A Day of Adventure with Super Nina and Super Boaz

So yesterday was quite the fun Saturday. I was asked by Jason and Gretchen if I could watch Bo so they could go to a movie and have some date time. I knew I didn't want to spend the day in the house, so I devised a plan of adventure. I found out that at the local libraries you can check out a "play pass" which gets up to four people into the children's museum for free. I then called around and found a nearby branch that had an available pass and then gathered the troops. Megan wasn't doing anything for the day and wanted to get out of the house as well, so she agreed to accompany me. We decided it would be really fun to have Super Nina along, so we arranged to pick her up from her hide out and away we went.

We had to stop at the library to get the pass first which presented some difficulties including an expired library card and some long over due fines, but after some sorting we were able to get things taken care of and off we went. Once we got to downtown, our next challenge was to find parking which took us a few laps around the block, but we found just the spot. After piling the kids out of the car and taking care to hold hands, we were on our way down the street to our destination. Once we arrived, the real fun began. We spent a little over an hour having meals served to us on golden platters, creating life size houses out of foam blocks, making shadow puppets in the dark, and building the miniature house of our dreams. A great time was had by all. We had to depart at 1:30 sharp to get Super Nina home for her afternoon slumber.

Once we dropped Nina off at her super hero home, it was back to the Bradley mansion for the rest of us. We were then transformed into super heros of our own, ready to save the world. Even Haddie had a cape with bright pink powers to defeat the bad guys that came our way.

I ended the day with an adventure of my own with my good friend Alyssa. It was the night of the 4A boys high school basketball state championship. We made our way to the Tacoma Dome to support our respective teams. I wanted Curtis High School to win and Alyssa wanted Gonzaga Prep. Alyssa talked me into sitting on the Gonzaga side because it was much less crowded. It was a great game and pretty close till the very end where Curtis seemed to all but give up and ended up loosing by 20 points :( They still got 2nd in the state though so not all was a loss for the season.

The Adventure Team

Nina

Boaz

Haddie

Veronica

Megan

On our way

The golden pass

Fun walking down the street

We made it!

Fun at the museum

We've got a couple of builders on our hands

Fresh Air Fun with Nina and Boaz

Super Hero time with Boaz

Alyssa and I at the game

1st Day of School 2011 at AI Steenkamp Primary School

Today was another amazing day. I love being around kids! Today was the first day of school at the primary schools here. We were warned that it would be chaotic, and it was. I loved it though. The kids were so full of joy and were so cute in their little uniforms. The opening ceremonies was amazing with all the learners clumped together. I love being at a Christian school and watching the learners and teachers pray and sing unto the Lord. It is a totally different feel from our public schools in America.

Once the opening ceremonies were over, made my way to my classroom where I found no one. Eventually I found Mrs. Emma wandering around trying to figure out where to get 8 more desks. (There were two teacher work days, but it was amazing how much had been left undone and thus the chaos of the first day with students running around and desks and chairs being moved from classroom to classroom, textbooks being located and distributed to teachers, learners still being assigned to different classes, etc.) Our learners will still with their grade 6 teacher for the first part of the morning, so I just put a chair outside our door and watched everything happen as if I was watching an entertaining movie. Eventually, our learners joined us and I got to get started getting to know them. I only met my grade 7A class today which is my smallest group.

My teacher was in and out (mostly out) the rest of the day after saying hello to the learners and giving them their schedules. Thus, I was left to manage and entertain the children for a good 4 hours of time. There were these 22 learners that I hung out with for pretty much the whole day with just me and them. They are in grade 7 so they are about 12 years old. I started by telling them a lot about the USA and answering many questions they had about my life and where I come from. Then we had a break. After the break, I asked them if they wanted to learn a song. They were very excited about this, so I taught them the On A Day Like This (you know the camp song with the clapping and snapping and nanner nannering and bulla bulla etc.) They loved it and asked to do it over and over. Then one boy said to me, "Miss teach us another one." Delighted, at their enthusiasm, I decided to teach them the Rock My Sword My Shield song which they also loved. I realized halfway through though that they didn't really get the words from me saying them, so I wrote them out on the board. Several kids took out paper and wrote down the words so they could take them home and sing the song later. It was amazing and I wish I could have gotten a video clip of it. I was made to be a teacher, this is my element, I feel so free when I am in front of kids. I can't wait to start teaching them things next week :)

For the last part of the day, I began trying to learn their names. I got most of them down I think, but I won't see them for a week so we will see how well I retain them. Their names are as follows: Tracey, Maveline, Cindy, Paulina, Arnoldus, Jeffery, Lloyd, Ishandly, Jumarie, Raullen, Algene, Freda, Chauntel, Libertine, Geraldine, Eugene, Andy, Trevor, Kerly, Andria, Sambalo, Dugary. I am usually pretty good at learning names, but it can be pretty difficult here when I can't understand the child when they say their name. Cindy wrote this list of their names out for me which helps so that I can read them while I say them and look at the learner.

