Shelley in Guyana: 3 months!

The past few weeks have been busy at work! The first week back after the holidays was a short one with 2 public holidays! Labour Day and Indian arrival day. For the second one we went to Highbury which is an hour down the East Bank. It is the first place the East Indians arrived when they came 173 years ago. We sat with 2000 other people in a large wooden building watching a programme of dancing, singing and information about the journey from East Indian to here. We were given traditional food afterwards. We got a lift back with a nice couple – I was a bit worried about how we were going to get back as the sugar trucks they had put on for transport were full!

A couple of months ago I applied to VSO for a small grant to buy some books for a reading project here. The hope is that we will train up parents who will come in and hear children read individually twice per week at school. There is a charity called the Guyana Book Foundation which sells really lovely reading books which are appropriately levelled and culturally relevant at a reduced price. With the grant, I purchased enough books for 4 schools. This week we went into the first school and tested all the children in Grade 3 and 4 on their phonics knowledge, word recognition and comprehension. We then sorted them into two groups – one to be heard read and the other as a control group. In the afternoon we did a workshop for the parents, teaching them how to read with the children, giving them strategies for decoding and questions to ask. They will now hear those selected children at least twice per week. At the end of the term we will go back and test all the children to hopefully prove the project worked. Then (and I have to find funding first) we would like to roll this out to other schools. The parents seem really keen to start the programme and hopefully it will have a positive impact not only on the children in the reading project, but their children too, plus it will help build relationships between the school and community.

I ran my first full days workshop for the Literacy Professional development course. The first module was on teaching reading through phonics. I had 11 out of the 16 people turn up (I am investigating where the others were!!) plus a few other teachers and peace corp. volunteers who were interested in learning about phonics. The course went well, there are things that I would do differently next time but the participants seemed to get a lot out of it. I will now spend the rest of the term supporting them with their assignments and going in to observe them teaching. At the end of the course they will be trained literacy resource people who can be used within the region to support others.

I have also been to cluster meetings and run workshops on reading comprehension and writing composition – being given objects like

“Teach the 6 different types of writing composition for grades 1 – 6 in an hour” – just a small ask then!

Those VSO dimensions of flexibility and adaptability are coming in use this week with meetings being changed, then changed back and only knowing what is going on a few hours before! Also I have been asked to do a workshop on something and then that has changed when I arrive – a lot of thinking on my feet!

For the weekend we went to White-water which is an Island in the Essequibo River. A beautiful peaceful place with white sand – though still brown water! We had a relaxing weekend of swimming and reading on the beach. The water had piranha in it which some people caught fishing about 20 m away from where we were swimming – we were told it is fine to swim as long as you dint have open wounds! I would like to point out how brave I am becoming here!!

I past the three month mark which was a great milestone to reach! I have found the past few weeks a bit tougher but I guess some of the novelty of life here has worn off but next week I am going to Barbados for the week (it is very close to here). While I am very excited about hot water, ac, Italian food, the beach, no cockroaches, not sleeping under a mosquito net – the thing I am the most excited about is seeing a friend from home – cannot wait!

The weather is starting to turn here and I think we are going back into rainy season! There are two dry and two rainy seasons per year. It rained all last night and all today. I went home at lunchtime and had to wade through water up to my knees! It is very close to the door – luckily it has stopped raining so hopefully the water level can go down before we get any more!

Finally a lot of people ask about the cockroaches – I obviously talked about them a lot at the beginning – they are still here though in a lesser number due to some powder I have put down – I find quite a few dead ones and some that are alive too – but they bother me less. I did have a HUGH black spider to deal with the other night which was horrible as I HATE spiders – give me cockroaches any day!