CBT in Outjo

Today marks the beginning of my last weekend in Outjo, so I figured I should give some details about my life here! Last time I updated I talked mostly about irregularities in my schedule, so today I will talk about the excitement of my daily life. Usually, I worry that these sorts of posts are a little dull, but I love my day to day life so much, I really want to talk about it.

As I mentioned last time, I get up around 4:30 every morning so I can be ready to leave at 6:00 and be at school by 6:40. When I leave the house each morning, it’s still dark and the stars are still shining overhead. I usually don’t see anyone until I get out of my neighborhood and into town. As long as there’s not a ton of people, I try to greet everyone I pass, which is a bit thing here. None of us have quite figured out the procedure for when to greet and when not to, so we usually try to greet as often as possible. People seem to really like that. With adults, I always great them in Khoekhoegowab, students I always greet in English since I’m supposed to be an English teacher. When you greet someone in Khoekhoe, it usually goes like this (for mornings):

Me: Moro moro!

Them: Moro moro!! Matisa?
Me: !Gâi ge a! Aitsama mî re?
Them: !Gâi ge a!

And at some point they have started smiling a lot because a white person is bothering to learn their language. Knowing local language earns you huge brownie points, which is probably part of the reason that Peace Corps is so popular here compared to other volunteer organizations. Lately a lot of people have been asking me “Mapa du ra ī?” or “Mapa du ra hâ?” The first means “Where are you going?” the second means “Where are you staying?” I usually get the first one, for which I know to respond either “Maarseen skoli //kha,” or “dorb //kha”. Occasionally I get the second, which once I accidentally responded “Maarseen skoli //kha,” which means “to Maarseen School,” instead of “dorp !nâ” which is “in town.” Sadly, I haven’t been getting a lot of language practice besides that. Everyone here speaks English very well, except the occasional white person, who then usually speaks German (of which I have enough of a basic understanding to speak to them in German). Naturally, I speak Japanese with the Japanese volunteers.

At school, I usually teach one or two classes a day. If I co-teach, I might get four or five. Before we had worked out a solid plan for teaching, I could end up teaching surprise classes, but this week we made clear outlines so all the 5^th and 6^th grade English classes would be taught by volunteers. For our last week I will only be teaching 5^th grade English, which is awesome because we are reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and they kids LOVE it. We usually read a chapter or two a day and then use words from the text to build their vocabulary. We are trying to implement a Word Wall in the room, where vocab words are posted alphabetically for students to see throughout the day. This is a great learning and teaching tool because it not only lets students constantly have access to words, but it also allows for a lot of activities for us to do. For example, last week Andrew and I led a game called Guess My Word Wall Word. First, Andrew and I each picked a word for students to guess. Then they would ask us questions like “is it a verb/noun/adj?” “How big is it?” “What color is it?” and so on and so on. Sometimes the kids get a little out of hand. There is one of the 5^th grade classes that every teacher agrees is the worst class. There are almost 40 learners, most of whom have strong personalities. They are all really smart, though, which makes it even more frustrating. On Fridays, however, everyone is a little rowdy. I taught last period on Friday this week and it was horrible. I’ve never had so much trouble keeping control of a class, and it wasn’t even the naughty one!

I’ll end with a little bit about my school. As you may notice from the pictures, my school is really green. As far as low income schools go here, mine is really amazing. It was built because there were so many young kids roaming about the Location with nowhere to go. The school is run incredibly well, something else we have found is really rare for schools that we will be working at. A lot of the staff really care about the kids. A lot of money went into making the school environment beautiful in an attempt to make students more interested in coming. We have a nice garden and pretty green buildings because of that. The first grade classrooms are covered in learning material to engage the children where many schools have bare walls. One of the kindergarten teachers spends her own money and petitions organizations in the community to donate resources to the school. Still, students are extremely poor. They can’t afford their own books and pens, so the school provides for them. Some of them can’t eat at home, so they also can get food after school. A lot of the kids, we found out, are not Damara (the dominant ethnic population in town) but San (more commonly known as Bushmen). The San people are one of two groups that still live semi-nomadic lives, the other being the Ovahimba. The students at my school are mostly recently settled San people. I haven’t gotten to talk to them about it and probably won’t, but the teachers say that one reason for the low performance or general problems at school is because a lot of the parents don’t value education. Though the staff and teachers are definitely not without problems, I really appreciate how much some of them do care.