Each sector of Peace Corps must have a practicum during training. For education, this means two weeks in model school (health and environment do practicums in which they give a 30-minute presentation in whichever language they’re learning. On one hand, this is harder because all of our education work is done in English. On the other hand, they only have to do this for 30 minutes once whereas we spend two weeks presenting daily and being observed).
We were assigned to a form (US equivalent=grade) where we were observed by our peers, Malawian teachers, and our Peace Corps supervisors. I was assigned to Form 1 for the first week and Form 2 for the second week. Week one mainly focused on literature whereas week two mainly focused on grammar. I much preferred teaching grammar, which was somewhat surprising to me. Form 1 is assigned extremely difficult literature for the level of English they have upon going in and it’s difficult to teach literature when you can’t really discuss it. In addition, many schools lack the amount of books necessary to really facilitate learning. It’s hard to assign literature homework when you have 5 books and 40 students. It’s even hard just to get through the story What we ended up doing each day was splitting the students into groups and giving each group a copy of the book. This still isn’t an ideal learning environment, however.
Many people did fun games and activities, trying out things we’d learned in training or things that we had heard about from other volunteers. Some things worked, some didn’t. Sometimes we overplanned and sometimes we underplanned.
The first thing that Malawian students do when you address them is stand up and greet you in robotic unison.
Me: “Good morning, class.”
Students in unison: “GOOD MORNING, MADAM.”
Me: “How are you?”
Students: “WE ARE FINE AND HOW ARE YOU?”
Me: “I am also fine, thank you. You may sit.”
Students: “THANK YOU, MADAM.”
Also, anytime a student speaks in class, they are required to stand up. Respect culture (or power distance) is a big deal here and this includes the classroom.
Throughout the week I went into the head teacher’s (US equivalent=principal) just to chat with the other teachers and attempt to practice my Chichewa. The head teacher was away but the deputy (US equivalent=vice principal) was there running things. One of the teachers there who taught Bible Knowledge (Bible Knowledge is an elective in government-run schools here; the Christian past and present of Malawi is present within the education system) chatted with me and discovered that I was raised Cathodic. We had a lot to chat about then and he and some of the other teachers began describing the various churches in Malawi to me.
On the last day of model school, there was an assembly, sort of a farewell to all of us. The kids who came to model school came after the school year had technically ended and so people wanted to appreciate them as well. The EDM (US equivalent=…not really sure. Important bureaucratic government person in the education department?), the person who manages all of the schools in the division our training was in, came and was the guest of honor. Before we began, the teacher I had chatted with the previous day came up to me and told me, “Hannah, I would like you to pray at the beginning of the ceremony.” My well-thought-out and thorough response was “Uhhhhhh…” People pray before pretty much every ceremony or event here, but I felt strange about doing it because Christians are a fairly small minority in the education sector and I felt weird about it. I asked him if I could do it in Chichewa instead of English (all school functions in Malawi are done English, and English is the language of communication in the classroom, except for one subject—Chichewa), and he told me I could. I really just didn’t want to draw attention to myself among my friends or have anyone question why I said this or what prompted me to pray that. So, I prayed in Chichewa (also because the prayer was more for the PTA and community members who were there who may not have understood English, rather than for us), and sat down.
Then we saw some students do a song for us in which the words were: “We are saying goodbye to you, we are saying goodbye to you. Goodbye, goodbye, our dear teachers. We are so sorry for to part with you. May the Lord be with you, be with you to meet again.” In the middle of it, some of the students started shouting some of our names aloud. We all laughed and were touched.
There was a skit which two boys acted out. They called it “Education is the Key to Success.” It was essentially two boys arguing about whether or not they should go to school. Then it flashed forward to 7 years later and the one who had chosen to go to school met the one who hadn’t. The one who went to school was driving a car and the other one was walking. The pretty obvious moral was that life is better with an education.
A girl read a poem that she had written about being able and empowered to be educated despite being a girl.
A representative from our group of teachers got up and read a speech that was largely directed at encouraging the students and admitting to them that although we came to teach them, we had also learned from them.
In the middle of other things happening the MP (Member of Parliament; US equivalent: representative) for the area arrived and she was given the opportunity to speak. She spoke for a while and the assistant to the TA (Traditional Authority; no US equivalent, basically the chief of all the other chiefs in the area) spoke. He spoke for a while in Chichewa, and requested that one of us be placed at the secondary school we had just done model school at.
Our Training Director spoke for a while as well, giving his own speech twice, once in English and Chichewa.
If all this sounds long, that’s because it is. Everything like this in Malawi always takes forever. For one thing, there’s the cultural concept of time. As my Head Teacher has said, “time is always on our side.” People come when they want to come. People are more important than time (quite the opposite in the US), so if you see someone on the road, you should stop what you’re doing and greet them, even if it makes you late. In addition, there’s the power distance thing. Every time all of the people I’ve just mentioned above spoke, they had to begin with: “Moni nonse, zikomo kwambiri, ulemu kwa TA, ulemu kwa MP, ulemu kwa EDM, ulemu kwa Peace Corps, ulemu kwa PTA, ulemu kwa…and so on.” This basically means “Hello all, thanks very much, respect to this person, respect to that person, respect to this group, etc.” Sometimes people even pause to say something or give compliments about each person or group, which adds to the time. Occasionally the speaker will just become tired and say “basi [US equivalent: enough], all protocol observed,” in case they’ve forgotten to mention anyone.
Finally, by the time the guest of honor (in our case the EDM) gets up to speak, everyone is exhausted and the guest of honor usually doesn’t speak a long time. However, the first thing the EDM said when he got up this time was, “I would like to thank the teacher who prayed for us in the beginning.” Immediately all eyes shot towards me and some suppressed giggles began among my friends as well as myself. Slight embarrassment and humor, but I thought the moment would pass. But he then went on to say, “She prayed in Chichewa! I would like to shake her hand.” So I then got up and shook his hand in front of the whole assembly.
The situation was funny, I’ll admit. Especially the irony of the fact that the whole reason I prayed in Chichewa was to avoid attention, and the only reason I got attention was because I prayed in Chichewa. People are so shocked when we know Chichewa. Peace Corps pushes it so hard, but it seems like no NGO or development organization here does, at least not to the same degree. People here encounter Americans or other Westerners all the time and they never know the language, not even the greetings. Malawi is an easy country to get by with that, because the national language is English. So someone, somewhere, will speak English. But not everyone. And not the everyday people. Typically, it’s people with power that speak English. And if you can only speak to one person out of the whole village, then you’re by default getting a biased viewpoint of life in the village. I’m glad we learn the local languages. It helps us immensely with integration. It’s just crazy to me that we expect an entire country to learn our language, but people come here so often without even learning the basics of the local language that many people here are shocked when you say something as simple as “Muli bwanji?”
Okay, so this blog actually had very little to do with model school itself. Maybe I’ll talk more about what Malawian education is like in the future. After all, I have two years to get accustomed to and learn about it.