My grandchildren should be grateful


We have funded a small project to teach English to a rural Village just outside of the capital city of dili. There are two classes. The first one is for school-age children and the second one is to the Village adults. The classes are held in the village`s School. The picture above is of the school. There are three buildings and an open area in the front.
This is the main road or path to the school. Needless to say the school doesn't have or need a parking lot.
This is the school cafeteria or lunch area. The food is cooked on wood fires. If the menu is like all of the other rural schools it would be rice and vegetables daily. No protein.
This is the eating area.
The school had modern bathrooms for village standards. Both boys and girls bathrooms had the same fixtures.
Outside of each classroom is a hand wash station. On the upper left is a small bucket for the soap. There was one of these outside of each classroom.
Here's a picture of the adult English class. They were standing up while they were singing the song. About 20 more adults came in after this picture was taken. The teachers for the English classes are our advanced students. There are four. Two of them teach each class and the other two give assistance. They use the same Power Point presentation lessons that Cheryl and I use.

The Village was very excited about the opportunity to have English lessons. A good percentage of the entire Village showed up. It'll be interesting to see what sort of dropout rate we have. One theory is that they don't have much else to do and so maybe attendance will remain high. Most of their houses have electricity but probably no refrigerator or television. Probably only about half of them have running water.

Cheryl and I attended this first set of classes just to make sure there are no problems and that everything was running smoothly. If all runs well they will have a total of 16 weeks of classes. They have two classes a week. Of course the classrooms don't have air conditioning. It was pretty hot. By the time we got home we were pretty tired.

One of the three buildings had an American flag painted on it. There was a plaque on the building that said that it had been built by the Navy Seabees in 2016.



Comments

  1. DeniseMay 21, 2019 at 9:59 PM

    Love all your pictures. The work looks good. Reminds me of Nicaragua (where our Community Center is) except the school just has pit toilets! Do most people cook over a wood fire? Sending you an update on our mission
    Hermana Young

    ReplyDelete
  2. DeniseMay 21, 2019 at 10:02 PM

    Just reread! In their homes do they also cook over wood fires!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Trapani's in LiberiaJune 2, 2019 at 12:42 AM

      Yes, even the nicer homes have outdoor kitchens with wood fired cooking. Apparently the wood is a lot cheaper than Natural Gas. When you drive down the road you see lots of bundled piles of sticks for sale for cooking. We fortunately have a gas stove in our apartment.

      Delete

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