Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Bonzour! Ki manier?

So the deal, in brief, is this:
I am in Mauritius, I will be here until the 21st of August. I arrived on the 15th of July I have been sent here by a small-scale American nonprofit, name of 'Learning Enterprises'. My mission? Teach English. Lots of English. This I plan to do, and many other things besides, and then write about them to all of you lovely people, inviting you ALL to share my joy, pain, embarrasment, confusion or interesting tropical disease.

Two weeks have passed since I first set foot on this tiny island in middle of the Indian Ocean, and that, to me, seems pretty crazy.

Two weeks of rice with everything.
Two weeks of unreliable buses.
Two weeks of my schizophrenic phone (with or without signal depending on alignment of the stars, ground temperature and chi flow)
Two weeks practically sans internet.
And one and a half weeks of teaching my very own native language.

The place where I have passed most of my time so far, my adopted hometown of Chamarel (Chammytown, for the cool) is way up in the hills. The village is sprawled across several kilometres of land, houses separated by patches of what is virtually rainforest. The farmland there is consists of acres of tall sugar cane plants, with pineapple plants, Jacques fruit trees and all kinds of palms springing up all over the place. The landscape is very hilly and steep, and North of Chamarel the largest mountain on the island, Le Grand Piton shelters the town.

I am staying with la famille Quint, some of the kindest and most hospitable people I have ever been lucky enough to meet. They have a wonderful house in the centre of the village, with a huge extended family who are always coming and going and visiting the house. Blondine my Mauritian 'Maman' is an amazing cook, but the food here is seriously pimenté (spicey)! It's taken a little while to get used to...at one of the first meals with les Quint I had the misfortune to bite into a single very very spicy mini chili, about the size of a seed. I spend the next ten minutes turning interesting shades of scarlety red and downing glasses of water in rapid succession. More on Mauritian cuisine in a later post...

English teaching has so far been very successful, and a good deal more dynamic than my experience in Senegal last year! Because we have total freedom to teach whatever we want, however we want, classes have been a lot of fun for both ourselves and the kids. I'm teaching with Daniel, another volunteer living in Chamarel. Every weekday morning at 9am, we begin our class in the local Catholic school, which is empty for the Winter (yes, Winter!) holiday. Circle games, ball games and group competitions have been big hits, as has creative work with drawing (I brought a crateload of crayons and pens from home). Grammatical work is limited, but we teach the basic rules of the language, or at least enough to cover the topic of the day, be it 'parts of the body', 'my house', 'the weather' or 'the date today' (the subject of this morning's lesson). We teach for 3 hours every day, with a break of 15 minutes in the middle of the class. As most of our pupils are between 7 and 13 years old it is unsurprisingly difficult to hold everyone's attention for this long, so fun games are invaluable.

And at the end of every lesson...we SING! Music was a big success story during my teaching in Senegal. But in Mauritius we have most certainly taken it to the next level... in every lesson so far there has been a decent portion of the time given over to singing English songs, with or without guitar accompaniment. We've done 'One Love', 'Three Little Birds' (both Bob Marley classics!), 'We are Family' (for the 'family' topic of course), 'Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes' (unvoidable) and finally an extremely edited version of Calvin Harris' 'Merrymaking at my Place'. For this last one, we have, of course, replaced the line 'drug-taking' with various household activites, such as 'Bed-making' and 'Shower-taking'. And the verse is truly a funky blast of wonder. I shall do my best to get a video uploaded as soon as possible.

And now, my time in the internet cafe is drawing to a close and so too must this frenzied, confused and far too brief blog. But more is to come, with photo and video accompaniment. Stay tuned, amigos and amigas, and please, PLEASE drop me a comment!