Back To Skool!

I made it back! To Namibia, obviously. But really, I meant my blog. It’s been a long time since Thanksgiving, and I was starting to worry that my blog had died. But it didn’t. It’s still here! Yippee!

My time at home was wonderful. Honestly, it was a bit surreal though. I cried getting off the plane at the beginning. And I cried getting back on the plane at the end. I don’t know if I can explain either emotion but they were both a mixture of fear, missing certain people and an overwhelming sense of not belonging anywhere… or maybe belonging too many places.

Before I left for home last year, I would spend a certain amount of time everyday visualizing things that I felt were shocking about America. For example, I visualized an entire row of the grocery store being dedicated completely to ice cream. I visualized getting into a clean car with seatbelts that would travel directly to where I needed to go! I visualized a clerk in a store who said, “oh yes, of course I can help you.” Instead of the regular, “I don’t want to speak English today” or “Buy me these sweets when you buy your things.” Yes, I visualized many fantastic things about America. But when I finally got there for my vacation, some things still shocked me.

I had a ten-ish hour layover in JFK airport when I first arrived in America. It was hellish (“Hellish” defined as: completely jet lagged, tired, dirty, wearing summer-weather clothes, without American money, hungry, forbidden to check in until a mere 6 hours before my flight and doomed to carry ALL my bags around outside in the cold rain waiting until Delta would accept my worn and ragged soul… and that is no exaggeration, that is, until I found a McDonalds…). Just before my connecting flight left for the west coast, I finally found some coffee. It was, of course, at Starbucks. I didn’t mind because it was coffee, the only beverage confirmed to improve my outlook on life. When I tried to get an Americano, though, I ran into some trouble. I had in my wallet a fresh $20 from an ATM I had stumbled across – a whole different challenge – and a few coins left over from 2007. I figured that I would make life easier on this Starbucks worker by counting out exact change for my coffee. But instead, she angrily stared at me as I counted the coins. And when I finally put them down she said, “This ain’t right!” I counted them again, twice. They were right, I thought. The employee just got more and more angry before she finally took the coins and counted them for me... in a loud and clear voice… like a math teacher… in first grade: “25! 35! 36! 37! 38! … You’re 25 cents short!” I looked at the coins in horror as I realized, a quarter is worth 25 cents. Not 50 cents. I just quietly put down a second quarter and grabbed my drink that had long since been prepared by the second employee and shamefully slid away to a dark corner of the terminal. Where I then examined the rest of the coins in my possession to ensure I knew all of their values before attempting to purchase something else.

The quarters were only the beginning. The little things seemed to shock me all over the place. The rolls of toilet paper in America are huge! Internet is the fastest thing I’ve ever seen. Why does everyone drive so fast on the freeway? Was TV News always so entertaining? Remote controls have so many buttons. Pop tarts cost more than I make in a day. Why is everyone so strict about the order of words in sentences – you got the idea, didn’t you?! And, you definitely don’t get to choose if you want to wear a seatbelt or not.

There were a few things that were not as great as I remembered though. For instance, customer service really confused me. It was just too much social stimulation. By the end of my visit, I would just make nods in the direction of things I needed instead of using full coherent sentences. And snow! Oh the snow! It was so… cold. And wet. And yucky.

There were some things that were just as good as I remembered though: Family, friends, curlers, pets, the cd player in my car, boots, the microwave, clean socks, the washing machine, lots and lots of blankets and fantastic tea with fantastic honey!

Overall, my trip home was really great. And I did get my hair cut.

I returned to Namibia on Thursday, the 8th of January. My first act upon arriving was to leave my cellphone in the taxi that drove me from the airport. It was a devastating loss. But the kindly Europeans who were bunked in my hostel room became concerned about my seemingly unhealthy attachment to a piece of technology and, with many phone calls and a little yelling, managed to get the taxi driver back to the hostel, resulting in my phone’s safe return… And who says Europeans don’t like Americans?

The next day, I made a quick visit to Khorixas for the weekend to make sure my flat hadn’t been broken into or otherwise damaged. I felt very lucky to see that my flat looked just as I had left it. Luck had very little to do with it though. It probably had more to do with my neighbor/friend/colleague who promised to watch it during the holiday. The inside of my flat smelled like something rotting though and it was a little more than I had bargained for. And, to make the smell worse, there wasn’t a whole drop of water in the entire hostel for the entire weekend. I survived by buying 3 liters of water and eating the leftovers from the lunch my mom had packed my for the plane ride. She’s a good lunch packer.

That Monday was the Nam27 Midservice conference in Windhoek. It was kind of like the Reconnect conference last year… the only difference was that we already had Reconnect…

About half of our group had visited home for Christmas. The others did some sightseeing in east Africa or South Africa. Only a few stayed at their sites in Namibia. It was good to see everyone though. They’re a pretty great NamFam. Slightly dysfunctional… but then, who isn’t?

Midservice was during the first official week of school - Thank goodness. The first week of every term is chaos. But the first week of the First Term is a special breed of chaos that also happens to provide a lot of time to bang your head against the wall and question your purpose in Namibia, and life in general. Luckily, my school proceeded through this period without me. When I arrived the next Monday, they already had a timetable (class schedule) and about half the registered learners for most classes.

At the staff meeting in the morning, it was good to see a lot of familiar faces. There were a lot of new teachers too. And a new principal! (We didn’t have a principal last year. The last principal passed away in 2007) When I saw my supervisor at the meeting she said, “you’re going to be a very shocked person when you look at the timetable” and then ducked behind another teacher before jumping into the prayer for the morning.

