Now, a post I should have put up a few days ago. Most of it, embarrassingly enough, is excerpted from an email I sent to my dad and my step-mom this afternoon, but I want to share my experiences with you guys, too, so here it is.
I'm sitting at my desk in the Heinemann offices biding my time until my supervisor assigns me another project. As is often the case, I've exhausted my list of things-to-do before she expects me to, despite frequent coffee breaks. Luckily, I'm moving to the Editorial Department next week, so I'll soon have a fresh list. So far, I've been working in the Professional Development department processing contracts and helping the department prepare supplies for the frequent seminars they offer with their authors and other educators. Fortunately, Heinemann is an incredibly organized and well-run business--better than any I've worked for so far, so I've been nothing but pleased with and impressed by the projects around the office. Heinemann (as I've no doubt explained to many of you) is a publishing house that publishes books written by educators for educators, so it seems to be the perfect place for me to be this summer, as I'm considering both education and publishing as career options for at least the first few years after college.
On to the more substantial part of my post. Before starting here on Monday, I spent two weeks doing service work in Haiti which is, as I found out, Melinda's "motherland." It was a spectacular experience. My team divided our time between two separate schools, both teaching the kids and working with/training the teachers. I spent the first week teaching preschoolers in the morning and rotating classrooms in the afternoon, working with health, writing/journaling, music, and recreation teachers. We moved to a different school for the second week and I filled in for the recreation teacher on our team, who had returned to the States. The schools themselves were astounding. I was shocked and appalled by the conditions at the first school, where thirty students were crammed into rooms meant for ten and fifty into rooms for thirty, where all the children had two spoonfuls of rice and beans for lunch, and where the teachers and students alike were amazed and delighted with the blocks and ten-piece puzzles that we presented to the preschoolers. They had never seen such contraptions before and a group of five teachers ended up taking all of 20 minutes to put the puzzle together. It's obvious that they need learning aids of all kinds, as their classrooms are completely bare and their skills underdeveloped. Their reading and writing programs are doing well, but it's difficult to run a successful science program without teaching aids. In health class, we struggled to explain to the middle-schoolers what bones and the human skeleton were, as many had clearly never heard discussed the human anatomy before.
Still, whatever I saw at the first school was completely outdone by the second. This school had two rooms for 300 students, and ended up running four classes in one large room about the size of the Branford common room. You can only imagine how difficult it is to keep kids on track when they have the distraction of four teachers all working at once. At lunch, the students were served a plain hamburger roll, and on one day, only got four crackers. During the school year, the school offers three such "meals" a week, often the only food the kids get that day. The other school, thanks to a fundraising effort by one of my team members last year (aptly named"The Fifth Day") is fortunate enough to be able to give the kids lunch five days a week.
Needless to say, it was an eye-opening experience, and I could go on about it forever. It was clear that the kids and the teachers alike were grateful for every second they got to spend with us, and they desperately needed the supplies (pencils, chalk, paper, crayons, posters, et cetera) we brought. The truth is, I've heard about the situation in these third-world countries before, but I could not have fathomed it until I saw it happening. The group that I went with also ran a clinic down there, and in two weeks saw a few thousand patients, from a 13lb five year old with a throat infection to a lady with a football-sized tumor growing on her hip to a baby so dehydrated that, despite their efforts, it died within hours. Unfortunately, most of the population is poor and, with a 72% unemployment rate, has very little hope of income, so the people just go without even the most basic medical and educational care.
As you can imagine, the trip gave me something of a new perspective on my life here. I had planned to apply for a Fulbright to study the foundations of Jhumpa Lahiri's writings in India next year, but now I'm rethinking my options there. I'll still apply for all of the other jobs I had considered, but it seems rather selfish to propose such a project for the Fulbright when, in truth, my main motivation is the chance to go to India. So now I'm researching options for educational service work in India, Haiti, and Rwanda. Who knows if anything will come of it, but I do hope it will!
That's all for now. Hope to hear from more of you soon.
Love,
Brady
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