March 15, 2014

Last January when we were at our Midservice conference in Maputo, Elizabeth and I went down a couple days earlier to participate in the EGRA/Aprender a Ler conference. I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before but Elizabeth and I applied and were accepted into this library program last year when we were in Mariri. It was hard to get things started for us because we moved to Meconta but we as of this Saturday we are finally getting a move on! We received a hundred and fifty children’s books in Portuguese. This program, however, has two parts. We needed to start a tutoring program as well so we can help contribute data. Previous studies had show that many children here in the north could not even recognize letters. USAID, who conducted the study, will want to compare their results against the students that we tutor for a year in 1^st through 3^rd grade so we can hopefully show that tutoring and having libraries are important. We want to keep building and funding new libraries here in Mozambique!

Elizabeth did a great job organizing and implementing the training of the tutors/volunteers/facilitators, who are our students at the school. Most of them are in grade 10 and 12 but we do have a few in 8 and 11 as well. After showing them how the lessons would work, we made activities with our volunteers that they could use to help students practice literacy. We got a lot of great ideas of what we could do with recyclable materials and how to do things cheap from our conference in Maputo. They also gave us tons of materials besides books, which included our awesome alphabet we can hang up.

Elizabeth giving a sample lesson. Today the letter was “C.”

Making sand letters on cardboard. Kids like the texture and they can practice the correct way to write each letter without wasting paper.

By the end of the day, we all went to the building that would become our library and painted the walls. The building itself needs a lot of work and it’s not safe keeping the books in there until we get better windows, doors, and grates. However, we’re going to start bringing around thirty books each day we have lessons for the kids to read and then bring them back in the house to store. The tutors all seemed really excited to participate so we’re hoping all goes well!

 

Painting the walls.

 

Group picture!