After the meeting, she cleared everything up for me. I was going to be a shocked person because I was no longer a science teacher or a math teacher. Which is really a pity, because I happen to have a huge binder full of a years’ worth of lesson plans for both subjects. Instead, I was going to be a B.I.S. teacher and a Life Skills teacher.

B.I.S. stands for Basic Information Science. Volunteers commonly call this particular course “BS class”. It’s supposed to help learners become familiar with information resources available to them, such as computers, books, videos, references, etc. The “BS” description comes in when the volunteer then discovers how many “resources” actually are available to the learner. Life Skills is a mix between health, study skills and social studies. The curriculum is basically common sense (which unfortunately is not always so common in these parts).

At first, I was in shock. I love science and math. And last year, I loved trying to force little kids to love them too. But after a while of thinking and looking over the syllabi, I decided that this could be a lucky break for me. You see, BIS and Life Skills are non-promotional subjects. That means that kids don’t have to take any government tests to pass the class. And after further investigations, I found that, basically, I can teach whatever I want!

It’s exciting that I get to choose the most important and fun things to teach. But it’s also a lot of pressure. I spent the majority of my first week getting a general idea of what I wanted teach for the first and second terms. And then taking those ideas and tailoring them to vastly different skills of learners in grade 5, 6 and 7. It’s a lot of work, but it’s going a lot more smoothly that making lessons for science and math. That’s mainly because there are so many more resources for Life Skills. There aren’t very many for BIS. But for BIS I chose to read “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” with the grade 6 and grade 7. We have a class set, left by the previous VSO. The small book should take up all of term 1, so lesson planning is taken care of up until June. Grade 5 is doing Phonics – which I’m quickly growing to detest.

For Life Skills, I chose Term 1 to teach about health – a healthy digestive system, a healthy diet, and a healthy mouth. If we have time we’ll finish with the nervous system and drug education. I chose health for first term because I thought it was the least important topic of the three things I wanted to teach. Granted, I only chose three topics I thought were important (one for each term). The other two are environmental education and conflict resolution (yes, and entire term can be spent on conflict resolution… probably a whole year if we’re honest). I think these two are more important because, in all likelihood, they will not be getting very much information about them in the rest of their education. They do get a lot of health education though. And by teaching it in term one, I can omit the things they probably know more about when, say, classes get cancelled for the whole week because we’re changing the timetable… which happens a lot in term one.

The other challenges starting this school year are the organizing the library and the dinosaur in the office. First of all, the library is full of books. At least that’s the way it looks when you walk in. The problem is that you, an American, can quickly see that more than half the books are written in Afrikaans. The learners can’t tell the difference between Afrikaans and English, though. And then will happily spend an afternoon applying English phonics to Afrikaans and making up who-knows-what-story in their head to go along with the pictures. So, at the end of last year, I decided to pack up all the Afrikaans books and send them along to a different school. The problem I’m encountering now is this: the library doesn’t look as beautiful without all those books. … … Yes, that is a problem. Almost a big enough problem that our school would rather keep all those useless books. So, the challenge becomes 1) making the library look beautiful and fun and useful with a tiny number of books and 2) getting teachers and kids to USE the book we do HAVE! And, by that, I mean actually reading the words and understanding the content… But to help that along, I also have a pot of beautiful red fake flowers that make reading look more enticing… Maybe.

And the second problem is that darn dinosaur in the office. And by that I mean, our computer. This computer, particularly today, is driving me INSANE! Insane. It’s so old they turn it on and hour before the secretary gets to school, so that it might actually be on by the time she gets there. Today, the mouse just broke. That means the only thing left to use is the keyboard. I wrote a previous post about the keyboard. I would bet money that the keyboard is actually older than the computer. Whenever you press Enter or Shift or the Spacebar, you then have to pry up the key with your fingernail before proceeding. But without the mouse, that keyboard is the only link to our dinosaur. I googled keystrokes in my phone and taught the secretary a few so that she could keep working. But the whole situation had almost become comedic.

As an extracurricular task this year, our new principal assigned me to computers. “You can be I.T.,” he said. I was really excited about that. My plan is to get a new computer for the school. Maybe two. Last year, I wanted to get a new computer for the school but the cost of one almost seemed unreal. While I was home for Christmas though, family and friends donated money for the school to get a new computer. It was so cool to see and it was almost overwhelming at times. Now that I’m back here, I really just want to tell my coworkers about all the cool people in America that care about them and their school.

Right now, I’m looking at a computer donation company based in Seattle for the computers. It seems like a good place. I start to worry when I think about shipping costs and customs though. There’s just so much that goes into being the computer person. Plus, the title of “I.T.” goes so completely beyond my skill level, it’s bit laughable.

Well, that’s about it for the start of the year. I hope I didn’t bore you with too many details about school. It’s about all I’ve been doing though. My down time pretty much consists of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Weeds and the Year Of Fitness… which is definitely a story for a different blog. It’s all been pretty hectic but it’s also been good. I did leave out one huge detail. Huge detail. It’s a tradition of Namibian schools everywhere. A magical moment designed to welcome learners back from summer holiday with warmth and love and… CHAOS! It’s Athletics. For those of you regular readers, you may remember the running fiasco from last year. For the rest of you, tune in next time and I’ll tell you about the craziness.