terrible drought for so many years. The sea is kind of looked at as a resource that infinitely supplies and is open to everyone, but unfortunately most of the coastal landscape has been devastated by deforestation of mangroves and the Bay of Ranobe has been stripped of its marine life through unsustainable fishing techniques like beach seining, which I’ll get more into later.
Hope everyone is well, keep the contact coming, it really makes me happy
Alex
No comments:
Post a Comment