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

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!

Our partnership with the One Laptop Per Child association (OLPC) began with the initiative of Madagascar School Project committee member Joseline Beaulieu. Having heard of the OLPC, Joseline researched the program’s mission and soon concluded that it was in line with the ideals of the Madagascar School Project and that the computers would be a great complement to our project.  She then reached out to the program, posting a note on their website that set everything into motion.

Michael Buckwam, a student at George Washington University saw our note, and told his debating friends to check it out. They all decided that they would like to be involved and Michael, Mary, Kate and Sean then got in touch with Joseline, who by now had been approached by a number of different groups. They emailed furiously back and forth until Joseline and others on the committee decided that she had found the perfect team. She wrote up a letter to OLPC in support of this group of young people who had great computer, travel and technical skills and knowledge. We all anxiously awaited a reply. There were 220 teams vying for the chance to deploy the program overseas.

The first response we got was negative. We hadn’t been selected.  OLPC had chosen only 15 teams. Five days later we got news that the number of teams chosen had been increased to 30 and we were now one of the lucky projects/teams chosen.

OLPC’s mission is to provide a means for learning, self-expression, and exploration to the nearly two billion children of the developing world with little or no access to education.

The OLPC organization believes that children will be empowered when they can learn through experimentation. Working from this constructivist philosophy, they believe that children need time to play and discover the possibilities.  One of the OLPC’s desires then, is that each child actually own their own laptop, and take it to and from class, as our children would take text books and notebooks. The laptops have a handy carrying handle and the antennae fold down so that it is very portable and fits into even a small school bag.

Deployment of the XO laptops to the school was significantly delayed at the customs department in Madagascar. Ours is the very first deployment for OLPC in Madagascar, and so the customs officials had many meetings to decide how to proceed. When we finally brought a laptop in to show the director, he realized that it was definitely for children and not something that would be easily sold.

Computers finally arrive

Then we worked on each logistical obstacle one at a time. Our terrific group of Michael, Mary, Kate and Sean had already graciously shared their four XO laptops with the children of the school and all our teachers, bringing their laptops down to the school at lunch time and working each with three children at a time, and after school, having all the teachers up to their house (where there was electricity), to learn on the computers. We worked meanwhile to bring electricity down from the college 200 metres away, as it was evident that we were not going to get the electricity company to install our own metre any time soon.

Teacher training started the day after we finally got all the chargers released from customs. Teachers from our school and three from a neighbouring school came to class each morning. We learned how to take pictures of objects and make up our own learning games with them. We made paper airplanes, flew them, measured the distance with the computer echolocation program (Dolphin), made improvements to the design, and then recorded using video or still photos and the writing program, instructions on how to make the best paper airplane. Once everyone had finished the task, we were able to share each other’s work, by working in an interactive way, inviting each other in the “neighbourhood” to look at our work.

Teacher Training

Teachers were challenged, after learning a number of programs, to begin designing their own lesson plans, using the laptops as a tool. The results were varied and led to great excitement about the possibilities that the computers brought to a classroom and to learning!

We held a big opening ceremony at the school at the beginning of August. All the children ages 5 and up with their parents were invited. Each child was assigned and given a computer – the computers, all numbered, were entered into the team’s data page so that each child would be the sole user of his/her computer.

Families

The parents were asked to make sure that their children were accompanied by an adult coming and going from school, so that the children and laptops would be safe. They were told that it was important that the children be given time at home to work on the computers, but that if a single computer was lost, being either stolen, sold or destroyed, then the lending program would stop. We had the mayor of the township come and speak at our meeting and he agreed to be co-signatory on an acceptance of responsibility agreement drawn up between the parents and the school.

The following day was the opening of computer camp! What excitement! What a lot of wires and power bars leapfrogging one another to reach all around the room! What a picture with all the fascinated faces staring at their screens as they went from one incredible program to another. The children first laughed out, then elbowed their neighbour to share their find, then stared mesmerized at their own image, seen on a screen for the first time, as they discovered the Record (camera) program and learned how to take pictures of themselves and each other!

The next three weeks were full of delight as each day marked new learning and hours of delight in discovery. Our four American students, our five Malagasy teachers, our English teacher, and I would walk around the room assisting children when it was necessary, and taking care of the power and technical needs as they arose.

For three days in the middle of that, we were without electricity, and so the more regular day camp activities were a replacement for computer work. The children learned how to play frozen tag, and had their first three legged race, all with the participation of the keen American students and the amazed but quick to join in Malagasy teachers!

The children brought their computers home every night. Parents quickly organized into teams to take turns walking the neighbourhood children to school and home. Computers were dutifully signed out and if a child was absent one day, the parent would make sure that the computer was returned by a friend. We even gained in another way by the computer lending program. The Lova Soa school has large gardens which are planted and cared for by the parents of our school.  The harvest is used to feed the children a noon meal at school every day. As we had four parents who had not been keeping up their plot well, they were told that the computer would not go home with their child until the gardens were back in form. Talk about pressure for the parents! It was no time before all the gardens were back in shape!

The computers will run about two hours before they need recharging. That means that as soon as the children get to school they plug their computer in. They can use it right away near an outlet, or charge it and use it later, during class. Then the computers need to be recharged again before they go home with the children in the evening. The biggest problem we have is that we did such a good “this is your responsibility” talk, that the parents don’t always give the children the freedom to use the computers when and how they want to. We will work on this over the year. The computer automatically stores everything that the children have done on them, so they can show their friends in the schoolyard the next day all that they’ve worked on.

One of the greatest thing about the computers is the way it has given the young children something of value to contribute to their family. Now the 5 year old is the expert and the ‘go-to’ person when anyone else in the family wants to try out the computer. The parents, of course, value the computer a great deal, as it is something that they never dreamed they’d be able to have.

Student With XO Laptop

We plan to send the computers home every evening until the middle of November when the rice transplanting season begins. At that time, the parents will not be able to come to walk their children to school and home, as everyone will be busy in the rice fields, so we may have to keep them at school until after this busy farming time.

So, as you can see, it has been a huge benefit and gift to us to receive this grant and to have four wonderfully, capable and intelligent young students come and work with our students and teachers. We are greatly indebted to both the team of Kate, Mary, Michael and Sean as well as to the OLPCorps for offering us and our children such a tremendous gift and opportunity!

The OLPCorps team have been keeping a blog of their experiences and have also shared photos.