Before I start I would like to apologise for not writing a blog post in such a long time. It was hard to write one at the end of term as I was very busy. Then I was on holiday which you will hear in future posts. My laptop got broken on holiday which made it easy to put off writing a post until now.
So I didn’t write many posts last term as I was busy teaching. There were a few frustrations in the term as there was sports day which removed a day or so of teaching. The school also hosted the inter-zone athletics competition which took 3 more days of teaching so at times it felt as though there wasn’t enough time to make any progress with classes. We had many assessments all 4 were conducted in week 3 6 9 and 12 to asses the students’ progress.
This meant a lot of marking and test making which got pretty tiring! Especially as one of the chemistry teachers was transferred to another school. This meant the class needed someone to mark their tests so the Head of Department and I shared the papers. In total in week 9 and week 12 I marked my four classes and 3 or his which meant 7 class’ assessments equating to around 300 papers each time. Although tiring and a bit dull, I think it did improve my speed at marking.
My classes’ performance wasn’t amazing which was a shame but it was sort of expected. The performance in science and maths in Zambia is quite poor generally. It’s hard to say why this is there are a lot of factors that might contribute. Like poor facilities, large class sizes and many other things. I’ve been finding it challenging to get them to think about things for themselves as often if you ask a questions that isn’t simply a fact most won’t be able to answer. I have tried a few things but enthusiasm can be quite low as they have had a long time to decide they dislike the subject and don’t want to get involved in lessons.
Despite the heat getting better people still keep falling asleep in class I think from lack of sleep at night.
Some other highlights from this term were judging a debate competition in the school on corporal punishment. It was good fun but many of the students were very nervous and seemed to put on a strange accent which made it hard to actually understand what they were saying. It was interesting to see how they do a debate but it’s certainly different to how I thought they were done in the UK. As is customary we got our free drink and biscuit for our attendance. We also came for a quiz night at one point when the girls came to visit us.
I also went to Petauke just to visit the girls there. We chatted and watched a few films which was nice. The only problem was getting back to Mambwe was a very very long journey. I got into a taxi to go home and foolishly paid once I got in as he needed to fuel up. Then the clutch in the car failed. The driver got us to a place where people could help fix it but after 5 minutes of trying it started to chuck it down for about 30 minutes non stop. The fixing stopped until the rain subsided. When it finally stopped someone manage to make the car work. Then we went to go and collect passenegers. This took another 30-40 minutes. Then we set off. The clutch was causing problems all the way needing to be fixed at least 3 times with a crowbar. Not really sure how that helped but it did. We ended up doing a kangaroo start every time we started which alarmed most of the passengers. my company was ever changing as everyone seemed to just be taking short hopps along the route I was taking. I got home very late and was very tired!
I don’t think I wrote about my birthday in my last post. the volunteers from Petauke and Katete came to Mambwe to visit us. We didn’t do much in the day apart from walk to the boma which was very very muddy! Especially as the girls had only brought flipflops to walk in so they ended up barefoot at times! They decided it was a long way to our boma as it takes about 50 minutes to walk there! We went to one of the teachers houses from my birthday and had a really nice meal with lots of people I had made a lemon meringue pie in a saucepan and a chocolate orange cheese cake which were very nice but extremely rich! We had a party at his house and went home the next day.
Nchwala is a traditional ceremony done by the Ngoni people near Katete. We went to see the cermony and borrowed a teacher’s car to go there. When we got there it was chaos. There were people selling things everywhere and a lot of people. We didn’t mange to get to see the actual ceremony because you were meant to have a ticket and we didnt have one. They might have let us in anyway but we couldn’t manage to get to the entrance as there were tonnes of people all trying to get in without a ticket as well. I didn’t really fancy pushing my way through especially as lots of people had tradtional spears and shields to bash through. The event was policed by the local scouts who had quite a heavyhanded approach to croud management. It was interesting but not particularly surprising to find a scout group in Zambia. We met the girls and chatted a bit before heading back to chipata for some shopping.
After the shopping we set off home. All was going well until we just got past Mambwe on the way to the person whose car we borrowed’s house. When the accelerator seemed to stop working. It turned out we had run out of fuel. The fueld guage doesn’t work very well and had been on empty the whole journey even when we had filled it up with 10 litres! The car was nearly empty when we got it so we had used all the fuel and were about 1km from his house but the car would not go. We rang him to ask for help but it would take a while to get some fuel to the car. So we decided to push the car to the house. It was very tiring as only one of us could push while the other steered. It took a while but eventually we got to his house. We were exhausted but still needed to get the food home and oursleves. fortunately another teacher gave us a lift. We have learnt now that you should always put more fuel in than you think you need just in case.
We also got our bike fixed last term by getting a new tyre and pedals. It only cost 12 pounds in total to get it fixed. It makes going to the boma and back so much faster cutting s 2 and a half hour trip down to under an hour!
The end of the term was also really busy as we llwere writing tests invigilating and marking tests then inputting them into the computer system at the school to be sent home. We were also planning the holiday in Malawi.
Read the next posts for more on the holiday.
Jack in Zambia 