For their language study, Mark and Kirsten go to a local school for adults who did not get to finish what we would call high school. There are many different reasons why these students didn’t get a chance to finish school. For some they had to drop out of school to work, to take care of their families, or because of the war.
Today we had the opportunity to go with Kirsten to her classes, Mark had a meeting today so he was unable to go. We talked to the school, which took about 20 min, but is considered to be outside of the city. On our way there we past some cows grazing, crossed a bridge over the river, which the locals use as a car wash, and as we saw on our way back, an onion wash as well!
Cow grazing
Not as green as Brown Bear! Good thing they don’t have salmon spawning!!
Washing onions, why they do this, I don’t know!
They go to school in the afternoon for two hours and have 3 classes, each one is about 40 minutes. Today they had Kurdish, English and Arabic. They stay in the same room and a different teacher comes in for each subject. When the teacher walks into the room, you stand up to show them respect. There were about 7 local students today plus the 4 of us (Sarah, Elise, Kirsten and myself). I was the only male today. Usually there is Mark and 2 other guys, so it’s always a majority of women students. It was a small room, with old desks (I thought they were kind of cool, but wouldn’t want to sit in them for more then 2 hours) and a white board. They had a poster on the wall that read [in English], “Teach a man and you teach a person, Teach a women and you teach a family” and a clock. Which Kirsten said were just added a few days ago. Not very much, pretty simple. A little better then some other classrooms I’ve seen in Kenya and Honduras, at least this one didn’t have a dirt floor.
First was Kurdish class, there were maybe 5 words I could understand, the rest was too fast and too advance for me! Next was English class, they went over a few vocabulary words of things you might find in a classroom. The teacher said the words and then had the students repeat them. Didn’t seem to be the best teaching method, but then I was only there for one class. Next was a 5 minute break followed by the Arabic class. For this class they read something from a book and the teacher discussed it.
It was an interesting experience, one of the things I enjoy most about traveling is seeing schools from different parts of the world. I hope to get to visit other schools in the area to share more stories with you. Thanks for reading!