We leave for the north tomorrow morning and I am really excited!

For a few artsy photos of this day see http://misswhetstine.blogspot.com/2011/01/1st-day-of-school-2011-at-ai-steenkamp.html

First Weekend

So, I thought that the weekend was going to be really calm and boring because originally we didn't have much planned for it, but that all seemed to change but for that I was glad. On Saturday, I spent my morning talking with my professors and going shopping at a much larger grocery market with them. Once back from the grocery market, we had a few minutes before we had to turn around and leave again. Through a connection that Jan has, we were invited to come to the meeting of a group here in Windhoek called Young Achievers. In short, Young Achievers is a group of young people in this area who are working towards a better future for themselves through pursuing excellence in the three areas of social, professional, and intellectual. The group meets every Saturday of the school year from 1-4pm. It was their first Saturday meeting of the year that we sat in on. When we arrived, we had time to mingle with the students, who ranged from grade 3 to university level. Once the meeting started, we sat in a large circle and had a world beach ball to pass around for the speaker to hold.

We began by taking turns introducing ourselves with saying our name, what our vision is, and what we accomplished over the holiday break. It was inspiring to listen to the students speak and tell of their visions and their accomplishments. I was surprised by the number of them who had vision to be a pilot or in the travel industry someday. Once we were done with introductions, the students took turns sharing their results of their exams from the last year of school. This was one way that they keep each other accountable academically. Next they did an ice breaker where one of our students introduced the game of continuous ultimate rock-paper-scissors. It was a great mingling game and the kids found it very fun indeed. We then listened to some announcements and heard some students talk about an outreach they had done in Okahandja the day before. Finally we ended our time there by breaking up into small groups and talking with the students about our collegiate experiences and PLU. A nice time was had by all and we left feeling very inspired.

Once back at the hotel, we decided not to go out for dinner. One thing that has been highly frustrating to me on this trip is the lack of desire of my peers to go into town for dinner. I have eaten more sandwiches in the last week than I care to discuss. I seem to be the only one willing to go out and pay for meals, so consequently since I cannot go alone, we have all been eating sandwiches and other random things out of our little grocery market for most every dinner. The difficulty is that we don't have access to a kitchen, so we can't really make anything besides sandwiches, so we must eat packaged goods which gets really old really fast. Because I am so tired of eating the same thing over and over again, I got a little bit creative this particular evening. I had boughten some spagetti noodles and pasta sauce at the store earlier in the day. We have one of those electric water heaters for heating water for tea in our rooms. I decided to try and make pasta in it and by golly it worked. I boiled the noodles in it for about 10 mins and then strained them out. I then boiled some more water and dropped the plastic baggie sauce in to warm it up. I then added it to my plate of noodles, stirred it up and added a side roll and there was dinner. The girls and my professors were quite impressed with my innovation. I was just glad to have a "real" meal to eat. Everyone else ate chips and guacamole for "dinner".

Paula has a friend named Noah who is involved in a local church here and he invited us to come to the Sunday service. So I think it was 7 of us who got up and decided to go. It was so amazing. I have been missing church and worship through song so I was so refreshed to be there. I loved the loud music and the singing and dancing. I especially liked when they sang songs which I knew the words for. During a break in songs the man who was speaking asked for all of the first time visitors to come forward and introduce themselves. That meant we got to come forward and be welcomed which was actually really great. We had to leave shortly after this time as we had another engagement for our day, but the service actually goes from 9am-Noon. We ended up having to leave at 10:30am and not getting to hear any of the message, but I want to go back next Sunday and stay for all of it.

