This is Retse, he is my 8 year old neighbor. Every evening I look forward to watching him go out and round up the sheep. He will hold them all by ropes, so they won't eat the veggies or flowers, and herd them back to their pen. Most of the time they fully drag him along, but he always has a big smile on his face. I sometimes go out and try to help him, after all I did grow up with sheep, but usually there is not much for me to do. The children here are given a lot of responsibility and they grow up quick. Of course this has both its good and bad points, but for the most part I am usually highly impressed with their maturity and skills.
This was another busy week at school. Teachers finished up working on their IEPs for their students and we were happy to have my principal back, she was away last week. I had the Peace Corps country director come for a visit. Of course she came on the day that I was giving a presentation and I was even more nervous than usual. The presentation was on mental retardation (mental disability to be more pc), causes, characteristics, prevalence, etc. I was surprised at how much the teachers wanted to discuss these topics and about how much I learned. Apparently there is a strong belief here that if you have a child with a cognitive or mental disability a lot of people believe that it is because of witchcraft. I also learned that there is a common medicine that the natural healers give to pregnant women that now is believed to cause some disabilites. Also that pregnant women don't want to be around people with disabilities because they think their fetus can catch it. We tried to clear all of this up, in an hour, but I can see that there is still a lot of disability awareness work to be done here! I was happy that the director got to meet the students, many of whom entertained her with impromptu yoga routines which they learned from our regular morning routine. I think that will be sustainable.
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| BEFORE |
Finally I wanted to show you my "before" and "after" photos of our storage closet at school. A few weeks ago I got a peek into the closet for the first time when they were putting away winter blankets. I couldn't believe it. There were bags and bags of donated clothes, bedding, school supplies, etc. I don't think that anyone intended for it to get this bad, but the school is grossly understaffed and it just wasn't really anyone's job to organize or distribute. I begged my principal at the time to let me clean it out, but she wanted to wait until a time when teachers could help me and we could actually give away the clothes to students who need them. Well this week she finally agreed to let me dig for some shoes for a boy, and once I started I couldn't stop. After two days of sorting, piling, labeling, etc. two teachers and myself got the job done. It would be even better if there was a Container Store here. Unfortunately the clothes still have not been given out, I have found that people really like to save things here, probably from fear of tougher times when they will not have anything. I will continue to work on encouraging them to use the things they have instead of just locking them up, but I also know that their fears are justified. I also found 3 good wheelchairs under the pile. One was given to a student who needed it and the other 2 are now easy to grab when needed.
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| AFTER |
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| Good thing I have burglar bars! |
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