What happened in September?

Good question! Yes, clearly I have not posted in months and people are writing friendly reminders to do so on my facebook wall and my father is making not-so-nice threats about updating now that I am home for winter break. The thought of explaining the last three months in one enormous post is a bit too overwhelming for me, so I am going to break it up by month and share some (hopefully) entertaining and relevant stories, experiences, thoughts, and photos from each.

My last post was a week into the school year; I have learned a lot about teaching since then. My biggest shift in mentality has been really embracing the idea that it is much preferable to teach a smaller amount of information well, so that the students really get it, as opposed to trapsing through some predetermined amount of material and losing the majority of the kids as you go. In September, I did not understand this. And you might say my ambitions were a little too high. It is my Twazieme plant biology class that first taught me this. The combination of personalities in their class makes them more inclined to have loud conversations in Creole across the room with each other than to listen to my lectures. At first, I was kind of treating the learning and the discipline as separate issues, which worked okay. Then, once teaching began to get a little bit easier, I started really trying to get to all the kids in my presentation of material and incorporated more warm up activities, partner/groupwork, notebook work...and it really worked! The majority of the Twaziemes are now actually wanting to and believing that they can learn when they come into my class, the superfluous talking has stopped, and a lot of them are a lot more excited about biology. That class is probably my biggest improvement. Really thriving with them was more of an October accomplishment though.

My favorite class from the start was (and probably still is) my Senkyems. They are the youngest group I teach, and little kids (11 - 13 year olds) are much more cute and charming than teenagers, even when they are doing the exact same annoying things haha. They originally impressed me a lot with their inquisitiveness about science...a few weeks in I started suspecting that they realized I could not resist answering their great questions and some of them were playing the "distract the teacher from the topic at hand and we won't get through the lesson!" game, which I was also very guilty of in high school. (I later made an "on topic" rule about questions which works better.) This class is interesting because sometimes I have a translator, and sometimes not; they have only been at the school for a year (and a half, now) and so they are in the midst of actually learning English. Class is probably more interesting without a translator, as I resort to creative tactics like drawing pictures on the board and making ridiculous motions with my body when I forget to bring a French dictionary.

Hmmm...it is hard to remember times without weather indicators; it has been basically 82 - 90 degrees F since my arrival. I think in September Corey, Meg, and I started going to the downtown clinic run by the Sisters of Charity on Saturday mornings. I have now cleaned out more festering wounds than I ever imagined, mostly leg ulcers due to untreated diabetes, but some crazier things, too. The sisters are hilarious. Sometimes I would help out in the "pharmacy" (where they distribute free medicine to sick people) and they would test my Creole by sending me to talk to patients and telling me to get them things in Creole. After my first couple of times at the clinic I was pretty motivated to improve my Creole...unfortunately, that excitement has since abated.

One final point of interest is the work that we began on Rue National 3, the nearby national road near our school. When I first arrived in Haiti, one of the most disconcerting things was the huge amounts of trash piled on the sides of the roads. Rue National 3 was no exception, with things like plastic bags, bottles, old clothes, food wrappers, shoes...really anything you can imagine...all strewn on the sides of the road. In some places, it was literally deeper than your ankles. Since there are no major construction projects going on campus, cleaning up this road became our major project. Taking about 120 students out to the road each day, picking up, raking, burning, burying, and carrying trash back to campus, we have actually made a huge change in the stretch of road near our school. Not only are the 5 miles around our school unrecognizable from their current lack of garbage, we have also made an impact on the community. People often stop in their cars when they see us picking up the trash, asking what we are doing and/or thanking the students for their work. Some people from the neighborhood now meet us out on the road each afternoon to help clean up. We also painted large signs on the roadside asking that people do not dump their trash there, and the signs or the example of our students picking up the trash or most likely the combination actually seems to have worked, as the amount of trash now present to pick up each day is tiny and we have to keep going further and further to find it. Below are some photos of students doing Rue National 3 clean up!

