Service

I have not written about my service project in a while because I was pretty discouraged last week. We were having communication issues with our mentor and the whole process was moving very slowly. For those who don’t know, the main part of this semester abroad is our capstone project. At our service sites we must identify the needs of the site and implement a program that is ideally sustainable once we leave. I still do not know exactly what I want to do but after today, I feel back on track. Today we went to the school at the hospital, which is basically a big room with grades kindergarten up until grade 12. Everyone is at different learning levels, developmental levels, and speak different languages. The teacher must try to accommodate all grade levels at once with very little help. All of the children have TB and most are also infected with HIV/AIDS. Once we talked with the teacher, she sounded relieved to have some help and said we could tutor the students one on one to work on their reading. She also expressed a need for a math teacher. She is going to give us their curriculum so we can get some lesson plans together. There is very little funding for the school and if the teacher puts in a request for something, she usually gets a response somewhere along the lines of “we need to worry about their health before their education.” Many of the students are eager to learn and very bright kids. We also sat in on an occupational therapy session and a speech therapy session. Tomorrow we are going to meet with the preschool teachers. The preschool does not have a curriculum. The children are usually just playing or watching movies so we are going to see where we can help plan activities and lessons for the little ones as well.