For our afternoon engagement, we were invited by Edwin and Emmie (2 PLU Alumni) to their home for an afternoon of hanging out and dinner. It was a really great afternoon event. They have 5 children and invited over many friends who also brought their children. There was probably close to 40 people there total. We enjoyed the afternoon by playing with the kids, swimming, talking, and eating. It was super chill and very fun. My favorite one of their children is Utarera who is 6. He was so full of energy, always smiling and enjoying playing basketball with me. The food we ate was amazing! Slow bbq ribs and lamb with salads and homemade mac and cheese and homemade bread. I ate meat till my stomach was happy :) The dessert we had was amazing as well. It was some sort of sweet bread with custard on top. We were there for close to 7 hours but it was such a great time.

Tomorrow is the first day of school for which I am very excited. Then at 6:30 am on Tuesday we head for the north for 5 days where we will experience greater heat and greater authenticity. We will not be bringing computers as we will not have access to the internet. I will post tomorrow evening about the first day of school and then I will post about the trip north when I return. For pictures see http://misswhetstine.blogspot.com/2011/01/first-weekend.html The candid shots of the kids are my favorite, enjoy :)

Teacher Workdays at AI Steenkamp Primary School

So this Thursday and Friday were our first experiences with the schools here in Namibia. They were teacher workdays which no PLU students have ever attended in the past, so we had no real idea of what to expect. Our professors warned us that we may do a lot of sitting around and meeting people and just having small talk. They also said that we may not find out what we are teaching the first day or the second or the next. We just were to show up and be polite and go with the flow, so that is what we did. On the first day we arrived at 7:15 am to find a group of teachers standing outside the locked school building. Our professors walked up with us and asked one of the teachers what was going on. We were told that the day started at 7:30. Our professors decided they would leave and go to the other school to drop the girls off and then they would come back. So we just stood around till the school building was opened at about 7:30. We then went in to the staff room and sat at a large table. We greeted teachers as they arrived and introduced ourselves. The teacher one of our professors had worked with for three days this summer and another teacher they call MeMe (mama) sat and chatted with us for a long while. At about 8:30 our professors returned and talked to the principal. We got to talk with her briefly and she told us there would be a staff meeting at 9 am in the staff room. We decided to explore the school a little bit to kill the what we though a half an hour till the meeting began. The meeting didn't end up starting until 10:10 am.

The meeting had quite the agenda with 11 topics to discuss and several sub-topics for each of the 11. During the welcoming, the principal introduced us. The part of the meeting that we got to stay for (we had to leave at noon because that is when our taxi could pick us up) was fabulous. We really like the principal and her passion. We learned a lot about the school through what she was talking about as well. The meeting began with some amazing singing. It sounded like a gospel choir as the teachers all took different parts to song they all know. We tried our best to sing along when we caught onto the words.

The mission of AI Steenkamp Primary School is to provide the best quality education and to help our learners to seek the light for a better tomorrow. The school is in its 42nd year. First off you should know that they don't call the children in the school here students, they call them learners. The school day runs from 7:20 am to 1:10 pm. There are about 1,400 learners at the school and they range from K-8th grade. K-3 (lower primary) are self contained classrooms where learners are taught all their subjects by one teacher and 4-8 (upper primary) learners move to different teachers for different subjects. For what we would call 5th grade they call grade 5. Upper primary learners have 9 classes but they don't have all of them everyday. They have 8 classes at 40 mins apiece everyday but some subjects like math they have back to back for a total of 80 mins some days of the week. The schedule is quite confusing. The grading scale is different as well. To pass students must get a C or above.

Grading Scale
80-100 A
65-89 B
45-64 C
30-44 D
0-29 E

The principal said a few things that I really enjoyed. She talked about how education is not the key, the teacher is the key. She said if the teacher doesn't provide the education, there is no education. She also talked about teacher competency and the passion and drive a teacher should have for the subject matter. She said no teacher can teach well a subject that they don't even like. I enjoyed this comment as it enforces why I want to be and should be a math teacher. We went home from the first day not knowing with who or what we would be teaching. On the second day we did a lot more sitting around when we first arrived. After a long while, we asked one of the social studies Head of Department (HOD) (similar to our vice principals) if he could talk to the principal and find out what she wanted us to be doing. She told him that he could take care of figuring out what we wanted to teach. This was exciting as it finally got the ball rolling. I chose to work with Mrs. Emma Muundjua because I wanted to teach math at the grade 7 level. All the teachers teach 2 or more subjects and home ecology (similar to home economics) seemed of interest to me as well. So just like that it was done, I was paired with Mrs. Emma. I went to talk to her and she seemed pretty open to the idea of working with me so that was great. She talked with me for a little while about the content we would be teaching and I was delighted to have my thoughts confirmed that I will be teaching very similar concepts of fractions, decimals, and whole numbers that I taught back in the states. The schedule as I said before is very complex, but I will see all the classes of grade 7 learners through out the week for home ecology and three of them for math. There are five grade 7 classes of learners: 7A, 7B, 7C, 7D, and 7E.