Elev yo la!

School started on Tuesday! It has been great so far…the whole feel on campus is different; busy and colorful and always a dull roar outside. Walking around, I am accosted by continual greetings of “Good morning/afternoon, Ms. DeAgostino”. Learning names is overwhelming and the students expect that you should know their names after hearing them one time. My largest class is 30 senkyem students (8^th grade), and I have no idea how I am going to learn all of their names, yikes! I made them some desk name tags so hopefully those will help me out. Their English is not stellar so we have been going very slowly/using a translator sporadically. Luckily the class is a very basic introductory science course with a smattering of many topics in not much detail, so we will be okay. Overall, I LOVE teaching. Standing up in class talking for 80 minutes during double-periods is quite tiring, however. It makes me hungry. One of my favorite parts about teaching is actually the planning and the organization between classes. Thus far I have really been pouring myself into it, using any and all free time to hash out details of specific lessons and plan overall units with objectives and methods laid out weeks in advance.

The students leave every Friday afternoon, so campus is quiet again now. I think the weekends will be a much needed respite, especially as the year goes on. I am living in one of the girl’s dorms with another volunteer (since there is not enough room in the volunteer house for all nine of us), and this makes things a little bit awkward with the students who live there. Not having a place to retreat away from the eyes of my students is not ideal, and the girls also use up the running water very quickly so I have been taking bucket showers all of this week. It is funny when I show up back at the dorm at 5:30 am after running and the girls see me all sweaty and dirty and think that I am crazy, haha.

And now, an appeal…this year the school is having a lot of financial trouble mostly because of the US economic problems. Many less people are donating and are donating less money. Louverture Cleary School is dedicated to keeping its students through all 7 years of their secondary education and properly feeding them, giving them a strong education and spiritual formation, and instilling in them the importance of hard work. Obviously to do all of these things, donations are imperative; it costs U$950 to house and educate one student for a year. Part of my job as a volunteer is to raise money for the school, and so far as a group we have not raised many funds. I am sure this is because people in the states are struggling themselves somewhat, but I would urge you to think about making even a small donation to help the school and support the work I am doing. Without generous donors, the school could not function…and right now LCS is one of the few bright spots in Haiti, a place of hope where the children of Haiti learn that they can change their country. Please check out their website (http://www.haitianproject.org) and make a donation, even if it is small. I would very much appreciate it, and the students here would even more so. Donations can be made online or be mailed to: The Haitian Project, P.O. Box 6891, Providence, RI 02940. If you have an idea for a fundraiser or would like someone from the Haitian Project to come talk to a group, feel free to call Elizabeth O’Connell, Director of Community Development, at (815) 484-8623 or email development@haitianproject.org. You can also let them know your connection to me so that your thank you note will be personalized!

Mesi anpil!

Moun bel yo

Bon swa (good evening)! Exactly 3 weeks in Haiti now…they have not exactly flown by, but we have been super busy so there really is not time to be homesick. Today some of us took a car ride up to a quite nice suburb of Port au Prince to pick up a couple of the director’s kids from some family friends’ house and were fed chocolate truffles and cupcakes; it made me pause and realize that I had not had any chocolate in three weeks. And it was gooood. This morning was pretty amazing food-wise actually, as we went to Mass at a nearby seminary celebrated by an Italian priest who then shared some homemade gelato with us afterward, yum!

Because we have been working so hard during the week (this week featured me wielding a pickaxe and a machete), the weekends are a much looked forward to event. The only jobs are cooking and kitchen clean up on a rotating basis, and otherwise we are free to do pretty much anything we want. This weekend was the best yet for sure. Friday afternoon most of the volunteer yo and some of the Haitian staff played sport together for a long time. It was hilarious trying to convince some of the young Haitian women that they would not die if they ran more than two laps around the basketball court. I was surprisingly decent in the following pickup futbol game (and I have not played any sort of soccer since 6th grade), and then Jon and I won in a game of half court 2-on-2 basketball that was relatively intense under the beating sun. Yesterday I successfully did all of my own laundry for the second time – finished before 9 a.m. – got some more lesson planning done, busted out Betsy’s water weights for an afternoon workout, and officially received my first Haitian sunburn after sitting outside reading for about an hour. My arms are already browning up nicely, but my legs are still tomato colored, unfortunately.

