July 6-11, Anticipating, Observing, Moving Forward

July 6, 2010
I am typing this at Heathrow, a few hours before boarding my flight to Freetown. The past two months have been a whirlwind of finishing up the school year with my fifth graders and finding and moving into a new apartment. For about an hour every day, I have been working on the logistics of the Davis Peace Project. I have had to prioritize the logistical elements of the project: getting immunizations and medical releases, acquiring the visa, and raising the $2000 on top of the grant money that I need. My stateside sponsoring organization, World Hope International, has been unexpectedly helpful in creating my personal budget, providing a two day training, handling the visa, and even providing a packing list. This logistical help is exactly what I needed.

The rest of the project has moved fairly slowly. Gwen Smith, my sponsor in Sierra Leone, is also busy with the end of the school year and things are complicated by intermittent internet access, but we have had several good phone calls and many emails figuring out what the head teachers of the 11 schools she works with would like to see in the workshops this summer. We are now assembling a team--there will be professional development in classroom management, science, lower grade literacy, and upper grade literacy (which I will focus on). I am anxious to arrive and be able to work face to face with my colleagues. We will still have several weeks before the workshops begin. I think it has worked out for the best that the content of my section has waited to be developed until I have a better sense of the context. My suitcase is full of teaching supplies that friends have donated and care packages and medicine that have been sent to me to give to specific people in Sierra Leone.

I will be able to stay for about a month, until July 31. In about 8 hours, the real work finally begins!

July 11, 2010

I have been in "Salone" now 4 and a half days, and they have been full! I need to quickly summarize very rich experiences:
* My luggage and I arrived fine, landing in the dark at Lungi Airport. To get to Freetown proper, I rode down bumpy roads in a van (with Sierra Leoneans and IRC workers), to a small water taxi taking me about 20 minutes across the water to the city, where my collaborator, Gwen arrived shortly. The sights and sounds of a busy African city welcomed me as well!

* I am staying in a house with Gwen and 3 other ex-pats on the western side of town, on the mountain over looking the city and water. As is typical throughout Freetown, people living in secure houses surrounded with barbed wire and glass on walls are neighbors with families living in tin shanties with no electricity. The national electricity, or NPA, is turned off regularly, and shut down soon after I arrived. The house I am in has a small generator to keep minimal lights on. The main roads in town are faily solid, but any side street, especially up the mountains surrounding the country, are crumbling and full of potholes. 4 Wheel drive SUVs thrive here, though the common taxis are compact cars that are regularly seen being worked on in the street. Gwen knows all of her neighbors by name and talks regularly with them...they call her Auntie Joy.

* I went to work my first days here at a new office space downtown. They just hired an office manager, a wonderful Sierra Leonean man named Samuel, and we are in the process of setting up a teacher resource center with all of the materials that have been donated throughout the years Transformation Education has been in operation. The biggest challenge has been figuring out where all of these specific teacher resource books go in the Dewey decimal system. Samuel has brought in several local librarians to help, and hours long conversations ensue.

* Gwen and Brian, a volunteer who is studying school psychology at Buffalo and has been here a month already working on classroom management and positive behavior strategies with schools, took me around to about 6 of the school we will be working with. School is still in session, though exams are done, so when we went around most teachers were grading exams while the students were entertaining themselves. I enjoyed a comraderie I felt when I met the teachers, seeing the similarities of our task in our profession. Many differences abound though. The staff of schools is a Headteacher, and the classroom teachers, and some lunch and cleaning crew. No secretaries, specialists, reading teachers, vice principals. In one school they showed off the school library that consisted of 3 shelves of books, mostly old American textbooks. Other rooms were bare except for student benches and tables (we saw several classes where students were sitting on the floor) a teachers table, and chalkboards. The kids and teachers generally brightened on seeing Gwen. We led a couple of classes in songs that Gwen had previously taught them. She says she does not observe the classes as often as she would like. Also in several buildings, 2-6 classes shared the same room, divided only by chalkboard structures. Teaching here has many challenges. As we went around to the schools, we were also finalizing the lists of teachers that were going to be able to participate in our workshop. Some teachers expressed the wish to get paid for the workshop, but then would say that the desire to get more training makes the time worth it, and the food and transportation provided will be helpful. TE can't set the precedent of paying for workshops when that won't be able to be a reality further down the road.

