September 5th
Welcome to Science Camp! Being here
does have it's ups and downs, but overall is going really well. I do
think it's safe to say we have an excess of volunteers. Most of my
work is in bursts, a lesson, someone asking for me to go get
something, a meeting with my team of kids, supervising shower time,
but there's still a lot of down time (which can be very nice, but on
some days is just too much). Still, as people are getting sick it's
handy to have extra hands to take over. All of the other PCVs are
from the stage after mine, and I'm really enjoying getting to know so
many new people who are all so passionate about science and teaching!
The story that shouldn't have happened
but was funny in the end was trying to get to La Reunion the first
night I was in town. I thought I remembered it, out past where the
paved road ends, but Drew kept saying it was close enough to bike
with people on the racks of our bikes, so I assumed I was thinking of
a different restaurant. Turned out it was the same one, but due to
construction and our unwillingness to actually look and see if we
could get around or over the big pile of dirt we ended up going on a
wild detour a huge way out of the way. We waded through mud, biked
over washboard roads, and ended up having to pass our bikes and jump
over a 3 foot ditch from one re-bar-spiked cement ledge to another.
It was terrifying, it was unnecessary, but we made it and had beer
and alloco and frites and laughed and talked and it was good and
somehow worth it after the fact. :)
These women that Marlow and I are
working with for the health lessons – Esther and Gloria – are
simply amazing. Their title is “assistant sociale” and they not
only counsel students, but do health lessons at the school on all
kinds of topics. They've been doing it a while, Gloria mentioned 1996
as the time of one particular affectation. They've been all over –
villages, cities, North, South, East, doing stuff in schools on
family planning/prostitution/staying in school/early pregnancy, with
villages to teach on forced marriage/early marriage/excision/covered
wells/building latrines, etc. Gloria is doing another camp this week
as well, a “Camp for Success” where kids from middle school up to
university come and learn about how to do well in school and how to
get into a trade or become an entrepreneur. It has a strong religious
theme as well. They start at 5:30am and keep going until 8pm, which
just seems crazy to me. The two of them are currently employed at the
high school where we're doing the camp, which is how we ended up
working with them.
Yesterday we caught frogs for today's
dissection, but I didn't go watch, it seemed cruel somehow even
though I remember enjoying dissection in school. It rained today,
finally, really hard but only for a few hours. I've been eating way
too much gateaux, but it's just so tempting, especially since people
keep going to buy more several times a day! Otherwise I've been
keeping busy by talking to people, doing odd jobs like refilling hand
washing teapots, and working on my resume and DOS.
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