Madagascar School Project Blog

So we reach the last week of school and have our regular weekly staff meeting on Wednesday afternoon. Tired teachers, satisfied that the end is in sight and that their report cards are finally finished, chat quietly among themselves. Tomorrow is the official closing of Tenaquip School and Friday the closing of Lova Soa. Holidays are in sight. But wait…

The meeting starts and the principal announces that there will be three days of teacher training organized for them next week. They will have Monday off to go to the market and then come to school for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Instead of being upset that this was being imposed on them, they asked when they were going to get some training from Mme Kathy? So we settled on an extra day, Friday, for that.

Then the principal announces that a young teacher from Canada is coming to Madagascar. Sadie St-Denis is volunteering her time and talent to run three weeks of soccer and computer camp for kids and give English lessons to the teachers. As the principal, Mme Raline’s father is terminally ill, it is imperative that she be free to come and go as she wishes, so groups of teachers will each be in charge of a week of camp. The teachers are thrilled! The question is posed, would they like the English lessons daily, or all together on 3 days at the end of the month. The teachers vote for lessons daily. This means that all teachers will attend all the camps!  They will walk the hour to and from the school each day and for the three that live in Tana, they will live away from home and their families for another month. In one fell swoop they go from having 2 months off to having 1 month off and they are all happy! I had not understood the extent to which learning is of paramount importance here, especially learning English, and among our group, learning new strategies for teaching. Teachers will have the month of September off and resume teaching Oct 12.

I was stunned. I told them that I recognized the hard work they had done throughout the school year. That they were not obliged to be here for the month of August and they should not feel any pressure to attend all of the camps. If they decided to do the English all at once, they could be home with their families for most of August. They would receive their salary throughout the month regardless of whether they attended or not. My little speech changed nothing. They smiled politely and voted to attend each day. Wonders never cease!

We are once again blessed with help! Last summer, a group of 4 university students came to Ambatoharanana to teach our teachers and students how to use their new laptop computers, generously granted to them by “One Laptop per Child” organization.

This year, I am pleased to announce that a young teacher from Glengarry, Canada, Miss Sadie St-Denis, will come for an entire month to offer camps to children and English lessons to teachers. Sadie is hard at work, raising money from family, friends and her church community, so that she can pay the expensive airline ticket over here. She will travel here on July 28th – 30th, but way of Amsterdam, Paris and London.

We are very lucky to have her, as she is a trained teacher, well experienced in teaching English, having taught English as a second language in Korea. She is also not a stranger to travel, and seems keen and flexible, ready for anything. She will arrive just in time to christen the new house for volunteers that is being constructed as I write.

The children ages 7 – 10 of Tenaquip School will enjoy two weeks of camp beginning Aug 2nd. They will come from 8 am – 3 pm each day and have soccer, computers, lunch and then more soccer before returning home with their computers in hand.

The children of Lova Soa will receive one week of camp, and then may have Sadie here a couple more days to play causally with them on the soccer pitch or with the computers. She will be a very popular person for that last week. We didn’t schedule any more camps for her as we wanted her to have a little time to herself to be a tourist, if she wishes. It is a long way to travel to see nothing but children, soccer balls and computers!

We are absolutely thrilled that Sadie has agreed to come. What started as a casual conversation at lunch in the staff room of Maxville Public School about Sadie’s desire to help in an underdeveloped country is about to become a reality! I salute the young folks of today who, although they struggle to find that first job, and to have enough money to afford a car, etc, still think of others and live out their desire to help.

- Kathy

The Tenaquip School was officially opened January 9, 2010 by the mayor, bishop, president of the township and the governmental representative of education for the area. Most of the people living in the five villages that make up the township came out to witness the big event. A plaque was mounted which announces that this school is made possible by the generous donations of the Tenaquip Foundation of Canada, and is a joint effort between the people of Glengarry and the community of Ambohiborosy.

The opening and celebration began at 9 am and continued until 3 pm with many speeches, and much eating, singing and dancing. People showed up in their Sunday best, despite the fact that the last kilometre of road into the school was completely washed out due to the rains. It was a treacherous ride for the big celebration cake which had to be carried in! Only the officials arrived in vehicles, however, as the village people travel everywhere on foot.

The 112 children were now ready to begin their education in a brand new school. Colourful desks and chairs greeted bodies which had never experienced the comfort of a chair, other than a church pew. Most homes have neither a table or a chair, and people sit on logs, or stones outside. The children quickly showed their ability and intelligence as they began their formal learning, got used to the routines of school and arrived each day at least a half hour before school began. The flags are raised on Monday morning ( the Canadian flag flies alongside the Malagasy flag), and the children sing their National anthem. This process is repeated every Friday, as one lucky child gets to be the one to lower the flags.

As a kitchen was not yet built, the parents put together a make shift kitchen area protected from the ferocious winds by a tarpaulin strung around. Two mothers took charge of the meals, cooked on a fire in the middle of a ring of rocks, and provided a nutritious meal each day for all the children to eat in their classrooms.

