While we have been in Tanzania, our boys and I have been fortunate to be able to volunteer at two different orphanages. We went to Free Generation, which had been recommended by an HVO volunteer that was here a few years ago, and also to the Kili Centre, which was arranged by our KCMC coordinator. They were both great, but were very different experiences. For now, I’ll discuss Free Generation, and post on Kili Center another day.
I described the mission of Free Generation in a previous post, when Chase and I visited the first time. Since then, we’ve been back several times. As is universally true for pre-schoolers everywhere, these children were full of eager smiles, hand holding, and they absolutely loved having the attention of their visitors! We went in the mornings and stayed for around 2 1/2 hours. The director seemed to want us to lead our visit, which I wasn’t expecting. I was thinking it would be more like, “we need you to work on this with that child.” The arrangement that we hit upon which I felt most comfortable with was for my boys (ages 15 and 17) to play outside with the children, while I would take small groups inside to the classroom to work on different topics with them. I suggested this, and it seemed to be well received by the staff. Teaching is definitely a challenge when you don’t speak your students’ language, and have no materials!
Please let me preface this by saying that, while I LOVE kids—nothing makes me happier than interacting with A child (that’s singular, like, ONE), I trained as a pediatrician, NOT as a teacher! I have the utmost respect for teachers because they can do things I NEVER would even consider doing—they work with (and corral!) a whole GROUP of children—a whole COLLECTION of kids—AT THE SAME TIME!! Holy Smokes—that’s truly a miracle! I taught Ben, the director, a new phrase today, “herding cats” and “herding butterflies!” THAT is NOT my forte!! So, please keep that in mind as you read on 🙂
I do think that we were able to firmly establish (at least I hope!) the concept of “big versus little” (in English) with the older class of 3 and 4 year olds! I took a cardboard box that was filled with about a dozen pairs of leaves that I had picked from different plants in our yard—one of the pair was “BIG” and the other was “little.” (Very thankful for the abundance and variety of plants in our yard, and truly hope none were in the poison ivy family!) We then were able to apply the concept to rocks, people, shoes, hands, etc… They seemed to understand and have fun in the process.
I also did a counting game, that was suggested by my Mother-in-law, who was a preschool director. I put one to five pebbles in my closed hand. I would open my hand for the children to count and tell in (in English), how many rocks I had. Once they got this down, I would open my hand for them to glimpse the rocks, but then close it quickly. They thought that was hilarious! It took a bit for them to catch on, but this was another “no supplies needed” activity that was successful.
I also worked with just a few of the more advanced children individually—I used a deck of cards, pulling out the red numbers. I started by laying them down in order and asking the child what number it was. When I felt they understood what I wanted, I did some out of order, and they got most correct. Then I spread out both red cards of the 2,3, and 4’s and asked them to find both cards of the same number. When they understood that, then I added the higher numbers and started skipping around instead of just going in numerical order. “Where is the 5? Where is the OTHER 5?” Then I went back to just the 2,3, and 4’s and turned them face down so that they had to turn over the cards to find the pair (of course, I didn’t try to teach them the word “pair” in English—it was just “Find the 2. Find the other 2.” And by that time, they knew that there would be two of each number. We definitely couldn’t take it as far as the Memory Game, but I think it went well. I tried briefly to use both black and red and asked “Where was the black 3? Where is the red 3?” They didn’t seem to get that, so I stuck with just the red.
With the whole class, did some color work. I had a collection of different colored items from our house—bottle tops, jar lids, a piece of black duct tape, etc..— in my box. I would take out one, and they would tell me the color. Then I asked for examples of that same color around the room. They did well with that, but I don’t think I taught them anything—just reviewed.
They had an alphabet chart that we reviewed together, but again I wasn’t teaching them anything new there.
I tried to teach the Itsy Bitsy Spider—they enjoyed copying my hand motions, and tried to sing along, but had so idea of the English words.
