teachwatts: Week Without Walls Done Right

Last week I was fortunate enough to participate in possibly the most meaningful week of my life. Chris Tananone, and I boarded a plane to South Africa with 20 students from the International School Bangkok for a Week Without Walls. For those who are not familiar with the term, Week Without Walls is one week each year that is designated for students to learn outside the confines of the traditional classroom. Each year in the high school, ISB closes its figurative doors and creates opportunities for learning throughout the world. This year trips varied from Italy, Prague, Egypt, Laos, Habitat for Humanity, Reefs to Rainforests, Painters with a Conscience, local medical internships, teacher apprenticeships. . . you name it, the option was there. I helped organize the WWW trip to South Africa: Service and Safari. We stayed approximately 5 hours north of Johannesburg, in the town of Mpumalanga (approximately 25 miles from Nelspruit) outside Kruger National Park at the Likweti Lodge.

The lodge and accommodations were set-up like Girl Scout Camps I had been to many times before back in the states. There are dorm rooms with bunks for males and females, and a dinning lodge stacked with picnic tables and a camp fire waiting for stories to be told each evening. The setting could not have been more perfect. When you are in charge of 20 students in a country you have never visited, it is nice to know that if they decide to break curfew, they could be trampled by a Buffalo. I had no worries or concerns about the students getting into mischief after hours.

You would think that the safari part of our trip would be the highlight, and so would have I . . . two weeks ago. The safari was no doubt amazing, but nothing close to the incredible people we were able to work with in the community. The service part of our trip led us to work with an organization called Trading World International which I highly recommend. Peter Evans and Steve Bullock put us in touch with a local orphanage that needed some help. Our initial plan was to work at the orphanage in the mornings and safari in the evenings. After day one, I could sense this plan could change. Although we were still able to safari each evening and it was amazing, the focus of our trip immediately turned toward the orphanage. The Siyakhula orphanage is run by an amazing woman, Elizabeth Mariya (read her words here). She currently cares for 18 orphans that live on the premises full time whose parents have died from HIV and up to 225 local orphans that she works with on a weekly basis and 95 HIV patients. The orphanage sits on a piece of property that used to house the community center in the heart of the village. When Peter and Steve initially started working with Elizabeth, the children hadn't eaten in over a week. They are in better shape now, but orphanage was badly in need of repair and some TLC. We began by painting the exterior and interior of almost every room. From there we planted banana trees for shade, dug up a rotten tree stump to create a play area, cleaned and re-created an ampitheater that hadn't been used in years and was covered in debrie, and then began to put the place back together again. This involved fixing old broken furniture, repairing and building shelves and hours worth of sorting through old papers and files. In addition, the Grade 2 students from our school in Bangkok had organized a fund drive for the local school. We brought suitcases full of donations for the local students. Within these donations were loads of new school supplies. Since the orphanage sits almost directly across from the local school, we helped stock a small store on the premises of the orphanage, to enable the orphanage to slowly become self-sufficent. They now have pens, pencils, markers, colored pencils, rulers, crayons, notebooks and a multitude of supplies to sell to help them feed the children. On the last day we went to the local grocery store and bought supplies to keep them well fed for quite some time.

One week later, my hands are still filled with blisters. I hope they never go away. I don't want to forget about what we were able to accomplish there. More importantly, I don't ever want to forget how little it took for me to make a difference in the lives of so many. I awoke every day with a sense of purpose. Can we only hold onto that feeling for a moment? How do we achieve that feeling everyday of our lives and still survive, and make enough money to feed our children and provide them with a home? I want to feel that way again. Teaching definitely provides me with that feeling at times, but not in the same degree. I came back a changed person. I learned that all my degrees and experience mean crap unless I use them to help those less fortunate. I am far from new to community service. I volunteer my time in a multitude of ways in my community. Nothing I have ever done compares to how I feel about this trip (see more images on my flickr account). The students mirror my emotions and feelings on our WWW blog and especially on Marisa's blog. I was fortunate enough to be able to help provide this learning experience for students. What they learned far outweighs anything I have ever gotten from a traditional textbook.