Victories, frustrations and the reality of deployment...

I now understand the emotional conundrum that Giles felt every time he returned home from a deployment. Coming back to friends, family, mountain bikes, creature comforts and great food is always such a reward for a job well done. However, is it actually done? The answer is no. You've given 100% to a project but when your time's up you simply walk away and hand over the reins, and I now understand that letting go must be the biggest wrench of all.

For the first time i am facing a similar situation. Having totally immersed ourselves in the project, the rewards are getting richer and changes for the better are slowly emerging. Of course the cultural and bureaucratic frustrations remain, and there are still many barriers to overcome. But my biggest fear is what will happen when we have gone...

Still, without worrying about the long term, there are some great wins to report on from this past week:

Giles' ingenious but simple physics invention of a light ray box out of a head torch and a small piece of card. Students were able to investigate the relationship between the angle of reflection and angle of incidence for themselves! Not a text book in sight, just a mirror and a protractor...

I got my class 8s making bread to look at the useful properties of microbes ... It worked brilliantly. The students were tasked with finding the recipe, ingredients and utensils, and in true resourceful indian fashion their solution was to ask the father of a fellow student who just happens to be a baker. They even negotiated a small fee to bake the bread after the lesson!

My class 6 students now understand animal adaptations so well that they chose features and designed their own animals for various different habitats. Again, some genius work which proves that they have what it takes to really understand.

It appears that the days of answering ANY kind of question with 'yes miss' are behind us... They're now familiar with open questions and know what we expect in return. No longer does the question 'how was your weekend?' get answered with 'yes'!

We have also run further teacher training sessions, and several of the more committed teachers are designing lessons to be proud of! This is the goal! Sure, giving the kids a great experience is well up on our priority list, but if we can get the teachers onside with our methods for the long term, then that's the real win! Sadly we still have a long way to go with many who are happy to turn their noses up at the effort required, but then again I'm not sure if the same isn't true back home...

With our sustainability aim at the forefront of our minds we are really excited by a recent proposal by our project coordinator. He is so impressed with our training sessions that he's arranging for us to deliver these to other schools in the region. Giles and I are now masterminding plans to build an online teacher training session and lesson resource bank for the charity so all partner schools can benefit, as can future volunteers when faced with coming up with a plan to teach anything from adjectives or soil erosion! An embryonic idea but one with legs at least, and another project to keep us busy!

It would be lovely to leave some sort of legacy, but, hey, with four weeks still to go, who knows what else we can achieve?