Travel Diary - Day Thirty Nine

Day Thirty Nine – Consultations
Wednesday 07 Oct 09

Two main things on today – first was a visit to the local secondary school. A quick note about the schools here before I continue. The schools are all streamed. And no, I don’t mean that each class is sorted from smart to less smart, I mean the schools themselves are streamed. At the end of primary school every student is tested. Depending on their test results they get to attend a school in their particular range of test results. That can mean students travelling quite ridiculous distances to get to the school that is set at their particular level. It would have to be one of the more bizarre setups I have ever seen, but there we are.

The school I visited was one of the ‘technical schools’ for students who it had been determined weren’t bright enough for standard academia. They can work their way out of that situation should they put in sufficient effort but from what I can gather it is no easy task. When you add to this the fact that each student must pass their exams to a certain standard to proceed to the next form level you can well imagine that there are 16 and 17 year olds in Form 1 – our year 7. Not a healthy situation in my opinion. Anyway, I visited one combined class of young people who appeared to be between 14 and 15 – I didn’t think to ask. I told them a bit about NZ, and asked them to compare that with what they knew about Guyana – standard lesson stuff. Then I invited them to ask questions. Mostly the questions were pretty good ones. Then they asked me to sing a NZ song. The particular Waiata that I had brought with me really needs a guitar and so I decided to sing Po Kare Kare Ana. That went alright and I explained what it was about. Then I told them that they had to respond in kind and sing a song for me. After a bit of carry on they all got up and sang the Guyana national anthem, pretty poorly I have to say. Everyone sat down and then a smaller group stood up and said they wanted to sing another song. They did really well, and you could see that the rest of the class were enjoying it too, some singing along, clapping, tapping their feet – I was impressed. Finally I told them I needed to go and one of the class got up and gave me a very nice thank you speech.

From there I went on to another, shorter performance in a slightly younger class. That also went well. By this time we were well and truly late for my next meeting. I was due to meet with Dwayne and the National Youth Advisor to talk about youth strategy for Guyana. We got there to find that the Advisor had not been able to make it and Dwayne and I were it. We spent about an hour going over what was happening. I listened to what they were doing and made a handful of suggestions about how they could think about their processes from a slightly different perspective. Simply put they are very organisationally heavy and I suggested that it might be helpful to turn everything around and make the key question of anything they do or plan to do, ‘How does this help (put name of young person here) to grow closer to Jesus?’ The question can be applied to leaders, to young people in youth groups, to young people not in youth groups. It’s kind of simple but it might help to scrub away a lot of the rubbish that can take so much time here.

From there I pretty much went straight home, taking a brief stop at the internet café to catch up on emails. I had a head cold, and my sore throat was developing into a chest infection. So I got home, took an antibiotic pill – there is certainly a place for self-medication while travelling  and spent the rest of the day resting, mostly asleep. I needed it. The evening was free and so I kept on resting.