I got to see inside my classroom, but Mrs. Emma didn't have anything for me to work on. So, I spent the rest of my morning playing with three learners who were running around the school. They have paper airplanes (similar to pinwheel) made of a piece of old paper, a stick, and a lollipop stick. The little boys loved showing us how they built their planes and teaching us how to make them spin as you run. Spending time with these learners got me excited to meet my learners on Monday.
For pictures see http://misswhetstine.blogspot.com/2011/01/teacher-workdays-at-ai-steenkamp.html

Safari Day

On Wednesday we traveled about a half an hour north to go on a safari. Typically when we travel in Windhoek, we use a taxi service called Paradise and our drivers are Shane and Grant. When we travel with them however, we must split up into two vehicles when our professors are with us. Because of this, we used a different taxi service to drive north with which we had a van large enough to fit all of us. This was a nice thing and our driver was amazing. His name is Uanee and he was full of knowledge about Namibia. As we passed things on the road he would explain them and their history to us. He also was super hilarious which made for a very pleasant drive. We learned that men who don't have work will hang out on the side of road at major intersections and wait. When people need workers then, they drive by and say the number of men they need and then that many men jump in the car or truck and go work. They usually work for 1-3 hours time and get paid about 100-200 Namibian dollars ($15-$30 American) an hour. Once they are done working, they return to the intersection to wait for more work. We learned also about the hospital health care in this area. We passed 2 hospitals which Uanee explained that prior to 1990 one was for whites and one was for blacks. Now though, both serve all patients regardless of color. He said too that by law medical is free, but not all people know that right that they have, so they end up paying the cost of 10-15 Namibian ($1.50-$2 American) for a consultation and medication. After driving for about a half hour we arrived at Okapuka Ranch. Once there, we boarded our Zebra striped safari truck and headed out into the wild. We drove around for a good two hours in search of wild African animals in their natural habitat. Our driver Isaac was amazing and found us all the animals we wanted to see. We got super close to many of them. Some of the animals we saw were: giraffes, springbuck, wildebeests, impalas, a mongoose, jackals, oryx, red hartebeests, warthogs, vultures, crocodiles and rhinos. How close we were able to get to each type of animal depended on the skittishness of the animal. The first animal we got really close to was the giraffe. We found about 12 giraffes just hanging out and eating. We drove up to them slowly and spent a long time photographing them. One of the girls here with us, Jill, is in love with giraffes and she got teary eyed at the sight of them so close to her. The other animal that was awesome to be so close to was the rhino. We literally could have jumped on their backs and rode them around, they were that close to our truck. Though I was sad and slightly disappointed that there were no elephants on our safari, it was still an incredible and a seemingly once in a lifetime experience. (For us it will be twice in a lifetime as we are going on another safari next week when we go up north to Etosha :) For pictures see http://misswhetstine.blogspot.com/2011/01/safari-day.html