* Although Temne, Mende, and many other languages are spoken in the country, the lingua franca is Krio, a language derived from English, similar to some Carribbean languages as well. It is spoken by most people and I am picking up just a little, "Kushe (kooshay)" is the greeting, with "Ow di bodi?" being "How is your body, or how are you?"

* Gwen, Brian, and I had a productive and long conversation about the content and format of the weeklong workshop from the 19th to the 23rd. We will have about 90 participants, mostly with educators from the 11 schools Transformation Education works closely with, and some from schools with other relationships. We just got a call from a teacher who wants to travel 6 hours into town to attend. The seminar will be from 8:30-4:30 every day, with breakfast and lunch. It has been interesting talking through positive behavior strategies and their reception by the schools. In the past, the primary strategy for discipline is flogging, both by the teachers and headmasters and only correct answers are praised if at all. Even as Transformation Education has provided other strategies for management, and flogging became illegal last year, teachers still regularly do it, though often it wasn't part of the discipline plan TE encouraged teachers to post. TE then encouraged teachers if they are going to flog, at least make it consistent as the most severe consequence and actually post it, rather than just giving the leadership and "westerners" the signs they want to see. (This made me think a lot of the processes and realities of globalization talked about in my Comparative Education class with Gita Steiner-Khamsi.) One of the schools, Modern, is ready to make a big transition. One of the themes of the workshop is "Caught You Being Good," and we are going to use various and consistent classroom management strategies throughout the entire seminar.
I am about to sit down and work through the 5 writing and 5 reading sessions for juniors (grades 3-5) teachers I will be presenting. I am sitting with a head teacher, teachers assistant, and teacher on Monday to discuss what would be beneficial and feasible for teachers to work towards in a setting where most reading is learned by copying down what a teacher has just written on the chalkboard, and then reading it in call and response style. I am excited about this conversation and the preparation of something useful to teachers. Though I have led reading, writing, and management workshops before, they have always been in an American context. I was afraid that I would be complete inept at transferring anything useful, but now that I have talked with the teachers here and will continue to collaborate with them in the preparation, I feel much better about being used as a tool to make this happen.

*Finally and concurrently, we are working out the logistics of the seminar too. So much is relational in this city. There are markets on every street and dozens of people lining every street walking with different items piled high on their heads, from fruit to snacks, to pants, to coal, to clean water. When asking Samuel about a caterer, he mentioned his sister caters. He called her and she came in at noon and she, Gwen, and I discussed what was desired, and she agreed to provide lunches for the week, but that drinks, and breakfast would be too much. Mr. Conte, Modern's head teacher, said he knew of someone who could probably do breakfast. We will get estimates for both of these by Tuesday. It makes me happy that the Davis money is not only going to support the teachers' development, but also supporting the local economy as well as we hire these business people. There is no "Yelp" to help us verify their success, so traditional word of mouth will have to do.

*Each day is full of new experiences and there are so many things about the society and city and people and organization I could write about, but there is not time for all of this. One thing is, presenters often have outfits of the same material made, so yesterday we selected fabric to be made into team outfits for about $8 per person. Internet and time have not been as plentiful as I had hoped, so this will have to do. I will post some pictures soon hopefully, but people are particular about getting their photos taken. "I am hungry, and you want to snap me?" one person said, as she thought I took a picture of her.

I am very glad to be here and am learning every day. Now it is time to work on the content of the workshops before the World Cup final tonight!

Also, did I mention it was rainy season? There have been 2 days when the rains haven't come till evening, but most days it has been heavy heavy heavy rain on and off all day. This has such implications for so many people here. It might also impact the seminar...if the weather is too bad, people won't leave home and taxis, the one form of transportation besides walking, (and chartered motorbikes) are impossible.