Today was my first day volunteering at a school here in Zanzibar. The school is a private primary school and the lessons are taught in English (except of course Kiswahili, which is taught in Kiswahili). The children are very well behaved and most really do try hard to work. I taught/helped teach an English class and also helped some students with their preparations for Africa Day – a day where the kids perform African dances, plays and have a fashion show to model some African clothes. The kids were so happy to have a new person around and were not at all shy to approach me and ask me questions about myself, as well as asking me for help with their work. I think it’s really cute, how the kids call me “Miss Teacher” (they do this with all teachers), and the staff address each other with “Teacher So-and-so”.
The younger girls were fascinated by my hair and at one point I had like five or six of them all standing around me braiding it – which, needless to say, turned into a complete disaster, I still have random knots in my hair that I'm trying to get out!
The school itself is quite well "decked out", having some computers and it's own library (meaning some old computers and an area with about five small cupboards of books). There are 6 or 7 classrooms and few students in each class - so the student to teacher ratio is actually quite good, though this may be due to the fact that it's a private school. I find the job that the teachers there are doing very impressive, especially when considering the limited resources in comparison to what is available to us in Europe or elsewhere in more developed countries.
What has really struck me, is that the students here are very keen to learn and do not take school for granted (at least most of them), so they try really hard. I've also noticed this with people I have met generally, they practice English and Maths by themselves with any resources they can find - for example, by using magazines to broaden their vocabulary and then using the words to write a few simple sentences. It's nice to help these people, because you know that they are genuinely grateful for any help they can get.
Hopefully tomorrow will be just as successful as today, I've already been booked to take a class at the end of the day, just to spend some time with the children and dance with them; for some reason I've become the go-to person to dance with the kids... and anyone who knows me can vouch for the fact that I'm probably the world's worst dancer, so I don't know how I ended up in this situation but I'll just go with the flow!
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