I have been getting a lot of reading done here. So far the pace of life reminds me of high school (which maybe makes sense since I am working at a high school?) when I put in a reasonable amount of effort and did my work well but always had plenty of time for things like eating and exercising and reading for pleasure without ever feeling guilty about not studying. Lavi se bel (life is beautiful). So far I have read The Uses of Haiti (Farmer), The Botany of Desire (Pollan), Sense and Sensibility (Austen), Night (Wiesel), Blink (Gladwell), and am almost finished with The Sparrow (Russell). I think I am going to tackle Atlas Shrugged (Rand), which should slow me down a bit. The jokes about my ridiculous reading speed are already rampant…I had forgotten in college how fast of a reader I am because I never had time for non-school books.

Last night I was invited over to Patrick’s family’s home (the director and his family who live right across the road from the school campus) to meet some alumni of the school. There were four grads total, two of them were physicians, and they were all good natured and fun to be around and successful and completely fluent in English. It was quite inspiring to see the long term results of being educated at this school. One special thing about LCS is the scholarship program that they offer to graduating students, paying their tuition for college or professional school – all four of these young men had received a scholarship after graduating 10 years ago. The scholarship program is in a period of expansion right now, with the goal of sponsoring 150 graduates every year by 2011. I spent time talking with the doctors, who were great. One is simultaneously the director of a hospital in a rural part of Haiti and is working on his MPH (Master’s of Public Health) and the other is working for a French non-profit group that sends physicians to especially violent and war-torn areas; apparently they are leaving soon since Haiti has become relatively stable (good news).

I was pretty successful in lesson planning this past week, but I still have a way to go. Other highlights of the past week include killing a tarantula that I found in our room (actually less gross than the cockroaches, in my opinion), micromanaging students who are sent to the school to help clean up the grounds (seriously, if you turn around for one second they stop working…teenagers), and a sobering visit to a local orphanage run by the Missionaries of Charity (it was wonderful to hold babies and play with young children, even though the situation was sad). Also, the phone is apparently fully functional so if anyone wants to call next weekend email me and I will send the Rhode Island number!

Ayiti, cheri

A little over a week has gone by since I arrived in Haiti! The flight down was uneventful and blessedly short compared to trips to Tanzania. I was surprisingly far underweight for my two checked bags (my Dad would be proud), which at first worried me a bit but after living here for a week I think I probably did manage to bring most of the things I might want. When we arrived Sunday afternoon and drove through the edge of Port-au-Prince in order to get to the school, the roads and the driving were reminiscent of Tanzanian streets with the exception that buildings are much closer to the road and things seem a bit less dusty here in Ayiti. Also, no one is wearing any “traditional” clothes and the U.S. influence in music and dress seems to be greater, which makes sense proximity-wise. After a tour of the school Sunday evening and a late dinner, I moved into my room to find that some others will already inhabiting it. Unfortunately, I was not okay with sharing living space with cockroaches, so I had my first roach killing experience within hours of my arrival (after the first week, my count is up to 14…most of those occurred in the first 4 days though). I live with one of the other volunteers in one of the two girls’ dorms on campus instead of in the main building where all of the other volunteers live. Being over here has challenges and perks…but now that we have running water (!!!) I really have nothing to complain about.

