October, 2011
The school year is finally in full swing. In September Belizean school days are so frequently interrupted with national
holidays, children’s rallies and teachers’ union meetings that not much gets
started in the schools until October.
Now that October is here, I am busier than I have been since arriving in
Belize. I have been assigned to five
schools in the Stann Creek District that are piloting a literacy program, and I
have spent the last month learning how to find the buses to travel out to these
schools and getting acquainted with the teachers and principals.
I will describe what my weeks have looked like for the past
month, but by the time you finish reading this blog post, my schedule may have
changed. I will continue to meet with
teachers and principals to determine which schools and teachers need
assistance.
On Mondays I travel by teachers’ bus to Hope Creek Methodist
School. I should explain that most of
the schools in Belize are managed by churches.
There are a few government schools, but Christianity is the official
religion of Belize, and Christian prayers are recited even in the government
schools. There is an official prayer of
Belize, and in all schools students and teachers pray and study religion in the
mornings as part of the curriculum. The
government of Belize pays the salaries of all teachers of Belize (except for a
few exclusively private schools), no matter the denominational affiliation, so
all schools are under the auspices of the government’s Ministry of Education
while most are administered by various denominations of churches. This is difficult for our American minds to
grasp, but there is no separation of church and state in Belize.
The teachers’ buses that I ride out to the schools are cast-off ancient,
rickety American school buses that pick up all the teachers who live in town,
and transport us out to the villages.
The village of Hope Creek is only about nine miles from Dangriga, so it
doesn’t take me very long to get to the school on Monday mornings. I leave at 7:15 and begin working with the
teachers and principals. At Hope Creek
there is one young teacher completing his internship so I am considering working
with him. Only a small minority of
teachers in Belize have a Bachelor’s Degree, another small number have an
Associate’s Degree, some have a smattering of training in Internet-based and
summer courses, and an even greater number of teachers have only a high school diploma. Recently the Ministry of Education made it
mandatory for teachers to receive their certification within five years of
beginning their teaching career. As a
Peace Corps Volunteer I am expected to work with both experienced and new
teachers to promote the development of literacy.
In the little
school in the village of Hope Creek there are many students who enter the primary grades speaking little or no English. On
one Monday while I was there, three little Guatemalan siblings were registered
by their mother, and neither the 9-year-old, nor the 8-year-old, nor the
6-year-old had ever stepped inside a school.
Belizean schools have many challenges in addition to language barriers. There are few resources, especially in the
villages, where there is less likely to be a public library than in the
towns. In fact, there are few bookstores
in Belize, so schools rely a lot on donations of used books from the States,
Great Britain and Canada. The Ministry
of Education does provide text books in all subjects to the students, but
children must bring their own pencils, notebooks, crayons, and some schools
expect them to bring toilet paper and copy paper for the teachers to have in
their classrooms. They must all wear uniforms. None of the schools
with which I work has a school library, although some teachers accumulate their
own picture books and storybooks and display a small classroom library. One of my five schools has no functioning copy
machine. Only one of the five schools
has internet access, and most of the students have no access to computers
either at school or at home.
On Tuesdays I
board a different teacher’s bus at 7:15 and travel to a more distant village in a lovely
little valley up the Hummingbird Highway.
This is a Baptist school, with the enchanting name of Light of the
Valley. Here I have begun to help a
Standard 2 (third grade) teacher learn how to assess the reading levels of her
students. She has a group of children
who are significantly behind the rest of the class in reading, and has asked
for assistance in developing intervention strategies for improving their
literacy skills. At this same school I
am also working with a young teacher who is beginning his first year of
teaching Infant 1 (Kindergarten). There
is another Infant 1 teacher in the school who is a very effective teacher, and so
I substituted for this beginning teacher so that he could observe this other
model teacher and learn from her. He
reported that he learned a great deal from observing her, and they now are planning
lessons together. What I learned by
substituting for him was that this young teacher has a challenging job. Two of the children have special needs, and
one has Down Syndrome. I spoke Spanish
to the children who didn’t seem to understand the story I was reading, and
discovered that over half of the class is non-English speaking. After my attempt at substituting for him, I
gained a fresh understanding and respect for the challenges he faces each
day.
Morning assembly at Light of the Valley Baptist School
Miss Logan's Infant 1 class at Light of the Valley Baptist School
Wednesdays are my
longest days. I board the teachers’ bus
at 6 am and return at 5:30 pm. The Roman
Catholic school of Our Lady of Bella Vista is in a village 1 ½ hours from
Dangriga. With a student population of
995, it is the largest primary school I am working with. The Literacy Unit to which I am assigned
focuses on Infant 1 to Standard 2 (Kindergarten to Third Grade), and in Bella
Vista that means 14 classes. This
village grew up quite recently around the various banana farms that are in the
southern region of the Stann Creek and the Toledo Districts. The banana workers are mostly Guatemalan and
Mayan, the languages they speak are Spanish and Q’eqchi, and the population is
very transient. Both parents (if there
are two parents) work long hours on the banana farms, and children are frequently
unsupervised at home. The teachers at
Bella Vista report that this situation has created a lot of vandalism in the
school, and a lack of parental support for teachers.
Our Lady of Bella Vista Roman Catholic School
The village of
Bella Vista has many other challenges, as well. There are frequent problems with the village’s
water supply, and there have been reports of outbreaks of cholera. There is extreme poverty and lack of proper
nutrition. The school is overcrowded and
there are not even enough chairs and desks for the children. I have developed a great respect for these dedicated
teachers who work under such difficult conditions.
On Thursdays and
Fridays I am closer to home. The two
schools in Dangriga that I visit on those days are Christ the King Anglican
School, and Epworth Methodist School. I
ride my bike into the Ministry of Education office in the morning and walk over to both of
those schools to assist teachers in developing intervention programs to work
with their lowest functioning readers.
Two of the teachers are interested in developing before- and after-school tutoring programs very soon.
Before I begin to help with those
upcoming programs, however, I have been asked to conduct workshops on teaching
the writing process in two schools not included in the literacy pilot
program.
Christ the King Anglican School
Finally, after
three months of intense training with the Peace Corps beginning in March, then
two and a half months of sitting for endless hours in the Education Ministry office, I am
excited that I have actually begun to do the job I have been sent here to
do: work with teachers and kids. I still need more time to establish rapport
with the teachers so that they feel free to reach out to me. Only a few of the teachers have asked me for
specific help in teaching reading to their students who have fallen
behind. I feel so fortunate to be given
this opportunity to do what little bit I can to ease these hard-working
teachers’ burden. Without teachers’
aides, or extra materials to work with their students who are below grade
level, they are frustrated in their efforts to reach all of their students. I am relieved to finally be working in my
primary project and I hope I will be of use to the teachers of Belize.
Here I am with my Ministry of Education colleagues as we prepare a chicken barbeque fund-raiser for one of our colleagues whose daughter is undergoing chemotherapy.
