Top Tips

My main role here is in training and sharing ideas with teachers around how to make their classrooms more child friendly, inclusive, and accessible for children with special needs.  Some of these ideas never seem to get put into practice, some get tried but are hard to keep up, and some work like a charm.  These are the top 3 Guyana tried and tested simple, easy and effective ideas.

1. The 'Magic Box' - This began as a way to try and make sure everyone is participating when doing training sessions with teachers.  We decided to get all teachers to put their names in a box, from which we would pull out names at random to respond to questions or feed back after group work.  Names that have been chosen got put to one side until everyone had had a turn.  The box quickly evolved into a labelled, decorated 'magic box', with the teachers shouting an enthusiastic chorus of 'hocus pocus' every time a name was picked.  I am now baffled as to why any teacher of facilitator would try to work with a group without using some kind of random system to choose who should respond to questions.  Teachers and pupils have really taken to the idea, and I also now use this in every training session I do.  It is great for pace, good fun, and keeps everyone on their toes.
2. 1, 2, 3, Eyes On Me - Rappers, rock stars and children's entertainers have known for years that a call and response routine is a great way to get everyone excited and in sync.  It works for teachers too.  The primary school (or grown up) version is that the teacher says '1, 2, 3, eyes on me' and the pupils respond '1, 2, eyes on you'. For teenagers it might work best to make up a more relevant call and response routine.  One of the biggest challenges for many teachers, myself included, especially with teenagers, is getting them to pay attention and listen.  The call and response trick seems to work like a charm, and in a friendly and positive way.  No more 'we can wait here all day', 'it's your own time you're wasting', and the other classic empty threats we all remember from our school days.
3. Set questions or tasks that start easy and get harder - Differentiation is difficult and time consuming, and to teachers in Guyana it is a new and unfamiliar concept.  The education system is based around all pupils doing exactly the same work, whether they finish it in ten seconds or two hours.  Differentiation can be a tenuous concept for teachers in the UK too, and is often forgotten or done badly.  It was certainly something that was always talked about, but little understood, when I was in teacher training.  The simplest way I have found to explain how to do differentiation in practice is: when giving class work, start with easy questions that review previous knowledge, move on to slightly more challenging ones that address the new content, and finish with an optional task to stretch the thinking of the quicker workers.

What are your best teaching or facilitating tips?

If you fart in your house, you have to fan it…

… or your neighbour will smell it, and the whole of Guyana will hear about it.
 
This really is a small country.

Guyana covers an area about the same area as the UK, but most of that is uninhabited jungle. The total population is only three quarters of a million, about the same as Leeds. In practice, this seems to mean that the famous ‘six degrees of separation’ theory here could probably be slimmed down to one degree of separation. Maybe two. Everybody knows everybody.
 
As a white person living in a small town in a fairly rural region, where tourists are more or less unheard of, you stand out. People notice you, and remember where they saw you and what you were doing at the time. Half the people I meet, even in other towns, knows where I live and have seen me on my balcony changing a tyre, or doing shopping in the market. The teller in the bank recognised me and remembered my full name when he saw me a week later in a bar. The other half of the people I meet just seem to know half the people I know, or are related to one of my neighbours, or live next door to one of my friends.

In the space of a few hours at the heritage month event in Orealla, 8 hours travel from my house, I happened to talk to people who by chance turned out to be: the brother of a colleague; the boyfriend of a VSO volunteer in Georgetown; and a producer who had interviewed a friend about her work on a number of occasions for national television.

So I really have to be careful what I am seen doing. And avoid farting in public.

Or at least make sure to fan it…

The photo below is irrelevant to the rest of the post, but I walk past this gate nearly every day and it always makes me giggle.

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Culture Shock

The three phases of culture shock, as expressed in my reaction to blackouts:

• Phase One: Honeymoon Phase
  
  Wow, a blackout. How exciting. I’ll go out onto the balcony. Look at the street! Surreal. No lights. No electricity hum. Is that a shooting star? No, a firefly. The street is dimly lit in black and white by the sliver of a moon. So many stars. This is stunning. Magical. We should have blackouts in England. People would stop what they were doing and just take a little moment to think and be still. It would be great. How beautifully calm it is. Serene. OK, there’s howling dogs and a truck thunders past every two minutes, but otherwise it’s amazing. I could just sit here and take this in for hours.
  

• Phase Two: Negotiation Phase
  
  Lights click off. Fans wind down. Thirty seconds to save my work. Comeoncomeoncomeon savesavesave nononono dontfreezeupdontfr[CLICK]
  
  Bollocks.
  
  How does anyone get anything done in this country? Can’t they manage to keep the power on for one day? Now I have to sit here and sweat out my liver. No fan, no aircon, no breeze, no light. Hot, stagnant, clingy, sticky air. Nothing to do but ooze and wait. How long today? They could at least tell us. Or warn us before hand. Or something. No wonder nothing works.
  
