A report from Aurore and Julia - 2 french volunteers currently in Meheba.
After a full week of advertising, we’ve finally managed to set up and organize our afternoon English and French classes for adults. School C’s headmaster had very kindly agreed to lend us somes rooms for our classes. We now have four regular students, coming every afternoon, even though they are not as punctual as we would like (see “Being a refugee”).
Of course, we wish we had more students but due to the particular circumstances of a refugee camp, organising english classes has proven difficult. The main reason why people wouldn’t show up to our classes is that Meheba is a very large camp, meaning that the refugees would have to walk for around two hours to get there. This amount of time travelling is often not compatible with peoples work hours or familly obligations.
In a sense, it shows the dedication of our students; Fiston, for instance, has to walk 8km every day for a one or two hour lesson, while Prosper lives in block G, the furthest part of the camp. Cornestone, who is fluent in English and 5 other dialects, has come to us for French classes in order to communicate with the newly arrived Congolese, while w cxe have given our last student, Jean-Jacques, seven English lessons so far. He has improved exponentially in the last weeks considering that he started with no knowledge of the English language.
It is wonderfull to see their progress, from week to week and their willingness to learn a language that might help them to improve their futures.
