August 16, 2007 (written by Janeen)

Good news! Today some girls in form C really put a smile on my face. I have received some books from home to add to the school library. Thankfully, I did not have to start a library from the beginning. At least there was something already in place that I get to help enhance. Anyway, my parents and grandparents have both sent some books. It has taken me some time to get them into the library (about a month) because I had to rearrange a bit, stamp the books with the school stamp, and glue in a small piece of paper for the return dates (plus it was winter break). Today 3 girls came in to check out a book and they squealed with excitement when I told them that there were new books. I couldn’t help but smile as they oohed and ahed over the new books. They were so excited that they had a hard time deciding which book they wanted to check out! So that made me feel good. Even if the library is often a disaster and many students can’t put the books away properly—I guess it is good that they are reading!

I just wrote a grant from Friends of Lesotho, and I was granted 500 rand to purchase different colored stickers to put on the spines of books. They are already in categories, but students have a hard time putting them back where they found them. So, I am hoping that the new color coded sticker system will help in maintaining the organization of the library. The idea is to create a system that will be easy to manage and someone will actually keep it up when I leave!

Other than that I am keeping busy. My form A students wrote their first quarter 3 exam yesterday. I am already half way done with the grading! Yippee! No composition this time though, so that always makes it easier. My form B students will write their first quarter 3 exam next week and they will have a composition. I am also working on developing a rubric so that I can be consistent when I grade the compositions and so that the students can know what to expect. I will share this with my colleagues too. It seems that I always have something to do and am working constantly from 7:40 until 4:30 everyday with almost no breaks in between. Then of course at 4:30 its just about time to start preparing dinner as well as dish out punishments to students who have not done their assignments! I’m often tired at 6:30, when we have just finished dinner and the dishes. We have been crawling into bed then and watching a DVD. It is still pretty cold at night, so it’s really the only warm spot! Did I mention it is REALLY hard to get out of bed at night?

Oh yeah! I also got nominated to be on the party planning committee to plan the 30th celebration of our school. I was not too excited about that, but the way they do it here is not very democratic. Here is how the meeting went. “We need a committee of teachers and I want to spend roughly 15,000 rand to throw this party. The committee will plan the program and find funds for the event. The planning needs not interfere with classes.”—headmaster. “We need to all use our outside resources to fund this”—head of English dept. “The committee members also need to be responsible”—teacher. “I nominate M’e Janeen”—deputy headmaster. “I second that”—another teacher… and BOOM I am on the committee along with 7 other staff members. One teacher appealed, but someone had already seconded that she be on the committee and of course she is on it whether she likes it or not! We’ve been meeting often, which means I have less time to work on my other mini-projects, but oh well. I am here as a volunteer at the school and this is what they want me doing. We’ve already planned a picture taking fundraiser—charging 5 rand per print when it costs 2. They are also going to show some movies and charge 2 rand as an entrance fee. We have written letters to businesses around to solicit funds as well. Apparently they want to raise funds to pay for the event initially and then any excess money they raise will be used towards development: like repairing the classrooms, building a science lab, etc. We’ll see what happens. At the event we may be selling T-shirts to raise funds as well as possibly doing an auction. We don’t have much time to plan this huge event as it will be on the 6th of October, so we’ll see what gets done. I have luckily stayed off the radar from taking any integral roles on the committee (i.e. chairperson, secretary, or treasurer).

Things are going well though! Jason is pretty busy too. He has been running to and from Maseru. Our funds have been interesting. We did take a nice vacation to Mauritius, and now we are 2 weeks away from being paid and we have about 575 rand left. I think we won’t starve, but we will probably have a larger than normal list of things we want when Sept. 1st rolls around! Peace Corps only pays us once every 3 months because all banks here charge a fee for EVERYTHING (deposits, withdrawals, ATM, going into the bank…everything!). So they save money by doing it that way, but it usually makes things tight around the last couple of weeks! Especially this time because we did a bit more visiting of other volunteers while we were out of school. Transport costs are usually the killer!

Well I guess it has been a while since I have written a blog and that is apparent by the way I have rambled on. So I hope I haven’t bored you too much!

Lots of love, Janeen

P.S. I had a really good lesson this week about question tags with my form B students. I get happy when that happens. That is really great, isn’t it?