  
• Phase Three: Adjustment Phase
  
  Oh, a blackout. [gets torch, lights candle, carries on cooking]

Unfortunately, it’s nothing like that simple in other respects. In most elements of life I think I am just approaching the border into phase two. This is virgin soil, uncharted territory. I’ve never been anywhere properly foreign long enough to get past phase one before.

Wish me luck!

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Morning Ritual

I spent the weekend with another volunteer visiting Orealla, an Amerindian village far into the jungle, about 50 miles up the Corentyne river from Corriverton. This was for the launch of Amerindian Heritage Month.

I could tell you all about the dramatic journey to get there, leaping across a huge gap in the dark and rain onto the village boat and then trying iguana curry on the six and a half hour boat ride, or about the village life and how it revolves around the river, or about the complex political subtexts that became apparent during the heritage month event, or the interesting and strange people we met along the way.

But instead, I'd rather share a true story that was told to me over the weekend.

I'll keep the names anonymous. Lets call the two protagonists Bob and Jim.

Bob was a young man who'd just moved into Jim's house, as he was starting to work for Jim's company, having been taken in as an apprentice.

Every morning Bob would get up, and take the container of water that he found outside his room to use to wash his face and brush his teeth. After about a month of this, Bob turned around one morning after finishing his bathroom ritual to find Jim bright blue in the face, doubled up with laughter.

"How [gasp] long have you been using [wheeze] that for?"

"The last month, so what?"

"That's [chortle] my daughter's bedpan. That isn't water."

---

Well it made me chuckle anyway. If you're still more intereted in Orealla, here's a few pictures:

The Brazilian Jacko

Last night I had an experience which shattered my stereotypes about Brazilians. It was on a par with discovering that Germans are disorganized and inefficient, Italian men shy about women and the Irish would rather stay in for a game of scrabble than go down the pub.

The shocking revelation? Millions of Brazilians are fans of really, really bad music.

It started with a chance conversation by the pool in the Pegasus. This is Guyana’s most prestigious (or at least most expensive) of hotels, and many of the volunteers have adopted it as a place to hang out and cool down, as you can get a month’s pass to use the gym and pool fairly cheaply (by our standards). I had my misgivings about getting sucked into some kind of ex-pat world populated by diplomats, servicemen and the very richest locals, but the lure of the pool quickly proved too much after a week of sweating and heat rash.

We were chatting on the sun-loungers about our options for the evening out and a local girl who was there for a swim with her children told us a little bit about some of the bars and nightclubs, and that there was a concert that evening at the National Park (Georgetown’s main bit of parkland) being given by a huge star from Brazil. She couldn’t really describe the music other than that it was ‘brazilian, uptempo, funky’. This was enough for me – when you say ‘Brazilian Music’ I think Bebel Gilberto, Chico Buarke, CSS, Bondo De Role, DJ Marky. Energetic, stylish, smooth, groovy samba vibes are the minimum level of expectation.

We rounded up a group of the volunteers to head down there, aided in our recruitment by an article in the local paper promoting the concert which described the main act, Pepe Moreno, as being ‘Brazil’s Micheal Jackson’ who regularly plays across the world to sold out 60 and 70 thousand seater stadiums. After braving the touts, the official ticket sellers who tried their best to overcharge us, and the weapons search, we got into the arena to find a DJ playing some pretty groovy house music. The crowd appeared to be a mixture of Afro and Amerindian Guyanese and a fair few Brazilians.

‘Desejo’, the support band were also from Brazil. They were made up of one guy with a couple of keyboards, three singers, and two dancing girls with a selection of increasingly astonishing outfits. They played a series of continuous medleys seemingly each structured around one pre-set rhythm on the keyboard with occasional riffs recognizable from American pop or RnB. The singers, two guys and one girl, shared out the lead singing duties between them. We were not entirely sure whether the keyboard player was actually playing anything, or whether he just pressed ‘demo’ at the start of the concert and mimed the rest. This fun but slightly baffling onslaught of music was livened up considerably by the dancers' progress through hula skirts, full on carnival feathers and skimpy rodeo outfits.

Desejo were followed by a disorganized interlude with the two comperes, one Guyanese and one Brazilian, telling us all about the various sponsors and running a dance competition between five girls plucked from the crowd. The one in the shortest skirt won easily.


After a very long ‘five minute’ break to set up, Pepe Moreno entered. The Main Man. The Brazilian Michael Jackson. The biggest artist to hit Guyana for years. To rapturous applause, announced with confetti cannons showering silver ribbons into the crowd, came . . . a slightly sweaty chubby man in a white vest, singing/shouting to a cheesy backdrop, drenched in stadium rock style echo and reverb. The overall effect was less a like Brazilian Michael Jackson, and more of a Brazilian U2 if they had their instruments stolen and replaced with a cheap keyboard stuck on the ‘latin’ preset. I tried to be as open minded as possible, and concentrate on watching the dancing girls to get me through, but the group lasted about 15 minutes before admitting defeat and heading home.

The Dutch volunteer told us this morning about how her mum eats space cakes and listens to the Grateful Dead, and she went to a nude beach when she was little. So Brazilians may like terrible music, but at least there are still some stereotypes we can rely on.