Tonic. And Gin.

This has been a good week. It was always going to be (what with my birthday appearing mid week, and the Form Five students finally arriving at St Jude’s) but I am glad that it is now confirmed merriment, as it was just the tonic needed to keep my pecker up. I’ve had a great week at school; mainly because I’ve been teaching students and spending time working with the Sixth Form which, ultimately, is what I enjoy the most and why I love the fact that I am teacher. In spite of all of the rumblings of late at St Jude’s, I have always kept faith in the induction programme that Revocatus and I had planned. I have realised that, most likely, many elements won’t be replicated next year (as I just don’t think the staff here see the point of many of the activities I ran) but I always knew it would benefit the kids. And it has, and hopefully will do again during the second part next week.

From Teambuilding activities, to Dragon’s Den style challenges, it’s been a fun week. Add into the mix a gin and tonic with a zebra, a surprise party and a few cuddles with some adorable little babies, and you’ll understand why I’m feeling more chipper at the end of this week!

I started out on Monday with a visit to a local orphanage called Cradle of Love. It is a home for young babies, taking in up to forty under twos and housing them through parental crises, when parents have died or when they have been abandoned or abused in some way. It is an extraordinary little charity; started up ten years ago, with the aim of providing interim care for infants in need. Traditionally, in the local area, infants who were orphaned or abandoned usually stayed in hospital because there was no place to care for them. The hospitals here are understaffed, under resourced and overpopulated, so it does not take much to imagine the experience these children suffered.

I was incredibly surprised by how impressive the set-up was at Cradle of Love. Supplied with its funding by international donations, the orphanage has really good facilities for the babies; with one member of staff for every four babies.  They each have a cot, ample supplies of nappies and milk, clean clothes, warm water and toys to play with they are old enough.  I visited each of the four rooms within the building: the baby room, the crawlers, the wobblers (by far the cutest little collection of people!) and the toddlers.

Spending twenty minutes bottle-feeding little four week old Charles brought home just how tragic many of these babies’ lives have been already, before they themselves have even registered they are alive. His story goes that his mother asked a stranger at the local hospital to hold her baby while she went to the bathroom and she never came back. Charles is now alone.

Another baby in the room, little Gracie, was found down a toilet. Born several months prematurely, she is amazingly growing well and staying strong. Turns out she is the daughter of a young girl in a nearby village who either didn’t realise she was pregnant or was too terrified to tell anyone.  

Some of the babies in the first room were unbelievably tiny – many arriving into the orphanage when just a few days or weeks old.

There are a myriad of stories behind why so many babies find their way into this baby home and others like it. Many are from homes where the family simply cannot cope – either they need time to make money, find provisions and create stability to provide for a child, or they simply have been left partner-less (through death of the mother) and are in need of help. In Tanzania, ten percent of the adult population is affected by AIDS. Since HIV is accelerated by pregnancy, many women die from AIDS leaving a nursing infant with no one to provide adequate nutrition or care. The home provides that care; often acting as a half-way house for these young babies whilst the fathers get themselves back on their feet.

However many children here move on after a few years to a nearby children’s home, hoping for adoption. Many never find that family and remain in care until they are old enough to fend for themselves. As sad as the history of these babies is, it is a beautiful place for them to spend these few months or years, being loved and tended for, and it felt a very sacred and special place to spend a day. I hope to be spending a bit more of my time helping here before I leave.

The rest of my week has been busy, busy, busy, with the arrival of the A-level students. I have had a great few days with them; they are a lovely bunch of students, all excited to be back at school and all ready for the challenge ahead. It has been fascinating getting to know them. They all come from incredibly difficult and impoverished backgrounds; many spending the past few months since they sat their Form Four exams working in various jobs to provide money for the family. Many of the students are in their twenties, having started school ten years ago when they were already over ten years old. That said, they are wise young souls and have already lived through a great deal. I have felt very honoured to be able to spend time working with them and learning about their lives this week.

We started the week with a teambuilding day (always one of my favourite days when I worked at Emanuel) with the students engaged in a range of activities that I designed to test their communication skills, their leadership abilities and their teamwork. Working in teams of ten, they rotated around the various activities; competing against each other in time challenges. There were eight challenges in total: the Egg Baby challenge (whereby they all had to keep their “egg baby” alive all day). 

For the Rope Challenge, they were all blindfolded and had to make a perfect square out of a piece of rope.

In the Building Block challenge, one student was positioned behind a screen with a picture made up of coloured building blocks and had to describe it to the other members of the team (hidden the other side of the screen) who then had to rebuild the picture.

For the Armless Challenge, the students were put into a room with a photograph on the wall of a table laid for dinner. They then had to try to recreate the picture using the props in the room – but had to do so whilst all holding hands in a circle. Highly amusing (especially the group who managed to lay the entire table using their teeth!)

One of my favourite games was the Sweet Silent Maze. For this, the team had to blindfold one member of the group, and then guide them around a maze I’d built out of tables and chairs, with sweets hidden around the room. The challenge lay in the fact that the team were not allowed to speak when guiding their blinded friend towards the booty; they instead had to devise a series of non-spoken signals (e.g. cough for straight on, sneeze for turn left, stamp your foot for bend down and grab the sweet!) Very, very funny to watch!