Scavenger Hunt and Relaxing

So on Tuesday, we were given a task by our professors that we must complete. The only thing they told us was to be out front at 10:30 am ready to go into downtown for the morning. They armed us with a map of the city of Windhoek and the cell phone they have boughten us to make calls to our hotel and taxi company. They gave us too a list of 5 places that we must find in the city and a few questions to answer for each location. We all were ready for the challenge and set out in our taxi with our trusty driver Shane. Once in Windhoek, Shane dropped us off at the Namibia Craft Centre. We looked around there for a long while at all the amazing things people had made with their hands. My favorites were the things made out of old pop cans. There were picture frames, guitar figurines, volkswagens, trucks, and a few other items made of recycled materials. Once we'd had a look around the craft centre, we found the answer to our question. Paul's cafe is a restaurant that is run by people with special needs in Namibia. From there, we made our way to the tourist information center where we got the answer to the location on our map of the other places we needed to visit. We then made our way up to the Namibia Stat Museum. We first walked through a seemingly deserted building and decided we were in the wrong place, so we found another museum that displayed history of the different cultures found in Namibia. Once we had toured through all the exhibits, we made our way to the National Art Gallery of Namibia. This was a small art gallery featuring local artists from Namibia. We weren't allowed to take pictures inside the gallery, but my favorite exhibit was a large succession of watercolor paintings that went along with a children's book about chameleons. From the gallery, we made our way to the Namibian theater which was closed, so we were unable to go inside to check it out. We did however see a little lizard guy who was stuck inside. Our last stop was the mall which we had been to the day before, so we were familiar with where it was. Once finished with our scavenger hunt, we made our way back to the tourist information center were shane was waiting for us with our van. Apparently three guys had followed us from the somewhere near the mall because a policeman met us at our van and asked us if we were okay. It was a cool moment because it was really expressed to us how much we are looked out for here. One of the other taxi drivers standing by said to us, “You are safe here, no Americans, will be harmed here in Namibia.” We had been told that before, but it was cool to see some tangibility to those words. Shane then drove us back to Casa where the sun was beating down hot and we had nothing but time, so what better way to spend the afternoon than relaxing by the pool and getting our tan on? We laid out for over an hour and hopped in the pool occasionally to cool off. We then had some down time around our rooms. Around dinner time, we decided we would check out the Texas Road House (pretty fun that they have a restaurant from Texas here :) for dinner. This was a fun very long dinning experience for us. We were seated in the back room by ourselves which was great because we didn't have to worry about using our loud American voices. We all ordered burgers and enjoyed our time to talk with one another as it took about an hour to get our food and another hour to get our check. We are learning that things move much slower in Namibia and no one really operates on a schedule. Sometimes the slow pace is really nice, other times it drives our American brains nuts. Since we had nothing to do after dinner though, it didn't matter that we were there for so long. Once dinner was over, we went back to Casa and relaxed some more and hit they hay for the day. For pictures see http://misswhetstine.blogspot.com/2011/01/scavenger-hunt-and-relaxing.html

First Full Day in Windhoek

Monday, January 10th was our first full day in Namibia. For this day, Paula and Jan had organized quite the itinerary for us. We began with a nice tour of the city of Windhoek. We first drove up to high point that overlooked the city. There we found some awesome huge centipede type bug that some of the girls picked up and let crawl on their arms. The view of the city was amazing and it was fun to see all the different buildings from a bird's eye view. Next we traveled to the parliament building in Windhoek were we enjoyed some fun looking lizards and many beautiful flowers. We then traveled to the outskirts of the city to a place called Katitura which means a place where no one wants to live. This is where people were relocated to during the time of Apartide. Katitura is where the students we will be teaching live. The living conditions are poor here and few people have running water in their homes. The people mostly walk everywhere and we saw many businesses including barber shops, bars, and car washes. The community in Katitura is very tight knit and family is very important to the people there. The buildings and houses are called shanties and are made of scraps of tin and old boards. While in Katitura, we stopped at the one of the schools our student teachers will be at called Moses Garoeb. It was amazing to be there and the desire to learn that is present here was evident even from the empty establishment. On our way back to the taxi from the school, we ran into some neighborhood kids and all of our hearts melted. They were so happy to see us and posed as we took pictures of them. Seeing the excitement of these children got all of us excited to start teaching next week. From Katitura, we went into downtown Windhoek where we exchanged money at the bank and bought some much needed supplies. Some of the girls bought adapters for the power supply and others bought bags and shoes. I bought a pair of sunglasses. For some reason I hadn't thought to pack some and my eyes had been squinting the entire time we've been here. Before our time at the mall, we went to a place called Zoo Cafe for lunch where most of us got pizza to eat. We also decided to try a local soft drink called Rock Shandy. It was made of sparkling water, 7-up, and something else we couldn't understand when the waitress told us. It was pretty good. It sorta tasted like ginger in liquid form. At about 4pm we headed back to the taxi and Shane drove us home. It started to pour down rain and I mean pour when we were coming home. We spent the rest of the evening hanging out and low key around the hotel. We had a meeting as a group at 5:30 to debrief the day and that was really good. We went around the room and talked about our highlights of the day, something that shocked us, and questions we had. It was really good to hear everyones different perspectives on the experiences we had. For pictures of these adventures see http://misswhetstine.blogspot.com/2011/01/first-full-day-in-windhoek.html