Peace, Paradise, and Parasites: The Work Blog!

Now here it is! The post you've all been waiting for! The post that shows I've done more here than just sit and observe our cultural differences and crave food! I've been promising you a post about something work-related for a while now, and here it is! At the end of May/beginning of June a few other volunteers and I put together a series of youth day camps in collaboration with the NGO working in the area (a non-government organization called EcoFish). We called the event Ocean Week. As you may have noticed with past blogs, I tend to favor writing in bullet points instead of paragraphs. I find it easiest to organize thoughts this way, at least when it comes to setting the scene. So here we go:

WHAT: Ocean Week: A Series of Youth Day Camps

WHEN: End of May/Beginning of June, at the end of the schools' summer vacation; one day at each of the 4 participating volunteers' sites (it made it much easier to organize since a volunteer was located in each municipality so we could each be responsible for organizing the logistics at our own site).

WHERE: 4 municipalities in my province, all within an hour and a half of each other.

WHO PARTICIPATED: The camp was designed for 30-50 high school kids at each site, although we got up to almost 80 kids at one site (luckily we didn't have to provide food for that group) and another site turned out to be more elementary age than high school age kids. But we learned to adapt, like with everything else here.

*Side note: Quick explanation about the schools: they only have elementary school (grades 1-6) and high school (grades 7-10). There's no middle school. And they usually graduate from high school at age 16, so they're the same age in each grade as American schools, they just have 2 less years of it.

WHO FACILITATED: Three of us volunteers were the main facilitators: Ali, Charlie, and me (all of us CRM volunteers in the area). The 4^th volunteer, Chris, was an Education volunteer and helped as an emcee at his school. EcoFish employees assisted us as well.

TOPICS: Since the three of us are CRM (coastal resource management) volunteers and the camp was called Ocean Week, you're probably guessing that the camp had an environmental theme to it, and you'd be correct! Congratulations! Although it really doesn't take a genius to figure that out. Charlie gave a talk on corals, seagrass, and mangroves (the three marine ecosystems in the Philippines), I gave a talk on solid waste management, and Ali gave a talk on climate change.

THE AGENDA:

8am begin (we never actually got started until 9am, but that's the Philippines for you!)

Charlie's lecture and activity

My lecture and activity

Ali's lecture and activity

Lunch and a Movie! With Blue Planet: Corals dubbed in Tagalog

Poster contest

Review game

Prizes, Certificates, Pictures

Closing (usually done by 3 or 4pm)

It usually made for a very long day. It was nice the way we had it structured, though, because all our hard work was done by lunch, then we just let the kids go to town on putting all their new knowledge to good use. My favorite part of the days was the poster contest. It amazed me how artistic the kids were. In the States if kids have to make a poster they'll maybe spend 30 minutes tops on it and it'll look pretty decent but you'll be able to tell they were forced into it. Here, though, one day the kids spent 2 hours working on the posters and they were still begging for more time! And the posters were amazing! I'll put pictures after this of my favorites so you too can experience the wonders of their artistry. I would hate to deprive you of that.

Another thing I couldn't get over was how excited the kids got about the activities we did. We followed each lecture with a game or activity related to the topic (in addition to the poster contest and review game activities at the end of the day). And these we not very intricate activities; they were simple running around, doing crazy gestures, or matching games. Apart from the few kids here or there that were “too cool” to join in, the kids went crazy over them, nothing like you would expect from high school kids in the States. Can you imagine American high school kids enthusiastically running around playing tag- and red rover-type games? Definitely elementary school kids would, maybe middle schools kids, but probably not high school kids. They're way too cool to break a sweat playing tag. But the kids here loved them and were so enthusiastic about them. And that enthusiasm is the same with every age group here. Even adult Filipinos love doing games and Ice Breaker “repeat after me” songs (although their bodies may not retain youth and energy, their hearts definitely do). It makes it really fun to facilitate things here and allows you to really get into teaching. One of the parts of my presentation included the song “The 3 R's” by Jack Johnson and the kids were getting really into the song, swaying and singing along, and it became contagious....and I ended up dancing to the song in front of 70 kids! Of course they all loved it, but if you know me, you know this is a big deal.......I don't dance......especially not in a spot light. Their excitement was just so infectious!

This enthusiasm also carried into the review game. We split the kids into groups and each correct answer earned their team points. I'll tell you, the amount of screaming at getting the right answer sometimes made me think I was at a Justin Bieber concert. Kids would literally be jumping up and down and cheering at every correct answer. Granted, it made the simple 15 question review go on for about 30 minutes, but it was really entertaining to watch.

It'll be a very rude awakening for me to go back to the States, try to do a presentation the same way (expecting the same level of excitement), and be met with complete silence and stares. Hopefully I won't take our cultural coldness to heart, though. One thing I'll take from this is the observation of how much more enjoyable it is to teach a lively audience, as opposed to one that just sits quietly and listens or stares at the wall behind you.

Like I promised before, here are some pictures. I'm going to apologize in advance for the unusual spacing. I can't really get a handle on it without wanting to rip my hair out.