'Education Coordinator'

    I have neglected to write anything so far about my teaching duties since school started back up in mid-August. My main ‘education’ job here is planning lessons for the Conservation Club, which happens once a week at two schools in Kasane and Kazungula. I am working on coming up with a curriculum that they can use in the future for the club. So far, the clubs have been going great! The first week Lipa and I did an introduction to ourselves, CARACAL, and the Chobe Ecosystem. Throughout  the rest of the year we will be learning about the different parts of the ecosystem, so we started with wildlife and talked about mammals the second week, birds the next week, reptiles and amphibians last week, and ‘real-world encounters’ this week, with a guest speaker Cisko, the CARACAL tracker.  I really enjoyed this lesson because it is so applicable to the kid’s lives. When I asked them who had seen an elephant out in the bush, almost all of them raised their hands, but not many of them know what to do when they actually find themselves in that situation. It was great to have Cisko explain the correct way to handle an encounter with elephant, buffalo, hippo, baboons, then demonstrate some of his tracking skills. (And just in case you were wondering, slowly back away from an elephant, never run away unless they are already chasing you.)

The Kazungula club with their bird feeders made from recycled water bottles!

    On Saturday, the clubs will have a field trip to the Biodiversity Center! The only trouble with planning this has been transportation. With a big group of kids being 10 kms away, it is sometimes difficult to line up transportation. After going through some trouble requesting a bus from the Chobe District Council (basically the local government), I finally learned the correct process, so thank goodness we won’t have to be cramming kids into recruited friend’s vehicles! I have also been working on planning a Game Drive into Chobe National Park for the clubs at the end of the year. This requires writing letters to safari companies and hoping that they will be generous enough to donate time and a vehicle to take the kids into the park.

   Interesting thing here is that you have to write letters for everything. It is rather old fashioned, but it documents any communication you have had with someone. So it’s been kind of fun giving myself the title ‘education coordinator’, sound pretty official right?

     A few new things I have also been working on as the ‘education coordinator’ are communicating with the Principal Education Administrator (basically like the Board of Ed) to arrange visits to all ten schools in the Chobe District. We are only reaching two of the schools with our Conservation Clubs, so it would be a great opportunity to be able to travel to the more distant schools to teach them about the environment. Unfortunately, conservation is such a poorly covered subject in the schools that the children know very little about it in general and even just the Chobe region. We hope to get those visits started this year, but it’s slow goings so far, so we’ll see…..

    Also, I contacted a local Catholic Mission called Bana ba Ditlou that provides a preschool-type program for youngins and an after-school program for older children in the community. They have a conservation component to the program but the woman who runs it doesn’t know much about conservation, so she is happy for me to help. We are still working out details of what this will look like, but currently they are coming to the library on Thursdays for the ‘Library Club’, which I just started back up today after realizing that kids were still actually coming even though there are supposedly mandatory afternoon study sessions at school.

     So, there’s quite a bit going on, and it’s great! This week I have really started to get to know some of the kids and phew! What a relief to finally be getting some of the names down. Between Katlego, Kato, Kagisano, Kagiso, Katsano, Kutlo, oish! It’s been tough. I have asked the majority of these kids their names about ten times, but in the end, I think it will mean more to them if I can actually call them by their names!  Most are starting to open up to me and become more comfortable (which I’m sure will not be fun later…) but it feels so great. After a great afternoon surrounded by kids I often find myself not being able to hold back a smile, and I am so reassured that they are the reason I’m here!