We woke up early Monday morning to begin working, which is how we have spent every weekday morning since. At 6 am we gather for morning prayer, then eat breakfast, then begin whatever physical labor needs to get done (so far lots of cleaning, painting, moving rocks, etc.). The group includes 9 volunteers and around 15 Haitian staff…all of the Haitians who live here are great and much more desensitized to U.S. Americans than the Tanzanians I spent time with, so interactions thus far have tended to be more genuine I think, which is refreshing. After work, we eat, then have a couple of hours of Creole class – grammatically very similar to Swahili – then hopefully a bit of free time, dinner, group activities, bed…and then start all over again. Before I got sick, I had been getting up every morning at 4:45 to run around the soccer field and basketball court which is monotonous but makes me feel much better.

The heat has been nice! It has been between 85 – 95 degrees the whole time (maybs a bit cooler at night) but the humidity seems really low and I LIKE the warmth. And I especially like that it is all year round. Around 6 pm it usually starts raining, anything from a light drizzle to an all out thunderstorm – very pretty.

I wasted no time in getting sick, erlack. From Saturday until yesterday (Wednesday) I was vomming on and off…it did not get too bad until Tuesday, when I starting voming uncontrollably; that is when the director over here decided to restrict me to a white bread and Coca Cola diet, which has worked wonders. Today I managed to eat some corn grits for breakfast and some peanut butter for lunch and kept it down, so I am hopeful that will continue and I can be done with being sick in Haiti forever.

School starts in about 2 weeks!! The first year students came for orientation this week, and they were very cute. I found out that I am teaching computers [all grades], Sanciem Natural Science [7^th grade], and Twaziem Biology [10^th grade]…so so excited to teach science! Before I came they were not sure if it would be feasible, but it all worked out. Today we are visiting the book depot so I hope to start lesson planning soon!

Internet access thus far has been less regular than expected...desole (sorry). I think once the school year starts and things are one more of a schedule I will be able to use the nets more often. In the meantime, hopefully I will continue to post a bit, and I would love to hear from you thru comments, email, or snail mail! Hand drawn pictures by children are especially appreciated and will be added to the collection already on my wall (mesi, Nicole!) which has plenty of space for more. That reminds me, children from the neighborhood are often invited into the school to use the playground, and last week I had the opportunity to play with them; very, very cute. The community around the school is very poor (as most of Haiti), but the director and especially his wife do a great job of local outreach so relations seem quite good from what I have experienced thus far.

Barack Obama and Haiti

I GRADUATED via an exciting ceremony that received national attention. And I was a small part of that...this fox news story was apparently shown around the country as my friend in Albuquerque commented that she saw me on the evening news a couple months ago. Here is the local written report: Fox news report

Anyway, senior week and graduation went by in a blur. Despite my premeditated boycott of most of the planned activities I only managed to get in about an hour of actual relaxation (sitting in the sun reading a book, which cost me my first sunburn of the summer). Thursday started the awards ceremonies and departmental functions which continued through Sunday morning, Friday night my entire family arrived, and then Sunday afternoon was the actual graduation ceremony. Security was a mess...I had to wait in line for over an hour and a half just to enter the ceremony. Luckily I was standing in line with my friend Patrick Tucker, the recently crowned College Jeopardy champion, so he helped to pass the time. While I was not exactly surprised to make it to graduation from Notre Dame, it was still surreal to be sitting in the JACC listening to the President of the US send us off and then bless us alongside Fr. Jenkins.

Graduating may not be surprising, but having definite plans for the next five (potentially six) years is notable. There were times when I seriously doubted if I could have everything figured out by May 15, but I pulled it out. After a long, difficult discernment process I like to call "Vanderbilt vs. Dartmouth" I finally decided that I will attend Vanderbilt University Medical School. They are also wonderfully allowing me to defer matriculation for one year, so I will begin med school in the fall of 2010.

