January 13th to January 19th 2024
Hey I’m late posting this but life has been busy lately.
Well, it was bound to happen at some point. After 3 months of being here I finally got sick and had food poisoning. I ate some meat samosas from a restaurant here and three hours later I was violently sick. You know it hit you really bad, when it is 95˙F and you are putting on a sweatshirt because you are freezing and shivering. In the grand scheme of things, it really wasn’t that bad, and it passed after a couple of days. It also hit me over the weekend, so I was able to go back to school and teach on Monday which was good.
Monday and Tuesday were my full days of teaching. The curriculum for the 10th graders was on “Getting a Job.” I had fun with the students and getting them to talk about how to answer different interview questions and showing them what a resume is. One thing that I do appreciate in the U.S. is the ease of obtaining resources. Here in Madagascar, none of the classrooms have any sort of technology so it is not possible to show any educational videos to the students. It is also not always possible to give the students handouts or photocopies of lessons. The private school that I teach at has one printer and it is expensive to make photocopies, so the school director limits how many copies can be made. It does make you appreciate what some of the Malagasy teachers are doing. For example, if they want to teach about organs in the body, they have to draw pictures of the heart or other organs and label them themselves.
Anyway, we had a good lesson on “Getting a Job.” We also practiced how to have a strong handshake and make a good first impression. Whenever I teach my students, I usually learn something myself. Here in Madagascar, it is not polite to make eye contact when you shake someone’s hand or when you talk to them in general. This is very different to the U.S. and something that I have to try to get better at while I am here in Madagascar.
The rest of the week was slower because a cyclone approached the island and caused a lot of rain and wind in Majunga. To help keep the students safe the government closed all the schools for the rest of the week. The cyclone started to hit on Tuesday afternoon and I got pretty drenched riding my moto back from school. But the rest of the week was pretty nice because it actually gave me more time to recover from my food poisoning and relax and read my book. Overall, another good week in Madagascar. See you next week for more.