Another Day, Another Louver

Another day has finished and I'm sitting on the balcony of my hotel room looking out over the lagoon.  Can't hear any roosters at this hour - they start up around 4am.  Can hear a couple of dogs in the distance.

Today we arrived at the Paama Seaside School at around 8am.  Harvey, David and John headed off to the hardware store and Kaye, El, Graham and I took a look around the grounds and met some of the teachers.  My services (as a non-educator but pretty decent English speaker) were offered as a "she'll listen to the kids speak English".  Kaye, Graham & El - all educators, were able to ask lots of good questions - but I was soon ushered into a room and given instructions to listen to the kids one by one.

I think the last time I had done this it had been - just listen to them read and mark the paper, this time I was told it was an examination - so I felt a bit more pressure.  The story was about Meg and her Dad and a boy with a toy helicopter.  What a cliffhanger!  Will Meg's dad be able to fix the helicopter at the end of the story?  I think I will never know.

The first few kids read through the story with more or less ease - it soon became obvious to me that I had all the better readers up front, and then some not so good ones.  At one point the teacher entered the room and said "sorry, I've got to go to a meeting offsite, I'll leave these sheets for you so you can mark the ones who are at a lower level of reading.  The teacher never actually pointed out how I was supposed to tell which kids were at a lower reading level - and I'm sure it wasn't her plan to drop me or the kids in that ditch - but there were a couple of kids who ... well I gave them the wrong level - and had to read through the whole of the piece basically with them.  I walked out of the room feeling a bit shell-shocked.  Will need to speak to the teacher tomorrow about whether I can do some reading with the kids who need a bit more help.  I might also need to test them again - I got a good idea of their fluency, but otherwise not exactly sure my marks are useful!

Anyway - I then headed over to church where Sanjay, Nerida and Harvey had headed off to the health meeting.  Alira was with Kaye enjoying some orange mush.  David and El were working on painting the window frames, and Graham and John were removing the louvers from the last of the window frames.  After sitting for a few minutes I headed off down the road to the health meeting - I was planning to be "Vanuatu time" on time.  #WesleyOnVanuatuTime.  I arrived and said I was looking for Nerida, Harvey, Sanjay and Elder Johnny - there were blank looks until I said Elder Johnny and I was ushered into the back room.

One of the people at the meeting was Pastor Allen Nafuki who I had met on the first trip I'd had to Vanuatu - when we were just a team of four - he played a big part in that first week and took all four of us around the island.  His name, like Elder Johnny's, seemed to be a key that opened doors in Vanuatu - I am sure I name dropped it at some point to get a better seat on the flight home.  The other people in the room were Jonathan and Richard, who both work at the PCV offices and specialise in health.

We heard that the team at PCV has a memorandum of understanding with the government to provide health services which has been made after the success of the education services that the PCV has provided.  They are looking for some help with training materials.  Now given none of us have expertise in health we were careful to say we'd be happy to help facilitate with contact finding - but we're unlikely to be able to jump in the thick of this one.  All in all a good meeting - and we headed back to the church while Sanj went to find some lunch for us all.

Back at the church it was all systems go.  The paint was drying and some of the louvers were starting to go back on.  Some of the louvers were a bit broken so Harvey and Graham went off to find some more.  We saw lots of the kids bringing chairs out of their classrooms and gather round - there were four 20 somethings doing a play for the kids - I walked over and from what I saw it seemed to be about paying attention while driving and not talking on your mobile while at the wheel.  This was soon confirmed when they asked the kids to chat something like "look left, look right, look left" (might have been the other way around - don't quote me).  The kids seemed to be really enjoying the show - and the young people who were presenting certainly seemed pretty enthusiastic.

2pm school finished and we went to re-louvering in earnest.  There were two drills or maybe one drill and one screwdriver - so there was a bit of a resource drought - we all made ourselves busy taking off masking tape, cleaning glass louvers, drilling, finding screws - after a couple of hours they were getting down to the last of it so some of us headed back to the hotel for a rest.

Tonight we've had a meal at The Brewery - I think everyone feels that we worked hard today and another big day of painting tomorrow should see us breaking the back of the painting work.  We were talking about the school and how different it is to home - and it is _very_ different.  I'm glad we've seen it for 8 years now, and 5 years back, and 2 years back, so we've got a basis for comparison.

I hear some roosters.  What's going on there???