I have had a fantastic first couple of months in Madagascar, and it has already exceeded my expectations in many ways. I have met amazing people and got the opportunity to teach and work in some incredible and humbling settings. It has also been quite a life adjustment! I live in a fairly basic town with one tarmac road, an intermittent water supply, many dogs and few luxuries!
I teach one day a week in the public high school, which has approximately 1,200 students. I teach the penultimate year group, so students who will be taking their literature Baccalaureate exam next year, and I have 10 classes of approximately 20 students each who I share with the other English teaching volunteer at the organisation.
Lessons last for an hour and a half and focus on speaking and listening, as this is what students dont get as part of their normal school English lessons; they get 3 hours of English a week anyway, but this largely consists of repetition and copying written work. By contrast, in my lessons students are required to produce language and demonstrate their understanding of what they are learning, and encouraged to converse and participate as much as possible.
This is something they are not used to, and found pretty odd at first, but they are getting the hang of it and its fantastic to see their confidence and use of English grow. It is almost the Easter holidays now, but I am really looking forward to building on what we have done so far next term.
I am also teaching in more remote and rural schools in the Anosy region, where there is a huge shortage of trained teachers and resources, and many children unable to access school, largely due to the chronic poverty in the area.
Getting to these schools is quite difficult logistically as infrastructure and transport are extremely limited, and roads outside of town are in extremely poor condition, meaning it takes hours (often a whole day!) to travel anywhere. It is currently the rainy season and some villages are only reachable on foot. However, every time I have made the journey out, it has been completely worth it.
In one of the schools I taught in last month, Mahatalaky CEG (middle school), they have one English teacher, but she lives in town and rarely comes. Hence, the students level of English is very low and inadequate to prepare them for the English they will need at high school. They were extremely keen during the lessons though, despite comprehension difficulties, and tried very hard. One of the lessons involved playing a game outside where they had to run around and swap places with each other, something they sadly evidently didnt do often, but thoroughly enjoyed.
In this informal outdoor setting they were also much more comfortable speaking English. The students at Mahatalaky CEG receive English lessons so rarely, but desperately want and need them, and I hope to teach there more, but also to develop a more sustainable way for Azafadys English teaching team to work in these contexts.
I also got the chance on one of these trips to help the conservation team with one of their lessons. It was about coral reefs (the community lives by the sea, where marine conservation is of crucial importance to their livelihoods) and the children had to act out being a coral reef, with one of them being a boat anchor crashing in and killing all the fish and coral.
This was fantastic and they loved it. In the coming months I am going to become more involved with the planning and teaching of the conservation work we deliver, helping to create a relevant and structured syllabus, alongside the respective communities.
Aside from these activities, I am doing one-to-one English lessons with some of Azafadys Malagasy staff members in the office, in order to enable them to communicate effectively with international staff and, crucially, to accurately relay findings from monitoring and evaluation carried out by them in the community.
This is important for building the capacity of the whole NGO and all our activities, but the lessons themselves are also very enjoyable and rewarding. I get the opportunity to get to know the Malagasy staff team and to learn about their areas of work within Azafady, and have already seen some great improvements in their English, though they only get a one hour lesson a week. They are very keen to learn and improve, work hard and always do their homework a teachers dream!
The final element of my work so far has been developing proposals for new education projects, largely focusing on improving the quality of English education provision in Fort Dauphin, the town where I live. English is a commodity here, necessary for students to pass their end of school Baccalaureate exam and continue to further education, but also a prerequisite for many job opportunities in the area.
These new projects will thus help to address some of the restraints placed on the town through a lack of quality English provision, by teaching English in the high school, teacher training and support sessions, and the production of English media resources for students and the wider community. Identifying suitable grants and preparing applications for them takes up the remainder of my week.
Over the next couple of months, I will continue to work on this project development, as well as teaching in the high school and with NGO staff. I am also going to do more teaching in communities like Mahatalaky where education is unavailable for many children, and work on the development of our conservation education activities.
The environment here is so fragile and vulnerable and there is a huge need for education specifically targeting this. I am very excited about what the next few months hold, and am really looking forward to continuing and expanding my work, and achieving as much positive change as I can in the short-term and in the future.
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