Teaching...

I think the two crowd favorites, out of all the public health lectures we have done so far, were the personal hygiene skit and the gatteux skit.  The personal hygiene skit was aimed to portray how germs spread. It was about a family that didn't wash their hands and all became very sick.  The best part was when Zach, who was the father, got explosive diarrhea and ran to the squat pot. (A squat pot is a pit toilet...it's basically a hole in the ground. Nasaras don't usually use them). 

The gatteux skit was for the family planning lecture. We wanted to emphasis that it is best to space out your children. They need to wait at least two years between each child so they can better prepare and provide for each little kid that joins the family. In this skit there was a family with a hard working mother.  The first part of the skit the mother didn't space out her children and they all got sick.  She had to use the little money she made on medicine. With the money she had left after getting medicine, she could only buy two gatteux. (Gatteux are like little donuts). Tchadian custom is to serve the husband first.  He greedily ate one whole gatteux. We had on of the Bere boys play the role of the father and he had to stuff the whole gatteux in his mouth.  The crowd loved it. Then we showed how malnutrition and other health issues affected the family. Of course we ended on a happy note, showing how spacing and family planning can help prevent some of these problems.  

Another aspect of the family planning lecture was the use of contraceptives. We talked about all the options we provided for free at the hospital, followed by a special activity.  We had them practice the proper way of using a condom. (The bananas aren't big enough here, so we used an American style cucumber. We weren't able to eat cucumbers for a week after this lecture).

I was in charge of preparing the props and prizes for the lecture.  While I was running around the hospital collecting what was needed, Benzaki, the head public health worker in the hospital, stopped me. He handed me a box full of condoms and said to pass them out during the lecture.  If I was done running around the hospital, this wouldn't have been a problem. Too bad I wasn't though.  For the next hour I walked around the hospital with an open box of condoms (it didn't have a lid!).  I was already getting looks for being a nasara, but it got worse with the box. All the Tchadian men were trying to look in the box. Once they realized what I was holding it spread like wildfire. The men who knew a little English tried to talk to me and were a little too friendly. I was so embarrassed! I just told them to come to my lecture and they would find out why I had so many condoms. Back at the demonstration, the Tchadian men loved showing how much they knew about condoms. They were cracking jokes left and right during the condom activity. I'm glad they actually learned a lot from the lecture too.

__________________

Teaching English has been a lot of fun. Well, it was fun for the first two weeks.  By week two it was time for me to teach the sixth graders for the first time. I started with the basics to assess what they knew and what they needed to learn. Like the classes before, I started simply with the alphabet. The class knew almost all of the letters, so I decided to move on for the day.  The teacher stopped me from erasing the letters off of the board.  I was confused. He started to speak to me in French asking me to do something with the alphabet.  After a while, I realized he was asking me to write the phonics under each letter. He wanted the kids to write them down so they can study it later.  

I tried to tell him I didn't know French phonics, but he wouldn't listen. He kept saying that it was the same as English phonics. I gave up and wrote the English phonics. (Let's be real. I wrote random letters down). The teacher told me that I was wrong and erased it. Once again I told the teacher I didn't know and tried handing him the chalk. He wouldn't take it! I tried writing the phonics three other times, and was told each time that they were all wrong. Finally, the teacher took the chalk and showed me how to write the phonic for the letter A. (He wanted all the accents and stuff that we don't use in English). Based on his example I was able to guess B, C, and D.

While I was writing the phonics for those letters the teacher left! I didn't know what to do. I looked at the kids, looked at the board, then looked outside. The kids had so much fun laughing at me. I didn't know what to do. I looked at the board, then looked at the students once again. I handed one of the kids the chalk and said the letter he needed to write the phonic for. That at least kept their attention. Now every child wanted the chance to write on the board and now it took us half an hour to agree on the phonetics for each letter. We stayed each letter until everyone agreed it was right, only then moving on to the next one. 

Once we finished the alphabet I tried review numbers with them, but the children were too rowdy. They were confident they knew all the numbers just like the alphabet.  Turns out they were solid on numbers one through twenty, but had to be reminded of the rest.  To try and grasp their attention again I started writing larger numbers.  They were stumped.  They know tens, hundreds and thousands, but if I wrote 395 on the board they didn't know the answer. I don't know what to teach them next time, and I don't really want to teach them again.  But you've got to do what you've got to do.