PC Blog 8: Technical and Language Training in Salone

Note: This blog entry was first posted on Saturday, April 22. I hope to finish my entries about our time at Pre-Service Training soon, so I can start to talk about my work at site!

In addition to the training I already discussed in a previous blog post (which I have also slightly updated), the two most important areas of training that we received throughout the summer were for Language/Cross-Culture and Technical (Education/Health). Below, I’ve detailed what each of these were like for us during our Pre-Service Training.

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Education Training at Kolenten Junior Secondary School

For our technical training days, which were usually held three days a week, instead of taking the bus to the training site, we Education volunteers would take a short stroll across the main road to a Junior Secondary School (roughly equivalent to American Middle School/Junior High School) called Kolenten JSS. Unfortunately, the Health trainees had a much longer walk through a good portion of Kambia to the First Aid Clinic for their technical sessions (and they were only rarely offered a ride in one of the Peace Corps vehicles, so they quickly grew familiar with their trek through Kambia). Obviously, the Health and Education trainees had much different experiences on these training days to help prepare us for our very different future assignments, so if you’d like to hear more from a Health volunteer’s perspective, check out this blog from one of our Health volunteers: Kadiatu’s Kronicles. Below I’ll mostly detail my experience at Kolenten JSS and a little about some of the sessions we learned about, but if you’d like to read more about the Sierra Leonean Education System in general, I will go into much more detail in a future Salone Blog post.

The front entrance of Kolenten Junior Secondary School. When it rained, it formed Lake Kolenten right outside this entrance.

Kolenten Junior Secondary School, as well as the affiliated Kolenten Senior Secondary School (roughly equivalent to American High School), are Catholic-affiliated and so receive a significant amount of their funding from Catholic organizations (I’m not sure if they also received government funding or not). I would later come to find that it’s a fairly large school for Sierra Leone standards, with six classes (of up to 50 students in each) for each of the three grade levels (JSS1, 2, and 3), which is about double the size of the schools in my own village. In addition to these 18+ classrooms, the school campus also houses a large indoor assembly hall, a set of toilets, a covered market area for buying food during lunch, an outdoor assembly area with raised stage, several benches scattered around the campus, and a large sports complex out in the back complete with football (soccer) fields and volleyball courts.

Only for the first few days of our training sessions at Kolenten was school still in session (this was the beginning of July after all), so we got a small amount of exposure to the students and what their school life was like before they left for their summer break, and we mostly had the school to ourselves. Though for an additional week or so after normal schooling ended, the JSS3 students started to take their BECE exams for entrance into Senior Secondary School. This was only for the students in the highest grade, JSS3, and we didn’t see them too much since they stayed in their classrooms most of the day for their exams. Though students weren’t around for most of our time at the school, other visitors were plentiful, and we soon grew used to chickens, lizards, and other small animals wandering into our classrooms during sessions. These visitors were only really a problem once, when during a quiet lunch toward the end of summer, one of the chickens, who must have grown used to us, decided we posed a small enough threat to attempt to steal one of the trainees’ plasas, literally out from under her spoon as she was actively eating it, by jumping up on her desk and flapping its wings menacingly. Luckily, the trainee won the right to continue eating her food, but only after scaring the chicken away by falling off her bench in fright.

The many benches of Kolenten JSS in front of the main classroom buildings.

Most of our sessions here at the school were obviously focused on teaching, including basic teaching/education theory that you might get from any introductory education course (several of our trainees had taught in the States and so were familiar with many of these concepts already, such as approaches for “student-centered learning”), while many sessions were also specific to teaching in Sierra Leone, such as sessions on teaching with limited resources and large class sizes (including one led by our Country Director’s husband, who has experience teaching in several places with low resources). For several of our sessions, we were also split into our specific teaching areas (English, Math, and Science) to discuss things more related to our specific subject areas, like ideas for activities in the classroom. This was especially important for two of our future teachers, who would be starting Primary School teaching (the equivalent of American Elementary School) for the first time since the Peace Corps’ reinstatement in Sierra Leone after the Civil War (the rest of us were to teach at the Junior or Senior Secondary level). I was one of five science teachers, and though we were the most numerous, we had a good mix of trainees from different science backgrounds (2 Physics, 2 Chemistry, and 1 Biology), compared to the 2 Math teachers, and 5 English teachers (3 for Secondary, 2 for Primary).

Visiting another JSS at a nearby village for our first "Village Day". Photo courtesy of Peace Corps Sierra Leone.

Besides our normal training sessions, we also had several special training days throughout the summer, including a “field trip” to meet with Education Ministry officials at their Kambia office near the beginning of training, and two projects toward the middle and end of training. The first was “Village Day”, where we went to visit a JSS at a much smaller, more rural village (that took us about an hour’s drive through the bush to reach), which allowed us to see some of the differences that exist even between different Sierra Leonean schools. The second was a two week Summer School that we held at Kolenten to help us gain some experience (and confidence) in teaching, as well as to (hopefully) give the kids some extra studying before their new school year started. I’ll detail much more about both of these projects in future blog posts.

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Language and Cross-Culture Training

Besides our “Technical” training in Education or Health, perhaps the most important training we received over the summer was Language Training. For this, the Peace Corps enlisted several Language teachers (LCFs in Peace Corps parlance, for Language and Cross-Culture Facilitators) who taught us in small groups of 3-5 trainees. They started us off with at least three sessions every single training day, which, while necessary and very useful, could really start to drag on for many of us, especially in the afternoons. After the first few weeks, it slowed to two sessions a day, and even went down to one session toward the very end. Though they were only hired by the Peace Corps for the summer, they had all received training prior to our arrival and many had worked with the Peace Corps prior, so they were all well-versed in the Peace Corps’ particular language training methods (which involved a lot of motivational clapping and singing). Most, if not all of them, were also teachers in Salone schools during the year, so they were able to offer some additional insight during many of our Education sessions.

