Life Skills Workshop Facilitators

As far as my title goes as a Life Skills Volunteer, I have finely found a project when I feel I am actually fulfilling the objective set forth by the Peace Corps for me. John Rusiecki and I were asked to tour our district and find out how well the other school were implementing this Life Skills curriculum that we were so attached to. What we found was that, like our own school s, no one was doing much at all with the Life Skills books or teaching any of the lessons. So, as we meet with school head after school head we offered our expertise to come back to their school and facilitate a workshop for their staff on what the Life Skills curriculum is and how to use the books that were sitting unused in their store rooms. By the way, both of us are a little silly with each other but very professional in meetings but we couldn’t resist making inside jokes and poking fun at each other in front of those we met with. There were a few times I almost laughed out loud or had to turn away. Lol.

Anyway, through our self promotion we established a net work of schools that look to us as the staff developers when it comes to Life Skills based operations. We facilitated or fist work shop at John’s school which I can tell you went as well as trying to feed a lion vegetables pie. We work shopped an area school next that seemed to go better but it’s hard to know if the information seed grew any after we left that village. We took a little adventure on this overnight trip and decided to climb a cell phone tower which was awesome but also scary. Once was enough for that little stunt. Our next workshop was my school, by now we thought we had some solid chemistry in our presentation and we got 3 days instead of 2 like usual so the last day we reviewed and also covered Test Taking Skills and Strategies as well as Classroom Management Skills. We’re not sure what sunk in but I’m doing a follow up on the progress starting next term so we’ll see what worked and what still needs to be nurtured.

My favourite workshop we did so far had to have been the one in Middle Pits, 800K south of Salajwe, well outside of our district. Another volunteer Mary Goldamer lives there and invited us to do a Life Skills Staff development workshop for her school staff of 45. We again got three days but this time we put most of our focus on infusion. Infusion is taking a life skill, such as decision making and infusing it into a subject, such as math. So that might be a lesson where you are teaching budgeting and what to buy and what not to buy on your budget to save and to buy needs not wants. This can be done with Risk Reduction and Science or Social Responsibility and Cultural studies. As we had done in other workshops we had the teachers make mock lesson plans and present them. Everything went wonderful but the best part was that I was getting a sense that the teachers were realizing how important Life Skills are and were starting to buy into it and persuade their colleagues how valuable these skills are. At this point John and I were working together like a well oiled machine and we ran the room like it was a class of kids. The loved us and offered to take up a donation for us because we travelled on our own dime but we refused. Then they wanted to get money from the Ministry of Education for us so we applied and are still waiting for that but we didn’t expect any type of reimbursement.
These workshops can be very frustrating when you see the apathy or unwillingness to do even the smallest amount of extra work but it’s those few teachers that grasp is that makes it all worthwhile. It’s when we finish the last day that I feel the best. We know we told them straight. “It is a little more work, not all of you will use the books, but the ‘Life Skills’ are what matters, include them in you classes, it will make better students and better citizens of Botswana in the end.” When I’m in front of teachers talking about what I’m passionate about and flowing and doing what the Peace Corps has asked me here to do I just get a great feeling of purpose and like I’m making a difference.