barbs blog: Redundancy; the end or the beginning

28 February 11 My last working day

I am now finally redundant.

We celebrated with a little drink around the fire although not too much as tomorrow is a school day, literally. Half of the volunteers are going on safari tomorrow so that will only leave four of us to go to school.

If this is redundancy then I guess I will have to wait for retirement to take a break. Life is getting busier as the project has grown 6 fold in the last year and now needs some process management. I have spent most of my professional life avoiding any sort of management and now I am finally redundant it seems this is about to be my new role. The school had thirty pupils this time last year and now has around 250. There are 7 seven classes of which three are baby classes of 3-5 year olds middle and top which are equivalent to our infants and P1 and P2 which are like our juniors. The plan is to continue to expand by one year group each year to P7. The foundations for four new class rooms are in place and we have desks for the three oldest classes and have just ordered desks for the middle class.

The children are incredibly well behaved compared to their UK peers and will get themselves into class on the bell and make a start on the lesson, even if the teacher is not present! The resources are pretty limited and learning is often by rote with everything having to be copied from the board, laboriously in English. As volunteers we help to support the teacher and to bring in and use books, crafts sports equipment and other learning resources which have been donated to help the children and teachers to become familiar with them.

I am trying to put together some guidance notes and procedure documents for the volunteers and teachers, to enable smooth handovers as volunteers come and go. We are also trying to set up a data base of all the students to monitor sponsorship, progress and updates for sponsors. If you want to sponsor a child have a look at the link on the right. The money goes towards providing, uniform, porridge in the mornings and teachers; funds are also required to keep on adding new class rooms for each new year group. The latest rooms are still awaiting windows and doors, to make them secure so that books and other resources can be left in overnight.

All a bit serious this redundancy thing but really the fun part is with the children, they are so happy to be in school and to learn, we play all the play ground songs with them and they can pick up the words so quickly. Also when ever we go for a walk around the plantations or the village they are always greeting us; we do stand out as beacons being the only white people in the area. As the project ethos is to discourage giving anything directly to the people, always to the school and community project, we are rarely asked for anything, so we feel sincerely welcome.

So it is still an early night, to get up for work in the morning, but there is no rush hour or parking problem, just a gentle wake up call from a reasonable 7am dawn chorus, breakfast served in the banda and a gentle stroll through the banana plantation to be greeted by 250 happy children, bring it on.