The final games were a One-legged cup challenge, where they had to retrieve ten cups of water onto a tray without spilling, but only standing on one leg and using one hand:

the Egg Parachute challenge, where they had five minutes to build a parachute for their egg, and then launch it off a balcony to its smashing demise (or not as their cases proved - some genius inventions!)

The final challenge required each team to race across Shark Infested Water, using equipment that they had bid Monopoly money on earlier in the day (some successful teams using their money wisely and gaining a newspaper or a collection of paper plates; others being left with a single saucepan or a tea-towel). Again, highly amusing as a photographing spectator!

It was a great day – the kids all really enjoyed it and, I hope, gained a great deal from doing something they’ve never had to do before. The sad thing for me was that Revocatus, the Head of Sixth Form, did not attend: whether this was a silent show of his disapproval of such activities (even though he sat and planned them with me) or he just didn’t want to come, I don’t know. He has not given me a clear reason why which is all part of the bigger picture of what has happened here. Hey ho. But, the students had fun and learned a great deal – they have never before been asked to do such activities, never been asked to work together in teams like this and all had big smiles on their faces for the entire day. If nothing else, that’s my consolation for the teachers’ absence.

The rest of the week has been a combination of induction A-level lessons, study skills sessions and P.E challenges. In the P.E. lesson I led the kids in a creative activity, designing new sports. Yes, you read that right, Musson taught P.E!!! I even had a whistle round my neck which I blew with proficiency and a mild semblance of sporting authority! The year group was split into four teams; each group given three pieces of P.E. equipment (eg. a cricket bat, a hoola hoop and a basketball) and they had to devise a new sport. Although this sort of challenge was totally alien to the students, having never been asked to think creatively in any educational context before, they all rose to the challenge and I was incredibly impressed with the results.

Although none of the creations are quite worthy of entering the next Olympics, they were genius in their germination: Four-Three Ball; Gloveit, Three-Pass and Wobble Get being the morning’s creations. The best one had to be Wobble-Get; a game involving one team member from each team being tied up with a skipping rope and sent out onto the court, which is scattered with juggling balls. The “wobbler” then stands with their backs to the team members and tries to pick up as many balls as their wobbling selves can “get” in the time. They then lob the balls over their heads to their team mates who, when catching them, throw them to the back-stop who catches them in their Frisbee! Utter genius. Sadly I was so busy rolling about laughing watching this creation that I completely forgot to take any pictures. Luckily I’ve scheduled another P.E. session next week for all of the kids to try out each new sport, so photographic gems will follow. For now, I’ll put a few of the other snaps of the other sports-extravanganza up for looks.

On Thursday, I turned 34. Blimey. However, not only did I have a fun morning delivering a Study Skills session to the students, I then headed out after work for a drink with the other volunteers at a nearby park with zebra, colubus monkeys and ostrich…not a bad audience to share a birthday with!

When we got back home, I walked into the communal kitchen to a surprise party, complete with mojitos, Thai curry and chocolate brownies! Amazing! A really, really lovely day (even though it did leave me with a wee headache the next day from those pesky minty-cocktails – ouch!)

All in all, a great week. And I hope this week will be too, as I’m working again with the Form Five students for most of it. My sadness looms in the background as I see how little interest the staff are taking in any of the “extra” activities, and, after next week, the students will not be given any enrichment again. I’ve tried to encourage the staff to see the importance of learning these soft skills; of enhancing their curriculum with this level of enrichment, but they keep coming back to the fact that there is no room in the curriculum for them and no time (in the next two years) for such work. I keep remembering those smiles I’ve seen this week, and just hope that some of the staff can see the rewards.

However, I have been warmed by the fact that the Headmaster has asked me to deliver my study skills lesson to the entire school. He happened to come up to the classroom when I was taking the session on Thursday, and ended up sitting listening to me for twenty minutes or so. He then talked to me afterwards about the content of the session, read through my material and stated emphatically that it was incredibly important that I taught the whole school how to study and must do it straight away as none of them had ever been taught this before! Luckily I’ve managed to talk him out of the idea of me simply giving a lecture to all 700 students in one go; we’re now in the process of arranging time slots for each of the year groups and breaking them down into smaller, more manageable audiences. At least a little bit of useful and practical knowledge can be passed on to these kids and teachers before I leave that will, hopefully, help them on their journey through the crazy curriculum that lies ahead.

Tomorrow I’m visiting another local orphanage (one I hope to be able to spend some time working in) and then whipping up a vat of sangria for the leaving meal for two of my fellow volunteers. We’re dropping like flies here, now that the education volunteer roles have all become fruitless. Sad when you’ve got ten teachers who’ve all given up their lives back home to come and volunteer their time and skills in what they thought were needed jobs. Just goes to show how hard it is to really know what is useful. At least this week has provided some tonic: for those students coming back to school and being able to start their next challenge with a smile on their faces, for myself realising that not everything I’ve been working on of late has been fruitless and for my glass of gin sipped whilst watching a herd of zebra silently roam the fields beside me as I turned thirty four…