I have spent almost six months in Togo. And last week I received incontrovertible evidence that I have made one small difference, one tiny positive impact in my community.
I mean, I'd like to think I've already made more than one tiny positive impact, but it's up for debate how to measure whatever intangible or tangible effects I may have had. Has the U.S. government gotten their money's worth in paying my living allowance for these three months? Jury's still out.
I had my first Ewe tutoring lesson on Saturday with a teacher at the local high school. Monsieur Yovo teaches Ewe and English, and is also one of my partner teachers for my environmental club. He's dynamic and wonderful. My Saturday morning started with two hours of drilling in Ewe tenses and new vocabulary. And I mean drilled - I'm beginning to appreciate what a Togolese student feels like after a long class. After having had a rough couple of weeks wondering what I'm doing here, it felt really good to be a student again. It felt productive and helped boost my confidence about my ability to be not just a friendly but also a supportive community member.
When Msr. Yovo finally decided I'd had enough (I was there forty minutes before him, but never mind that), we chatted for a little bit about environmental club the next week. I tried to explain the great American holiday of Thanksgiving, with dubious success. "You mean you only say grace once a year?" Some of my homologues know it as "Holiday of Turkey," since that was how volunteers before me had explained it to them. "But aren't turkeys expensive?"
But back to the environmental club.Msr. Yovo said he really loved the soil lesson, since soil health and quality is a huge problem in the community. He asked about whether using herbicide was good or bad for soil health, giving me a great opening to impart some EAFS-y information. Then Msr. Yovo made my day, definitely my week, and possibly my whole month.
"You really know something about pedagogy, eh?" (Debatable. Also, the Ewe eh is not quite the Canadian eh, but is used in a similar fashion.) "I learned a lot from watching you do the environmental club. The way you presented, posing questions at the beginning, asking the kids to hypothesize, doing hands-on experiments - it was great! It's so exciting that we can learn so much from each other. I will be trying some of these techniques in my classroom."
I was quick to explain how much I had already learned from his participation in the club, and from our Ewe lessons. I also shared that I carry around a notebook to meetings where I note good training and facilitation techniques that I see others using. There are lots of wonderful opportunities to learn from each other! But knowing that I had made a difference, however small and completely unintended as a result of my environmental club lesson, was just the boost I needed after a week of doubting what I was doing here.
And as for the intended result of my environmental club lesson, here's to hoping my students learned just as much about soil...