For the next year I will be volunteering as a science teacher at Louverture Cleary school in Haiti through a Catholic misssion called the Haitian Project. It is a rural area just northeast of the capital Port-Au-Prince called Croix-des-Bouquets, about 13 kilometers away. After careful consideration, I decided that now was the best time to actual try living in a developing nation for more than a couple months...I also wanted a life-shaping experience that will inform my medical education for the long years of study ahead. I do not want to forget my committment to global health or lose my idealism prematurely. And I figured this is my last chance to volunteer in a non-medical setting. I am excited to become a physician, but I do have other talents and interests, too, so I am going to use those for a bit. I am going to start looking for donations of lab supplies as the school is trying to revamp a laboratory science program that I will be helping with...any ideas?

I have orientation in early July and then I leave August 9...I will update with new information as I receive it. Haitian Project

"we're doing the best with what we've got"

kwaheri tena

Kind of a twist on the more common Kiswahili saying of "karibu tena"...actually almost the opposite. I leave tonight and again, it is a mixture of emotions. Even though I was only here for two weeks this time, I miss people at home a lot more. It was kind of a lonely trip this time, doing fieldwork by myself instead of actually teaching. I did very much enjoy spending time with my family here and I met up with many of my Tanzanian friends from last year on Saturday and we had a great lunch together. Two of my favorites are actually dating now, which is exciting! But I am definitely glad to be going home too, back to running water and toilets as usual.

Yesterday bibi (grandma) came over and she thinks I am a riot. She breaks into this huge grin whenever I say anything in Kiswahili to her, which I have to pratically yell because she is pretty deaf. She also falls asleep constantly in her chair while we are all sitting around and talking or whatnot. She is amazing, I wish I had met her sooner.

Back to school, labs, friends, work, research, interviews, boys, running, dancing, and dining halls.

last days

The new mzungu volunteer, Alice, moved in last night. She is super nice but it was hilarious to watch someone else go through the transition into living with the family that I made last year. I felt a bit sheepish that I may have been ruining her moment or whatever but she seemed pretty grateful that I was there to explain some things. And the kids are very quiet and shy when they meet new people so she felt less awkward having me to talk with at least. It was funny though, we were playing Old Maid with Dorcas, Rachel, and Irene, and they were all sitting very quietly and being polite and well-behaved. Then when Alice went to bed, the radio was turned out, Dorcas started dancing around like a crazy person, there was shouting during the subsequent game of Go Fish, and mama even joined in. Irene made fun of Dory for being not shy once Alice went to bed, then I pointed out that Irene had done the same thing and we all laughed.

Also I should have known better...this is Tanzania...I was not moved into the Harry Potter room. Baba moved into the Harry Potter room and mama moved into the kids' room, and I moved into mama and baba's room! After a few minutes of protesting when I realized what had happened, I quickly realized it was a losing battle. Since it is only for 2 days I let it go. But yikes. Good thing I am leaving Monday or I would feel even more awful!

I leave on Monday...if everything goes according to plan, I will have collected 13 more interviews, bringing my total to 30! It was not easy per se, but definitely enjoyable and worthwhile. I think my thesis should be very relevant.

cheka

Interviews are picking up! I have done 5 so far, and over the next few days have plans to do 8 more. And they are going very well, getting info that my original data was pointing at but did not necessarily explicitly say. So that front is good!

I also was able to call Fr. Paul’s friends in Arusha, the Krafts, and I might have dinner with them sometime before I leave. I spoke with Mr. Kraft on the phone and he sounded very friendly. Tonight I am going out to dinner with a new group of GSC volunteers who arrived last night as well as the staff at the GSC office (who have been extremely helpful and friendly to me during my stay). The funny part is one of these volunteers is apparently moving into my family’s house on Friday evening…so I am being relegated to the “other” room. I have actually never seen this room, but I think it is a Harry Potter cupboard under the stairs sort of deal. Hahaha, I am excited to see this actually. And Arusha is currently going through a water shortage (no rain in a long time apparently) so there has not been any running water in the house. More the experience that many people probably imagine when they think of Africa I suppose.