Here is something that I think we did teach: My boys were awesome in the “playing outside” category! The center had a few soccer balls that we played with outside. The children seemed to know all about kicking, but didn’t seem to know about THROWING and CATCHING. That was a big hit, and they loved learning how to catch. By the end, they were having my boys throw a ball high into the air and they tried—generally without success, but with much laughter!—to catch it on its way down. They had two new balls that weren’t inflated and 3 others that had slow leaks, but their ball pump didn’t work. We had brought a pump and a ball with us from the States for our boys to play with. We brought the pump with us to Free Generation every day, to pump up the balls. On our last day, we left the pump and our ball with them. They are fortunate to have a playground with swings, a small slide, and a see-saw that was donated by the HVO volunteer’s family that was here in 2017. My boys spent quite a bit of time helping out on the see-saw!
What I learned:
It would have been so easy to have stopped in at the dollar store before we left, and bought a stack of crayons and coloring books! Or pencils and workbooks or just plain paper! I also could have brought some books for children learning English. Any of these would have helped me to be armed with an activity, and they could have kept the supplies. Also, if we had had supplies, my boys might have felt more comfortable “teaching,” instead of just “coaching.”
Look around for “teaching tools” that are in the house or the yard. I shied away from using any food items. I initially thought about taking in large ziti noodles and having them “string” a certain number of them onto a spaghetti noodle. I was very proud of myself for thinking of this, but then I remembered how little these children have, and thought it might be offensive to the teachers to use food for play.
Changing gears… Here are a few more general “being a non-tourist, quasi-Tanzanian resident” lessons I’ve learned:
—Even if you turn the eye on, it won’t heat up if you don’t turn on the “cooker” switch on the wall!
—Don’t even TRY to find an Tanzanian version of Dawn dishwashing detergent! It doesn’t exist! I stood on what was obviously the “soap/cleaning” aisle forever before I finally figured out that the product I was searching for was “Axion—the Grease Stripper!” It is in a tub (think margarine tub sized), and is a solid. We either rubbed it with a wet sponge to get some off or used the handle of a piece of silverware to shave some out onto the dirty dishes.
—Don’t EVER bring white socks to Tanzania! Just don’t! 🙂
—Always travel with a knife sharpener! We always do this, but somehow forgot to for this trip! Luckily, my boys brought pocket knives (even more luckily, they had sharpened them just for this trip!) and multi-tool knives (in their checked bags, of course!).
—Always travel with duct tape. You don’t have to bring a whole roll, just wrap a generous strip around something, such as a hiking pole.
—I brought a pair of scissors, that we’ve used frequently.
—Throw in a few rubber bands, twist ties, and/or clothespins for closing up food stuffs. For example, the bread comes in bags that are sealed with tape, which doesn’t facilitate resealing.
—Empty pasta sauce and olive jars make great Tupperware!
—Plastic bags are illegal in Tanzania (which I think is awesome)—punishable with a fine or up to 6 months in jail (not so awesome)! So, definitely no ziploc bags! (See above)
—We learned this trick from our cook at Moonhole on the island of Bequia: place a dish towel over your compost tub to keep the fruit flies out. Genius!! Our kitchen trash can in Tanzania was a small plastic bin with holes all up the sides and definitely no plastic trash bags (see above threat of jail!). As such, we put only “dry” trash in it, and put all our wet, compost trash in a box on the counter WITH the mandatory dish towel cover.
—As we all know, older houses that are frequently closed up (and don’t have A/C), can have musty smelling closets and drawers. After we went to the coffee plantation and bought coffee to take home, I put the bag in my closet. Next thing I knew my closet smelled awesome! At that point I remembered a very long ago conversation with a second cousin, who is a flight attendant. I learned that if a plane bathroom starts smelling especially bad, they will put a coffee filter out with ground coffee on it! My new observation and my remembered conversation led me to (cleverly, I thought!) put a bag of coffee in each of our closets! Who needs Febreeze when you have coffee?!
—Another great air freshener is dry shampoo. I’ve sprayed some on my clothes to refresh them between washings.
—There are frequent (generally brief) power outages. We brought our Luci inflatable solar lanterns. These are AMAZING! I think the inventor deserves a Noble prize for pure genius! Dr. Tree thinks everyone needs one. I think everyone needs more like six!! The “off-brands” work great, too!
OK, enough musings for now. It’s 6p, and Dr. Tree has just WhatsApp’d that he’s on is way home! WooHoo!! This has been his longest day, but it’s our last here, and he’s gotten to spend it in the OR. I’m sure he’ll blog about his day soon!