What’s Goin On?

And now… the latest. My work has been keeping me out of the house and the internet café quite a bit lately. I just want to give a (relatively) short description as to why nothing seems to show up here lately.

School
I reduced my teaching load to accommodate these other projects I’ve been working on, and which I’ll delve into in a minute. I was teaching about thirty periods per week last year. This year I’m teaching only eighteen. I think this has been the triggering change that has solidified my previous feeling that I was not meant to be a teacher. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy it. There’s a lot that I do enjoy, and I think when I sit down and really plan a good lesson, class goes well (and I have fun). But the good times aren’t good enough to try and make a career out of it. It’s been a fun thing to visit, but I don’t think I want to make a life out of it.

I have followed most of my learners from the previous year (assuming they passed) so the good and the… um… challenging… are all the same. I’ve changed rooms twice now. Once to give a teacher who had a full load the bigger class, and then again when a new teacher arrived. I’m now full time in the lab where there are about fifteen stools and two desks to accommodate seating of forty one learners. It’s a well disciplined and perfectly organized class. It also snows regularly and magical pink elephants carry me around the room. (A sort of epilogue since I first wrote this post: I convinced my principal that we should get long boards to make benches out of the few stools. These are now in my class and things are improving slightly. I think it’s more of a classroom management problem i.e., I have no classroom management.)

I’ve been trying to get the chess and science clubs going again, but getting kids to show up to the meetings is proving to be like pulling teeth out of an angry hippo. If thirty sign up, ten don’t really want to but sign up with their friends, twelve have something else to do, and the other eight forget they signed up in the first place. If I’m lucky, three might show intentionally with a few more just because they are passing by. But by god, I will teach them how to play chess if they like it or not!

Not School
During the April to May school holiday, Peace Corps puts on Camp GLOW (Girls and Guys Leading Our World) for youth ages 14 to 16. The camp teaches team building, leadership, and life skills which are then taken back by the learners to, hopefully, be used at their schools. The camp is five days with a theme for each day. I’m helping with Team Building day this year which will consist mostly of games in a full day competition where the team who gets the most points by placing well in each of the races gets the prize. Though, we still don’t know what the prize is. The games are variations on things most people have had at some summer camp somewhere: passing people through the ‘spider web’, five people on planks stepping together to run a race, and other things that are essential skills to have in life. I mean, I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve had to throw someone through a netting of ropes without touching any of the sides! Many of the volunteers who help with the camp say it is the highlight of their PC experience so I’m excited. I’m helping to organize transport for six learners and myself from the far northwest down to Windhoek starting on the 27th. After that, its time for Fish River Canyon again, but I’ll talk about that another time.

Aside from the camp organizing, school, clubs and the battle at home, I’ve started to work with the local SCORE volunteer on a new and daunting task. In case you forgot, or I didn’t explain before (which is far more likely), SCORE is Sports Coaches out Reach program from South Africa but with volunteers from all over the world. Their term is one year where the volunteer is to develop sports in their community. In other words, they play games with kids. Sometimes I think I joined the wrong development organization.

The SCORE volunteer in Khorixas, Terje (tear-eh-yah), and I came across the old “whites only” club from back in the day, now known simply as the Community Hall. From the outside, the Community Hall looks like a big warehouse complete with broken windows and missing doors. Inside it has one large room with a stage at one end and what appears to be a DJ or film operator balcony at the other end. Behind the wall opposite the stage is a medium sized room that has a low ceiling held up by metal pillars. One of the pillars was knocked out and so the ceiling is now sort of half drooping on one side. These two rooms make up the southern two thirds of the building. The north side has a couple of rooms that could be used for offices, a kitchen missing ALL the possible fixtures, two restrooms with four stalls each, and even a snooker room complete with snooker table. For those who don’t have a busted apart snooker table and a Norwegian to explain what the heck snooker is, snooker is like pool played on a much larger table with much smaller balls and pockets. Everything in the hall that wasn’t nailed down, and most of the things that were, have been stolen. The snooker table stayed behind simply because it’s just way too big to move.

We went through the hall a couple of times to check out what work needs to be done and make a shopping list. Carefully avoiding the broken glass, trashed garbage (yes, it is possible), and piles of human excrement, we figured out that the place is in good working order and needs some cosmetic help. Okay, it needs a team of people working like mad to get to a point where a health inspector would even walk in the non-existent door. Not that there are health inspectors here to inspect buildings, but you get the idea. I’m optimistic, honest!

Outside the building to the west is a dried out pool which was rented out by someone else, who we haven’t been able to meet yet, but hopefully we can coordinate our efforts. South of the hall is a dirt patch big enough to easily accommodate two volley ball courts. North of the pool are a few sports courts which are in equally bad shape as the hall. A basket ball court exists but needs poles, hoops and some new lines. Two tennis courts sit beyond that, also missing nets, fences and poles. There’s a small badminton court next to the tennis courts also missing everything except the pavement. That seems to be the one thing we can rely on finding, the concrete foot print that sports once existed here. We’ve set up a volunteer guard at the site to make sure the ground doesn’t get stolen.

Our game plan is to apply for grants for the repairs on the hall and get a sports office established on the eastern half of the building where the medium room with the collapsing ceiling is since it still has burglar bars. Yes, our first step is to move into the room with the collapsing ceiling, you got a problem with that? That’s how we do it here! Of course we might have to get all that glass and poop off the floor first. So get the office established and donations from partner sports programs to get supplies for the sports areas. That’s the short(ish) term plan.

Terje leaves at the end of June and our goal is to have the hall clean with a team of Khorixas volunteers ready to continue working. Between the time he leaves in June and when the new SCORE volunteer arrives in August, I hope to get the office in place and have some funding secured so we can start to work on other things. By the time I leave, I want to have the supplies purchased and work started on the rest of the hall, along with a solid local volunteer base to work from. Then I can hand it off to the next volunteer so the whole thing can flop and lay dormant for five or six years. But again, I’m optimistic…