You Are Most Welcome

Monday was my first day of school in Uganda, and the week since has been exhausting, overwhelming, incredible and amazing.  On Monday we drove from our home in Kasese out 45 minutes into the foothills of the Rwenzori mountains, winding around on gravel roads until a tiny clearing appeared and we saw the Rwentutu Community School for the first time.  300 little children were eagerly waiting for us around their flagpole, and when we got out of the van they were absolutely giddy with excitement.  I have never had that many people or children watch my every move, and would soon learn that this would become the standard for the rest of the week.  Everywhere we go, we have "followers" that cling to us, walk by us, and do anything they can to be with us.  When we leave at 4:00, all of the children want high-fives or handshakes; we were laughing yesterday saying we felt like the Pope, reaching out our hands to touch as many franticly waving fingers as we can before getting in the van and going home.

On the first morning, the children had prepared a "Welcome Assembly" for us.  After receiving extremely grateful, heart-felt welcomes from each member of the teaching staff, we were seated in chairs in front of the student body.  With one student on the drums and the rest singing and dancing, we were entertained with several songs they had prepared for us to welcome them to their school.  The last song included the line "We shake shake shake, to welcome you!" repeated in the chorus, accompanied with a "shake" dance move.  After it had been repeated several times by the children, we decided to get out of our chairs and shake like the kids!  This sent them into fits of laughter, so we kept going with it and continued to shake, disco dance, rave-ball, air guitar…anything we could think of to keep the kids (and teachers!) laughing hysterically.  I loved that moment because I felt like it kind of broke our mold of being "the visitors" and showed them all that we were willing to become part of their community this summer and were definitely happy to be there.  Either that or it just made us look like fools…

 This is a typical scene at the end of the day --- a mob of students chasing us all the way to our van!

I was placed in a Primary 5 classroom this week, but will be rotating the rest of the summer so each week I will teach a new grade level.  There are 5 grades and 3 levels of Nursery school, but I will be sticking with Primary 1-5.  Jackie and Evan have the same type of rotation so all the children will have the opportunity to have each one of us as their teacher.  I was under the impression that the first day or two would consist mainly of observations, so I walked into my Primary 5 classroom after the Assembly on Monday and quietly sat down to observe their English lesson.  I had probably been sitting for 30 minutes, taking notes on how the teacher was going about teaching Active and Passive Verb Tenses, when all of a sudden he walked over to me with a huge smile, handed me the chalk, and exclaimed, "Now, please, you can teach us!!!"  "Me??" I asked, heart starting to pound as I was completely unprepared to teach any sort of lesson, "What do you want me to teach?"  "Anything that you want!" he said, eyes glowing and still smiling a mile-wide. 

And so began my summer of teaching at Rwentutu Community School.  Apparently the Ugandan teachers are so eager to learn from us, and hold us in such high regard, that they often request (at the last minute) that we teach lessons while they watch and learn with the students.  In only a few days, I have grown accustomed to learning that I will be teaching the next lesson approximately five minutes before class is to start.  This usually results in a frantic scan of the material from the Teacher Book, a quick glance at what students have in their notebooks, and an hour of teaching pretty much on the fly.  There is one book per grade for each subject, which belongs to the teacher, and the only other materials available are pencils and paper.  We are learning to be extremely creative in teaching with limited resources, and have also been able to negotiate at least some type of a teaching-schedule with the teachers so we can do our best to prepare material a day in advance!

The children are absolutely amazing.  I have never seen a group of happier kids in my entire life.  They have three "break times" throughout the school day, and Jackie, Evan, and I have out there playing with the kids the whole time.  We tried to teach them tag, but they still do not understand the concept that if you get tagged, you then become "it" and try to tag others, so it is basically a free-for-all with children running everywhere and Jackie, Evan and I trying to catch them, only to have them get up and continue running again after they have been tagged. We have taught them a few other games (I knew my years as a YMCA Day Camp counselor would come in handy someday!), but this is clearly their favorite.  They even came up with a name for it --- today during the first break we asked the children what they wanted to play, and they all replied, "We want to play 'Running'!"

Most of the older children speak English quite well, but the younger children are definitely still learning and only know a few phrases.  For example, our first day I saw a young one with a soccer ball.  "Wow, do you play soccer?" I asked him.  "I am fine, thank you," he replied with a smile.  My children in Primary 5 class, on the other hand, can read, write, and speak English just fine.  They enjoy hearing me talk because of my accent, and that is the only thing that has proved to be a little difficult when teaching.  I try to say things and then write words on the board as often as possible, because words like "heart, board, etc." sound different when I say them.  Names have also not been an issue because all of the children have American first names and Ugandan last names.  The only one that confused me was a little boy in the front row --- I asked him his name and he replied, "I am Robot."  "Robot?" I asked.  "Yes, Robot," he told me.  I couldn't believe someone would actually name their kid Robot, but I just went with it and called him Robot all day.  Finally, I glanced at his paper during work time and there, written on the cover, was his actual name: ROBERT.

And so, this week I have been teaching everything from English Grammar to The Circulatory System to Multiplication and Division of Fractions.  My "pizza method" for teaching fractions no longer works as a go-to model, as the students have never heard of or seen a pizza before.  They enjoyed saying the word, though, and I quickly switched my story problem from "Teacher Whitney has 4 pizzas and wants to cut each into five pieces" to "Teacher Whitney has 4 sticks of chalk and breaks each stick into 5 pieces.  How many pieces will she have at the end of the lesson?"  They loved this even more, because in my first two days I have already broken the chalk multiple times in a matter of minutes.  I guess that's what I get for growing up with white-boards and SMART boards!

Here are a few more pictures from our first week...

Our excuse for being late the first day --- cows in the road.

Just out for a nice walk when I bumped into the Equator!  Totally did not see that coming...not sure how I missed it.

Group photo

Evan, Jackie, and our taxi-van outside our home sweet home!