I leave Monday and I am already getting sad to leave my family. Maybe it will help that there will be anther mzungu there to distract them. This time though, I am not sure if I will be coming back. Of course I was not sure before either, but at that point I still had very lofty goals of getting my PhD in med anthro and doing my fieldwork in Tanzania. And I still have that goal, but the application process is definitely a huge reality check. And I am no longer certain that I would want to do my research in Tanzania. It is very far away from the majority of the people that I love, and spending years here alone would be intense. Not a decision I even need to think about now. But something that crosses my mind when I think about leaving.

I am so much better at getting what I need/want in Arusha now. I am not sure if that is good or bad. Probably both?

Just labeling this post as winter makes me pause. It is hard to believe it is so cold at home right now.

Halfway done (?)

One week into my 2 weeks here…not too much has been accomplished. I kind of forgot how pole pole (slowly) things move in Tanzania. I honestly enjoy it a lot once I readjust; Tanzania is really the only place where I do not hate spending time alone, I actually handle it very well here. But the slow pace of life is not entirely conducive to cramming as many interviews as possible into two weeks. The good news is the GSC office re-opened today, so I made it in to reconnect with friends and was able to set up four interviews for tomorrow. Plus I already have two lined up. I was also able to borrow a phone from a friend (I did not really want to pay $45 to use a phone for two weeks), so I am going to text the young people I did not get a chance to interview last summer and ask them to meet sometime this week. Plus I think I will do follow-up interviews with my friends from the summer, since I now have a more directed focus and specific questions to ask. And while I will still use the semi-structured narrative style of interviews, I think I can keep them each to about half an hour or 45 minutes, which will help the transcribing process upon my return.

I did have a crisis of sorts last week when I realized that my Harvard grad school application was due on Jan. 2! Yikes. Luckily I found this random high tech internet café (which serves the multiple purposes of car wash, barber shop, and internet café) right next to the hole in the wall place I usually use. It has 8 brand new computers, fast internet, and 3 flat screen TVs hooked up to Xbox 360s that people can pay to play video games on. Whattt? I do not even know. But I was super thankful it was there as I was able to get the vast majority of the application done. And I hope that will suffice until my return.

I am also happy to have been able to go into the office today because I was able to pick up some books…I only brought three with me from the states, which is so clearly not enough for Tanzania. I have been having a great time with my dadas and kaka this time around, even better than the first. Probably because they feel like I followed through on some unspoken agreement to make sure that we see each other again? Last night we were talking about the various “machines” in America that do a lot of the things we do by hand in TZ – washing dishes, washing clothes, drying clothes…even the fact that we have mops instead of using a cloth to clean the floor. Essentially they were flabbergasted. It is strange that they have hosted so many wazungu (apparently 11) but there are still a lot of things about the states that they do not know. I hope that someday maybe Rachel and/or Dorcus at least could come to the states to visit.

I have also more or less picked right back up with my Swahili where I left off. For some reason (maybe because it is no longer high season for tourists?) Tanzanians now readily assume that I speak Kiswahili as soon as we go through the customary greetings. Unfortunately I have to quickly follow it up with “Ninasema Kiswahili kidogo sana” (I speak only a very little Kiswahili) at which they laugh and applaud my efforts, at any rate.

The food situation is going surprisingly well. Since I am living with my family I obviously cannot refuse food – the original plan was to buy only packaged food and supplement with Clif bars. So instead I am just eating kidogo of their food and then supplementing with bars. Yum. Haha actually we have only had ugali once so far (and now I just jinxed it and we will be having ugali every night no doubt).

I have two interviews this afternoon (if all goes according to plan…you never know here) and then probably another night of “Go fish” with my sibs. It was the only game I could think of that was super easy to understand beyond crazy 8s. Does anyone have any suggestions for other simple card games? Think games for 10 year olds and younger please. And maybe include a description because I might not know it offhand, I guess I did not play many card games as a child (or really ever). Thanks!