Monday at School

We were at school by 7:45 am this morning for an assembly. It was nothing like the assemblies Joy is used to. The boys and girls stood outside in rows....boys on one side and girls on the other.
Phylis, a teacher at Eastleigh, was in charge and spoke in Swahili for approx. 5 minutes and then the children saw a song, one student prayed and then it was over. Mass exit then ensued with students running to their classes.
Don had a great day. He was with a teacher named Washington. Don was quite impressed with Washington and enjoyed teaching along side of him. Don taught one Swahili class, 2 social studies classes and one English class. Did Don miss his calling? !!!! What impressed Don, the most, was the way that Washington interacted with his class. His love of teaching and his students was very noticeable.
Washington is a young man who lives on his own in Eastleigh, in 1 room smaller than any bedroom that we have seen in Toronto. After working all day, he goes out into the neighbourhood helping street kids.
Joy also had an interesting day. She spent her time with a teacher named Mary. Mary was a good teacher. This is review time, before the students exams, and so the English Classes and Christian Religion Classes Joy attended were all review.....straight from copies of last year's exams. Joy was also able to interact with the students and used some of her class management skills with them. The teachers usually raise their voices to get above the classroom noise in order to get the children's attention and thus it just gets noisier and noisier. Joy also noticed that the children had to share pencils!
We were both able to visit the library, independently of each other. We both left with the same reaction. We were dumbfounded at the lack of books or anything else there. World encyclopedias were dated 1991; nonfiction books were generally published in the 90's and therefore any information was dated or obsolete. There were no story books to be seen. One cubicle held very ragged and torn novels.....pages were brown.....they would have been tossed out years ago in Ontario. It was a very sad sight. The man in charge was quite pleased with the way he had organized it...and it was organized....but we found it very hard to find positive things to say about the materials in the library.
Today, we had the pleasure of presenting soccer balls to the kindergarten class and the grade 1-7 students. All the students, regardless of age, were absolutely thrilled! The older students put on a show for us. The girls played first and then the boys. They are very skilled soccer players. One young male student was chosen to play for the city team and played in Belgium this past summer. What an experience that must have been for him.
We also brought pylons, which replaced the stones that they usually use for goalposts.
We are sensing that one of this issues that we will be focussing on when we lead the teachers on professional development days will be classroom management and discipline. They still are struggling with the fact that using the stick is no longer an acceptable method of discipline even though some of them still carry it around.
All in all, it was a great day. Please pray for the staff there. We are still feeling some resistance from them when we are in the staff room. The teachers that we have worked with are quite comfortable with us now, but those we haven't worked with still seem aloof. We feel that they still aren't sure what our role is at Eastleigh.
By the way, weather here is sunny and hot! NO SNOW!!