Saturday, May 5, 2012

Environmental Camp

Last weekend I went to the nearby village of Meri to help with a Peace Corps Environmental Camp. Some volunteers in the anglophone regions in the south started developing sessions to teach kids about their environment, and the project has since expanded to the north, where we are translating the sessions into French and adapting them for the desert rather than the jungle. The hope is that eventually we will have a toolkit of sessions anyone can use, so if a volunteer wants to host something like this, they don't have to start from scratch but can pull off the lessons and activities volunteers before them have developed, tried out, and modified. Meri is a small town in the mountains a couple of hours away from my village. We had about forty sixth graders come to the day-long camp, between the ages of about 10 and 15. There were around ten Peace Corps volunteers there too, which meant we had a lot of resources to wrangle kids and a lot of energy to keep them interested. The kids were split into three teams (the Champions, the Lions, and the Pharaohs), given different colored headbands and a team leader, and earned points every time they correctly answered a question. Volunteers led sessions on land, water, air, food security, and fauna. We talked about desertification, pollution, purifying water, and endangered animals. A lot of the subjects were completely foreign to the kids, even though they dealt with things happening all around them every day.

 Perhaps the most exciting part of the camp involved the numerous activities that we did, beginning with a recycling activity where kids strung together bottle caps to make what we had intended to be a neat snake toy to drag around on the ground. The kids rapidly figured out, however, that it doubled as a noisemaker and also as a nunchuck to whip each other with. I guess we did accomplish our goal, though, of showing kids how to reuse an everyday object in a new and exciting way. A couple of girls asked me as I was walking around with a giant bag of bottle caps where they had all come from. They were astounded when I told them they came off the ground in their own village.

Another excellent activity involved handing three unsuspecting students each a glass of water. All three glasses looked the same, but one secretly had sugar in it, and another salt. A lot of spitting, throwing water, and fighting over who got to chug the sugar water ensued...but I think they also learned a lesson about how water that looks clean may not necessarily really be clean.

It was a learning experience for us volunteers, too. A lot of the questions we asked the kids elicited answers that we did not expect. For example, while talking about climate change, a volunteer asked what will happen if the Earth keeps getting hotter. Without missing a beat, a girl raised her hand and said, “All the white people would die because they can't handle the sun.” The volunteer tried to point out that everybody would be effected, and this caused a lot of indignant shouting from the students. “No, the white people would all burn up because their skin isn't strong! It's true!”

I helped teach the session on fauna, where we talked about the difference between domesticated and wild animals, and then endangered and extinct animals. Again, a lot of the answers were pretty surprising. When I asked kids what it meant for an animal to be endangered (in French, en danger), a kid raised his hand and said, “it means that they will try to eat humans.” I explained the difference between endangered and dangerous, then moved on to talking about why animals became endangered. “What are some reasons why people kill animals?” I asked, hoping to talk about bush meat and poaching. “Because the animals attack people!” was the first response.

We eventually got around to talking about some of the other reasons animals become endangered, and then moved on to the difference between being endangered and being extinct. I held up a couple pictures of a T-Rex and a triceratops. “What kind of animals are these?” I asked. “Crocodile!” “Hippopotamus!” shouted the excited kids. Finally a confident hand went up in the back. “Dinosaurs!” A murmur of “ohhhhs” went around the classroom. I continued, “Are there still dinosaurs here today?” There was some confused muttering, and a few nodding heads. Finally one of the more ambitious students called out, “Yes, but only rarely!”

Although there was a fair amount of confusion and hilarity on the part of both the volunteers and the students, by the end of the day we all felt like we had accomplished something. At the beginning of the day, most of the kids could easily describe the water cycle or give a memorized definition of desertification, but by the end of the day I think we had done a lot to make them think more critically about their environment. By asking questions like “where did all these bottle caps come from?” and “what will happen if the world keeps getting hotter?” (we did eventually arrive at a more thorough response than all the white people burning up), we pushed kids past the rote memorization they were used to in their regular schooling to thinking about how to apply the facts they learned to better understand the world they lived in, and maybe even change the way that they lived in it.

One of my favorite moments of the day came when a volunteer asked the students what they could do if they went to a store and bought one small thing, and the storekeeper tried to put it in a plastic bag. The first kid's response: “Ask him for a smaller bag!” Progress...when asked for other ideas, there was a puzzled pause, then finally a lightbulb clicked on for one of the students. “Tell him you don't need one!” Maybe you can just carry that soda home in your hands, instead of wrapping it in one (or multiple) plastic bags that you will later just throw on the ground. Revolutionary!

As many of you may already know, I'm reaching the end of my two years of Peace Corps service and will be returning home at the end of July. As we get closer to leaving, we are all reflecting on what we've accomplished and how much we've changed in our time here. Last weekend, in a new village with new students and a mix of volunteers at all stages of their service, was a nice reminder of that. After two years, us teachers have no problem standing up in front of a group of people, talking about pretty much any subject (English grammar? Endangered animals?) in English or French. We've learned how to get inside the heads of 6th graders, how to present information and pose questions in a certain way so that they will know how to respond. Some of these skills, like public speaking, make me excited to come home and use them in a new context. Other things I've learned here, like speaking Mandara, riding motorcycles, or being able to list ten different wild animals you can eat, are less applicable and make me sad to leave. For the next couple of months, though, I am going to try to enjoy as much as I can the culmination of two years' worth of knowledge and friendships.

No comments:

Post a Comment