Henry in Guyana

This week myself and a VSO teacher have twice visited Mercy Wings school on the outskirts of Georgetown, a school started by nuns for young people (15-20) who for one reason or other haven't got on with the state education system. It is a charity and therefore not government funded, and is what we might consider to be a technical or vocational college. Students are referred to as trainees, and study a range of subjects including plumbing and construction as well as English and maths.

Whatever impression I had of St. Stanislaus (which despite its faults is a leading state school), things are very different here. The facilities themselves are good, with well kept buildings and a very good IT lab. As well as this, from my very brief visits it seems like many of the staff there are genuinely keen to help. Unfortunately, few or none of them are trained teachers and this affects things a great deal. Things like lesson plans, goals and so on are non-existent (as far as I can see) and I gather that some lessons involve little more than spelling tests. I observed a 2 hour IT lesson today where the students spent the entire time on a learn-to-type program. It is good that they appreciate how to type, but this was their second ever lesson and it would be nice to see them learn how to word process and so on. The classed ranged from the obviously au fait to the entirely computer illiterate. It is likely that some of the students suffer from learning difficulties of some kind and a number are illiterate.

Things did seem at times a bit dire, although during the lesson we heard some drumming, and downstairs there was a music lesson going on with some very lively bongo-bonanza style drumming going amongst a group of trainees. This was very impressive, although the classrooms all have wooden walls with slats on either side - I'm not sure anyone else in the school could teach during that!

Despite a good IT facility, many of the teachers are not computer literate and it stands perhaps as a good opportunity for me to go in and make a real difference. I will have to consider carefully how to, if I do, go about such a project. As far as I can gather the IT room is only open two days a week so even an informal club with some fun things would be worth doing. Mercy Wings seems like perhaps many places in the developing world - there is money available to help with equipment from outside donors, but with the wage rate and emigration (brain drain), well trained staff are hard to find.

Not much other news - the project at Saints is moving along, I finally attended volunteer frisbee in the park on Wednesday (which was great fun) and despite promises from the power company for consistent power from Nov. 5th, blackouts are still common (and particularly annoying when you are trying to get something done!)