One cannot help but be struck by the incredible respect that these children show to each other and to their elders. If one was to walk into the room while the class was in progress, the whole class of children would rise to their feet and chant “Good Morning Madame Kathy”. If one is to ask “How are you” they will respond all together with “I am very well thank you and you?” They stay standing until they are invited to sit down, and then they all chant “Thank you” and get seated again. As the teacher hands out the copy books, they hurry to the front when their name is called and sing a thank you to the teacher. When they do a lengthy response, (i.e., counting to 100 by 5’s) they stand to speak. As they pass to come in the door to class, they say “Excuse me”, and bend down with a hand making way in front of them. If a child answers a question well, the rest of the class will chant “Good job, good job, Tsiry (the name of child) and the child will respond “thank you”. They are also very shy, as a people, and my first visit is usually met with smiles and giggles from down-turned heads. They sneak a peak at me when I am not looking at them. If a child arrives late to school, they pause in the doorway. The class all stand up and greet the new arrival at which point he/she says “Good morning teachers and my friends.” They respond with “Come in and join us”. It is all quite refreshing to see. It feels much like the way it was in Canada perhaps 50 years ago or more.

I stand there watching all this, over flowing with joy. It is almost too wonderful to believe!

- Kathy

It is with great sadness that I report the death of Mr. Charles, the chairperson of the committee in charge of the Tenaquip School. Mr Charles, the 64 year old president of the township, died suddenly at his home on June 4th 2010. He lived long enough to see his dream come true, that of having a school in his township, and all the local children in attendance.

On the Friday of his death he had worked the morning at the school, organizing the parents to clear the land adjacent to the school so that the children would have a play ground. When he started to feel poorly, he walked the hour to Alatsinaina, the neighboring village, to see the doctor. Unfortunately all we know is that the doctor sent him home, and he died as he reached his home, after climbing up the mountain on which his house sits. At that time, knowing nothing of her husband’s illness, his wife, Madame Honore was working in the family rice field.

Mr Charles had a dream -  to have a school in his neighbourhood, so that all children could receive an education. He wrote a formal ‘demande’ which included statistics of the number of families, ages of all the residents, number of homes etc., and sent it to the mayor in 2007 in the hopes that somehow the state would take his plea seriously.

Nothing happened until I met with the mayor one day, and he told me of this remote village. When I went to visit, I was greeted by Mr Charles who said that the town would all work together to help us, if it would be possible to have a school. I told him that I would speak to our Madagascar School Project Board in Canada and see if there was any chance of us working together. Mr Charles immediately struck up a committee of six men and women to oversee the work, found a site for us to build on, found the land owners and got their permission for us to buy the land from them. The rest is history. It has been an honour to work with Mr Charles and we are forever grateful for his enthusiasm, energy and his vision.

- Kathy

One of the continual challenges teaching here, is finding the material to work with. This country doesn’t seem to have discovered “Sticky Tack” or whatever you like to call the “silly putty” type stuff that helps us keep papers on the wall. I thought that lack of materials (books, paints) would be one of the biggest challenges, but it turns out, that because their lives are filled with all the same stuff, there are other challenges.

Take for example Graphing, which we do in math right from Kindergarten. In North America we graph how many children have shoes with laces, how many children are wearing what colours, colour of hair, colour of eyes, favourite T.V. show, favourite food, etc – you get the picture. In Madagascar, no one has shoes, they all wear uniforms, they all have black hair and brown eyes, and they eat what they are given, mostly rice! I frantically wrote to a good friend and Kindergarten teacher back home and she had some good ideas. The next day we graphed who had lost a tooth and who had not. The following day when I tried number of brothers and sisters in the family, I had another surprise. In Malagasy there is one word for brother if you are a boy, and another word for brother if you are a girl. There is a name for oldest child and youngest child, but no one-size-fits-all word for brother or sister. Well…never mind….we’ll do it anyway. They each had so many brothers and sisters, that our graph (consisting of little stick boys and girl pictures) had to be made down the aisle on the floor between tables!

We are finding out this year, as we didn’t do a staggered entry and have 36 four year olds in one class, that the children in Madagascar often don’t know their own names! This is because they are called things like “youngest boy” or “looks like mother’, or some other pet name that some family member has dreamt up. When we take the registration the names are often long (ex-Raharinomenjanahary Travina Feno Fitahiana), and we have to write it all down and then ask what name they are usually called. The parent will give us a name, but it often has no resemblance to what the child is actually called, and the student looks at you blankly when you use the name assigned. This year we must have had fifteen children the first few days, who had no idea what their names were, so even with cute little around-the-neck name tags, we got no where!

Another strange thing is that the people in the countryside don’t follow any rules about naming their children. They may use the same last name as one of the parents, or the family members may each have a different last name, even though the parents are happily married and have had these children together. There seems to be no rhyme or reason why some keep their names and others change them or come up with a different last name for one or all of their children. If it was hard as a teacher in Canada, learning who was who’s sibling, you can imagine the challenge here!

Early reading in North America involves reading labels and signs in the environment. Stuck again!!! These people see no labels. They don’t buy anything packaged, their clothes are all second hand and have long since lost the laundering labels, they don’t have cars, trains or slippery roads, so no traffic signs, (even in the city there are no stop signs, and very few street names), they don’t have anything marked Poison, or Recycle, as they eat only what is produced in gardens within 5 miles of their homes. All we could think of was the no-smoking sign on some buses, but most children never get to ride a bus. We will have to teach them about labels and hope that one day they get to see some!

At home, we beg and plead with students and parents alike to come and check out our Lost and Found, as there are so many shoes, coats, shirts, hats, boots and gloves that the pile is always spilling out onto the floor. Here, there is no such thing as a Lost and Found. I’m sure they wouldn’t understand what I was talking about if I mentioned it. Their clothes are very valuable to them and as they never have enough, so would never dream of leaving an item at school where someone else may take it! In fact when Maxville Public School raised money to buy each of our children here a pair of sandals, the children didn’t want to take them off and leave them unattended to go to recess in case someone took them!

Thank goodness for the many wonderful differences still existing in our world!