Tuesday 21st, the training is going extremely well, tomorrow will be the last day and they will have to design a lesson themselves. They all look happy . The hot feedbacks I take with me to read after teaching hours are although naïve, remarkably sensible. Mostly they complain about the lack of resources in their schools and lack of parental involvement. I try to inspire them with ‘Light Teaching Methodology’ which specialises in teaching without books or other such ‘niceties’.
We do listening exercises , story telling, using fairy tales in the classroom and reconstructing stories in groups.
Things are looking up and my trip is starting to make sense, although it's still surreal having to teach under the rattattattat of army helicopters that come and go and today I learnt that there's a military base camp on the way to a temple we visited on our arrival....
On our now traditional afternoon walks I see a foreign looking woman coming up the road who looks at me in the eye and smiles as she comes closer, she stops and says ‘Enjoying your holidays?’, to which I respond ‘ Well, enjoying a great deal, but not so much of a holiday I’m afraid, voluntary work, and you’re not a tourist yourself either, are you?’, and we engage in an informal friendly chat. She’s been here for six years, she’s British and she runs an English boarding school, ‘The teaching methods here in Nepal are appalling’, she complains gloomily. I tell her about the seminar and how important it is to provide the teachers with a good training that can motivate them and give them an insight into what is involved in the psychological and sociological issue of second language acquisition. She says in a faintly resigned voice that children don’t go to school to learn, they just go to school to pass the exams. ‘Playing and moving, learning individual and social skills is something that happens outside school hours’.
A dozen of soldiers march past down the road, she notices surprise in my eyes and she plays down the impressive parade with an ‘ It is only when you see 300 of them that you have to start worrying’.
I go back to the host family meditating over the link between the educational system and the country problematic. As I’m beginning to gain understanding of the Nepalese society as a whole, I see clearly that the environmental awareness, cultural preservation, empowerment and other challenges that Nepal faces today as a developing country, need to be incorporated in the childhood education curriculum. For social integration depends on the ability of the educational environment to allow equal chances for all. The children of today will determine tomorrow’s future. Investing on teacher training is an investment in society as a living, developing organism.
This morning my host family asked me what do Dutch people eat. Fish, potatoes, meat, I told them. Daddy went all the way to the next village, Banepa, to buy fish for dinner. God knows how much he paid for it. We all cosily choke to the toxic fumes of a battered kerosene burner while Yog fries the fish in several times used brown oil. There’s papod to go with it and the result is not bad. I might even start to like curry.