Week 9

Good night!

Sorry I’m running a little late with this entry; things are heating up in the Caribbean!

I swear-in this week (i.e. I become an official Peace Corps Volunteer) and last weekend I moved into my own apartment. I’m just up the road from my home stay in a great little apartment that I will share pictures of next week. Maybe even a video home tour!

To swear-in I had to implement a Service Learning project (basically a project where young people do community service). After being at my primary school for a couple weeks I decided to focus my project on working with the students who are recent Haitian immigrants. My community has a large population of Haitian immigrants and they face enormous challenges. On top of the many social and economic challenges of immigrating to Dominica (they are the victims are a lot of xenophobia), many do not speak any English. The children are required to attend school but Dominica has social promotion (you are placed in whatever grade your age would be assigned to) and there are no English Language Learning services so often the children cannot understand anything in the classroom. They sit for 6 hours a day at a desk with no way to learn.

My project is a tutoring program between 5^th grade students who speak some Kweyol (which the Haitian students speak) and younger children who do not speak English. During lunch (there are not after school programs in my community) we met for the launch of the program, which was attended by the director of Peace Corps for Dominica (who is wonderful). I had the 5^th graders lead a discussion about compassion and being a good tutor before the project began. About halfway through the discussion the director was not paying attention and one of the 5^th graders called on him to summarize the discussion thus far. The students at my school are incredible.

After swear-in volunteers are supposed to spend two days a week at his/her school assignment (for the first 3 months) and the rest of the week with the assigned organization. The group I am working with is a community group, Salisbury Enhancement Committee (SEC) (www.bawilinkup.com), which plans events and programs in the community because we do not have a village council (which is the local government in other communities). The people in the Committee are wonderful, however there is no office and no full time staff. Therefore I am responsible for occupying myself. So beginning on Monday (my birthday) I will be on my own! I’m looking forward to working in the pre-school, the health center and at the primary school. SEC is also organizing a large reunion (think high school reunion but 16 days and for a village) this summer, which should keep me quite busy.

Check out my home tour and photos of swear-in next week!

Good night!

View from my front porch at sunset. That is the Caribbean. Glass courtesy of Vizzi's, Buffalo, NY.