Teaching

The goals for this project are many, and some of them has to do with our function in the camps. It is, after all, the teaching of English that our daily lives revolve around. At the moment, we have just less than 50 students divided between the three of us. The students are mainly women between the age of 18 and 25. In addition to teaching the students in the morning, we also teach around ten teachers who work in primary and secondary school here in the camps. We teach in very small classrooms with only notebooks, blackboard and chalk as tools. It is both liberating and very challenging. Some of our students have no English at all and don't know the Latin alphabet, whilst others speak almost perfect English. We have divided the students into three classes with different levels, and try to our best abilities to teach – despite our lack of formal qualifications.

We are also about to start teaching the same students IT. At the centre where we work, there are a few computers available – or rather one computer at the moment. As some of our students already work as secretaries, IT-skills are essential, but to some extent lacking. The challenge of course is to teach ten students at a time IT skills with one computer. Never mind the fact that the language of the computers is Spanish, and the language settings in OpenOffice is Arabic.

Of course, our goal is for the students to learn as much English and IT as possible. However, to be able to speak English is only part of the motivation. The other reason our teaching is important is simply because it gives the young people something to do every day. Many of the women and men in our classes have already got university degrees. Despite this, there aren't any jobs for them in the camps, except for the few positions as secretaries. From what I understand, the reason for the lack of men in our classes is that most of them have work to do in the daytime, paid or unpaid. Some drive taxis between the camps and Tindouf, whilst others work as teachers, do building work, work in the administration of the camps etc. The division between the gender, whilst I'm at it, is an interesting one, and an issue I will come back to in a later post. For now, I have to return to preparing lessons – something which takes some time when you're unexperienced, as any teacher will tell you.