11 new faces

Last Friday I came back from a very successful visit to Kano. The purpose of this visit was to get the Science and technical school board (STSB) in Kano familiar with doing assessments and to assess 10 new National Graduate volunteers. After this I was supposed to introduce the selected volunteers to proper teaching.

So on Tuesday, Chinwe and I, left for Kano by private car. We were about to leave around 9 so we could do some preparation when we arrived in Kano, as Chinwe was on leave just before this trip. In the end we didn’t leave Abuja before 11 am, even more close to noon. The ride in the private car was easy going and we took our time as Chinwe ordered the driver not to go faster than 110 km/h. He seemed to have little problems with that, because whenever Chinwe was asleep we hit the 140 occasionally. After a short lunch stop in Kaduna we arrived in Kano around 6 pm. The first hotel Chinwe had in mind to stay was fully booked so we had to find another one, which was quite a challenge as the room rates were quite high and in all hotels the cheapest rooms seemed to be occupied. At Tahir luxury suites I tried to get a big discount by telling them we work for an NGO, and it almost worked. We almost got the NGO rates, but the manager didn’t seem to know VSO and wasn’t that interested in finding out about it. In the end we ended up in Green Palace hotel, a nice hotel in the same league as Crystal Palace in Abuja. The thing that is better in Green Palace is the food! I had pizza at the first evening! And for breakfast I could choose from tomato and cheese sandwiches to white oats or full English. Really nice, although we had to wait quite long for this good food.

The first day of the assessment started with a big surprise. The STSB didn’t short list 20 candidates but 34 and most of them just did show up because somebody told them about this. Showed up without first applying! Mmmm, what to do?  We had to bring the number down to at least 22 as we didn’t bring too many materials. So we decided to first test them all for their English skills. We let them write the essay first to preselect the teachers whose English is good enough. While they were writing the essays I could inform the STSB about how to do assessments and why we do assessments.

In the end all went well and we selected 11 new volunteers for the NGVP in Kano. The happy volunteers will have to start teaching on Monday. So before that they will have to get confident about their teaching skills. Quite a challenge if I may say so. To help them a little, I let them think about good learning and good teaching during a one day workshop about this. It went well, although the dynamics in this group were totally different than the group I taught in August. Is it culture? Most likely as in this group all except for one were Muslim and 6 are female.