A class of 200… good luck!

Bonjour, comment allez vous? Je m’appelle Jordan. Je suis un agent de santé pour Corps de la Paix. J’habite au Benin et je travaille au centre de santé. Mon travail ici consiste à travailler avec les membres de la communauté pour améliorer la santé dans leur communauté. C'est pourquoi j'organise un club de santé pour les étudiants du CEG.

Good morning, how are you all? My name is Jordan. I am a health worker for the Peace Corps. I live in Benin and I work at the health center. My job here is to work with community members to better the health your community. This is why I have organized a health club for the students at the middle/high school.

This is the exact speech that I gave during my first health club meeting last Friday. I was really excited to get this project started because I feel like it can have a huge impact on the entire community. I found two sports teachers (male and female) at the school that wanted to start this project with me. I prepared an agenda for the first meeting and I felt really confident in my plan. But if I have learned anything from the last 5 months living at site, it is that nothing ever goes the way you plan. So let me tell you how my first health club meeting went.

So imagine this, it 2pm on a Friday, and I am getting ready to go to school which is about a 20 min walk during the hottest part of the day. Health Club will officially be starting at 3pm, so I had to get going if I wanted to be a little early in order to prepare and breath before the storm. The week before was supposed to be the first health club meeting but the information never made it to the students. So we were trying again this week, and in my head, either no one was going to show up or way too many students were going to show up. Well I was defiantly right about one of my predictions. Anyways, I ended up getting to the school a little early, and there were already about 15 students waiting for me. During this time before the club officially started, I introduced myself to some of the students and started a casual conversation about their favorite music and food. As it got closer and closer to the start time, more and more students showed up. There was a point where we had to switch into a bigger class room. At that moment, I looked across a sea of students and thought “Holy shit, how on earth am I going to pull this off”. I gave my co-teachers a call but no answer, so we decided to wait an extra 10 min for them to show up. Not knowing whether or not they would show, I decided to start the club.

It’s officially 3:15pm and from what I could tell I had at least 120 students in one room. As thoughts of doubt run through my head, I started to have a bit of anxiety over the whole experience. I decided to split the students into two groups. I tried to divide them up by class but the numbers were super uneven. Then I tried to get their attention, but it only lasted for about 10 seconds. After another 10 min of feeling stressed and overwhelmed, and honestly having no idea what to do. I decided to just start talking. I was able to get there attention after repeatedly asking all the students to quiet down and listen. At this point I just decided to quickly introduce myself and give them the information for health club. Even that was a bit difficult with the size of the group especially because many of the students mocked my French while I was talking which really did not help my confidence throughout this experience, but I kept trying. I reminded myself that they are teenagers and I was a little devil when I was a teenager also. I informed them that next week health club would only be for the girls and the week after that for the boys. I repeated myself a few times to make sure they all understood or at least I hope they all understood. Then I told them after they wrote down their name on the attendance sheet they were all free to go.

Now it’s about 3:25pm and one of my co-teachers finally decides to show up. Honestly I was a little frustrated that she was late, but there wasn’t much she could have done to help with that many students. I should also mention that in Beninise culture it is very common not to not attend an event on time. As the younger students finished up with the attendance sheet, it was time to speak with the older students. Now this group was only about 20 students, so defiantly much more manageable. Sadly I was still extremely overwhelmed from what had just happened, so I was defiantly not at my best. I decide to just give them the information for next week and send them home. Unfortunately they were not very pleased with this and asked if we could talk about some of the information for next week. So we spent the next 20 min talking about an introduction to nutrition. Let me tell you these kids are sponges for information. When we were finished all the students headed out to go home or play soccer. The end count on the sign in sheet was 181 students.

Now let's talk about what I learned from this experience. I learned that not everything is going to go perfect and the most important thing is to be flexible. I also learned that I am going to make mistakes and that’s okay because the next time I can improve on those mistakes. Lastly I learned that speaking with kids is way different from speaking with adults, and I need to come up with some new strategies for keeping their attention. I have many more lessons learned from this experience, but these are the three that stood out to me the most. Overall this experience wasn’t terrible, but it defiantly was great. I think it’s somewhere in between.