Wi de lan Krio. Snap from Pis Ko Salone.

Each language session was an hour to ninety minutes long, with each group huddled around their instructor at a blackboard easel with our Peace Corps-provided Krio books open in our laps, so we could learn both speaking and reading Krio (a skill that most Sierra Leoneans don’t even learn outside of University, since reading and writing is mostly limited to just English). If the weather was nice, we’d go outside under the shade, but as it was the heart of the rainy season, we were often cooped up inside the Training Center or an unused classroom at the school, often straining to hear over the clatter of heavy rain on zinc roofs. Throughout the summer, they would mix up our language groups every few weeks, rotating around both the language teachers and trainees to give us more of a mix of learning environments and styles (though, since there were only five Health trainees, they stayed together in the same group for the whole summer, with only their teacher rotating in and out).

I won’t go into detail about the Krio language here (I plan to in an upcoming Salone Blog post), but I will say that if you are ever interested in learning a new language, I would highly recommend an English-based creole like Krio (there are several very similar Creole languages from Liberia, Ghana, Belize, Guyana, the Caribbean, and even some isolated parts of the Southern United States). Because so much of the vocabulary is based in English, only a small fraction of learning Krio needs to be devoted to memorizing new vocabulary, so instead more time can be spent on learning syntax and grammar. Even more so than the slight differences you may see from English variations around the world like from Britain or Australia, it’s fascinating to see the ways different people have adapted and molded the English language to fit their own needs and speaking patterns.

We learned how to talk about the things that went into our bodies... and the things that came out. Photo courtesy of PCT "Joey".

To help start to incorporate more cross-cultural aspects, once we started having lessons at our technical training sites, about half of our lessons would be held “in the community”, which basically meant we’d trek out to the back of the school behind the football field, with a blackboard and some benches from one of the classrooms, and would have an audience of Sierra Leoneans for our lesson, who would mostly go about their day-to-day activities and occasionally stop by to watch the Americans try to identify West African fruits and vegetables or learn how to describe our most recent bowel movements in Krio (a hot topic of discussion during the first few weeks as our stomachs were still adjusted to the new environment). Mostly, the Sierra Leoaneans who lived nearby would only stop to listen in for a few minutes, but we also had a constant audience of “pikin” (Primary School-aged kids), who found Americans learning Krio to be so entertaining that they’d sit and watch us for the entire lesson. One day, after learning about a popular song on the radio that poked fun at people riding on the backs of motorcycles with their pants too low (“Okada, you back-boot open-o!”), one of the trainees from my group directed our perennial group of kids to flash mob one of the other groups with this song in an ingenious attempt to get rid of them politely send them away. It worked for about ten minutes before they eventually grew bored with the other group and decided to come back to watch us again instead (the pikin seemed to like this trainee in particular, calling him the most “handsome”).

Throughout the summer, we’d occasionally have other activities to help mix-up our language training. Within the first week, they carted us all off to the market in the Peace Corps bus so we could use our newly learned language skills to buy soap to do laundry. As this was our first real introduction to the community with all of us at once, we got quite a lot of attention at the market and lorry park, with some questioning why we were there. We’d all go to the market later on by ourselves or in small groups, which is probably preferable because we attracted far less attention when we didn’t all arrive by bus in a huge mob.

One week we spent several sessions translating an English song into Krio, with occasional help from our language teachers, which they wanted us to practice and perform in a competition against other groups. My group, which consisted of only two of us at the time, decided on doing “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire” (in large part so we wouldn’t have to actually try to sing in Krio). Luckily, though the staff greatly enjoyed it and took lots of videos, they have yet to post them on their public Facebook page! For our actual language assessment during Pre-Service Training, we thankfully had a more formal evaluation, which I’ll talk more about in a future post.

Peeling bananas to make rice cakes, which are a little like donuts. Photo courtesy of Peace Corps Sierra Leone.

Another big event was Cooking Day, when our language teachers helped us gather all of the ingredients we’d need from the market for us to cook a large pot-luck style lunch for everyone at the Peace Corps Training Site. We’d all had at least some experience with cooking Sierra Leonean food during our weekend host family visits, but our language instructors (not wanting to be outdone by each other) had us go all-out, with each group preparing several dishes which took basically the entire day to prepare and leaving us exhausted by the time it was ready to eat. It’s hard cooking without a microwave!

Toward the end of the summer, after we had made our way through most of the Krio language book that the Peace Corps had provided for us, we started going on community walks, both around the school and the Peace Corps compound, where we’d meet and talk with people going about their everyday lives: doing laundry, cooking rice, making granat cake (somewhat like peanut brittle), and kids playing games. One highlight (besides the granat cake, which we all purchased several pieces of) was being taken on a tour of one of the small farms (which was surprisingly big!) just outside the Peace Corps compound, where we saw all of the wide variety of different crops planted during the rainy season.

Throughout our time at Pre-Service Training, I’d say we learned quite a lot in a very short period of time. Even though Krio has many similarities to English, it’s still difficult to learn even a Creole language in just a few weeks, but with the help of the Peace Corps resources and especially our great Language teachers, we all managed to learn quite a lot by the end of summer.