My Real Job

You would not know it from the most of the work that I have done and talked about so far, but the majority of my job here is supposed to be doing environmental education in the primary schools here. I was more interested in working in the community anyway and the slow start to the school year led to the schools not being a priority. However, I am finally getting to that part of my job.

I had mentioned that I finished repairing tables and benches at one of the primary schools and now I have finished at the other. Well that’s not exactly true, I did not actually repair most of the tables at Ecole 2, I sort of Tom Sawyered that out. When I went over there to look at what needed to be done, I realized that it was not making repairs but doing construction. At that point I said I needed someone to help me with it and the director knew a carpenter, that I had previously worked with, who was willing to help if he could have the left over wood (“left over” being used loosely). This was good news. What was better news is that the carpenter, Kaawi Ball, has a habit of not showing up when he says he will and when I am there, but then coming after I have left. Since he has the tools, this means that I waste a little time waiting for him, but he did almost all of the work by himself because he showed up when he felt like it. On the balance, I am more than alright with that. So that is done.

Since I am not repairing tables anymore I have had time to start integrating the environment into normal lessons, one of the three things we are supposed to do in the schools. The idea is that you take a normal rote lesson, could be math, grammar, or whatever, and make a small change so that part of the lesson talks about the environment. For example instead of calculating the benefit of selling a car you calculate the benefit of selling a tomato. The rest of the lesson stays the same and then at the very end the teacher spends a few minutes talking about what it takes to grow a tomato. That way the original objective of the lesson gets accomplished and the environment is also brought up. These integrations are very simple to do and since the school directors like me, I have their support for them. The problem is that with just a few minutes each time, it is hard to say much other than “trees are good.” One of the other things I am supposed to do is to create a school garden, but I do not see much point in creating a garden just to create a garden without an environmental education program that goes along with it. That leaves the third activity I am supposed to do which is also the one I am really excited about and I hope will bring all three of them together: Eco Clubs

The idea of the eco club is to do environmental games / science lessons with some students on the weekends. These could be coordinated with the integrated lessons and also be done at the same time as the garden. For those from home, it is sort of the same idea as the Selborne project that we did in middle school. Actually it is not sort of the same; it is the same because I will be using the same lessons. The reason that I have not started already is that to do these lessons, I need to translate them in French, something I am not very good at and something that did not really have me excited. At least that was the case until I realized that if I translated them well enough and put them into a book, that is the type of thing that I could give to teachers here and they could continue it after I am gone, not to mention that it would really help out all of the other EE volunteers here, and depending on copyright restrictions, in all French speaking countries that the Peace Corps works in. This is another one of those ideas that makes so much sense that I have to wonder if there is a good reason why it hasn’t been done before. So that will be by work immediately after Christmas, with the help of some friends translating 60+ environmental lessons into French.