First Days at School

It’s not as nerve-racking as when we started in Georgia but it is still a bit scary.  First days are like that.  It had been raining heavily the night before and I mean heavily.  Admittedly the roof of our hotel sounds like it is made of corrugated iron but I was awake at 2 when it started until 4 when it finished.  What happens in Ethiopia is that when it rains people just don’t go out so we had about 15 in the morning school (lessons from 8:30 till 10:00) but unfortunately the later session (10:30 till 12:00) was cancelled as the playground was flooded!  For some reason we were crammed into a small classroom.  That is 10 children, 3 volunteers, my sister and 4 teachers plus a parent or two at one point!  We just played and got to know them a bit so that they would feel comfortable around us.  They are a lovely friendly bunch and very open and cheerful.

We enjoyed the break time and played “What’s the time Mr Wolf?” much to the delight of the children and then they started to play some of their own singing games in their own language.  We had been asked to prompt some activities in break time as the teachers tend to leave the children to their own devices so it was nice to see that the children were having a good time.  Martin and Fran joined the circle and played along which was pretty funny.  I just took pictures!

Teaching us old dogs new tricks

They really enjoyed this!

Martin looking cute

Martin looking ready to have a heart attack

Martin relaxed and happy having survived

There were more children the next day with around 20 for the first session but there were only about 10 for the later session at the other school (10:30 till 12:00).  Twenty minutes before the end of the first session, another 8 children turned up.  One of these didn’t like the look of us and cried and cried!  I think it was also because he wanted to go home as well! It was just a bit chaotic!  This was in the nursery class so you can imagine the noise!  Me and Martin did that class together and what we assumed was the advanced class, was taught by the other volunteer Fran.  However, in our debrief over lunch we found out the advanced class were a bit of a mixed bunch and they didn’t all know the alphabet phonetically.  We were pretty worn out as well as we did a lot of singing and jumping (the 2 are often intrinsically entwined) and some alphabet and number work; but the exhaustion was more about being around so many small children at once haha!

Today we had 15 in the nursery, one class of grade 1 with 8 students, one class of grade 2 with 10 students and a “language-only” class of 8 students.  The other students have a session of English with us then after the break have a session of maths, science and Amharic after.  Apparently we need to provide extra work for this group for when we are not there.

We are trying to be as relaxed as possible about this as it has been said that it will be like this for the first week and then it will be clearer how many and at what level the students are so we are thinking about how to find out and bring up any students who are unsure of the phonetic alphabet, colours and numbers and then look to push any advanced students.  Not all the students at the summer school actually attend the school during the year and so may be at different levels.  So we will see. 

But we are really enjoying it!