Teacher Training

Rachel, a volunteer who has been with PoD Nepal for three months has been doing some amazing work with us. When she arrived, looking at her past experience, I decided Annapurna Primary School would be the best placement for her. On her first day there, she arrived, met the head teacher and the other teachers and was asked to teach Health because none of them knew how to teach it. Rachel was happy to take on the challenge but asked 'What happens when I leave?' which was met by a lot of blank faces. This gave Rachel the idea that she could be more helpful by running teacher training course with her time here. And rather than just focusing on one class in one school, could help train all the teachers from all the schools that PoD work with, plus a few others that we have connections with!

 In Nepal, to become a teacher you do not necessarily have to have gone through any training. All the schools PoD Nepal work with are government schools which inevitably means that they are very poor. Trained teachers would tend to go to private schools where they can get higher salaries. Which means the government schools often suffer.

In the last three months, Rachel has prepared a training manual which has then been translated into Nepali and run two full days of training for all our schools. The day before the training we were all full of nerves; Would they show up? Would they understand? Would they actually follow through with Rachel's ideas?

The event was a huge sucess, all the teachers turned up from all the schools and had a fantastic day. They all got involved, asked tonnes of questions and were eager to learn as much as they could. 

Rachel then gave them two weeks to go back into their schools and implement some of the ideas she had given them. Knowing they are on very tight budgets, the ideas she gave them cost little to know money, for example star charts and general discipline ideas.

After the two weeks, Rachel went back to each and every school for a days follow up training and was extremely proud of what she saw. Some of them had written up routines, some had star charts already in the rooms, some had taken on her advice of how to properly use volunteers. Now we just have to hope that the training continues and they keep moving forward in the right way!

 Rachel, along with the PoD Charity also donated toy boxes to every nursery which will make a huge difference to the early years of their education.

 I would personally like to say a huge thank you for all the work that Rachel has done here in the past three months.

If you would like to contribute to our efforts to improve the conditions at these schools you can make a donation here to the PoD Charity. For more information on our work in Nepal and how to join our our team, look at our website or contact Gemma in the UK on 01242 250 901. 

Painting 5 schools!

If you follow us on facebook, you will know that over the past 5 weeks we have been spending most of our time painting the schools that PoD Nepal works with using some of our PoD Charity money.

Many people have asked me what difference does it make if their classroom is painted? Surely there is somewhere more important you could spend the money? But in answer to that, let me show you what some of the schools looked like before we got in there....

They were dirty, dingy,  and grimy. Not particularly nice places to spend your time and definitely not a great learning environment. By adding a lick of paint, we have totally renewed these classrooms and made them a pleasant, light and pretty place for the kids to be. 

 

Most of these schools have little to no resources, so these paintings also work as great teaching tools. It was great to overhear a teacher the other day using our alphabet we had painted on the wall and using the animals as examples.

We have had alot of help along the way from PoD volunteers, locals, GRG's Adventure Kayaking and many of the teachers from each school and for that I would like to say a MASSIVE thank you, as I do not think we would have completed it on our own. (On one day we had 11 classrooms to paint with just 3 volunteers, but kindly a group of 20 gave up their day to help paint!)

The schools we painted were Sun Rise, Shree Krishna, Balam Primary, Birendra and Annapurna. Unfortunatley we did not have time to paint Dipya Jyoti but have left them our designs and left over paint so that they can do themselves.

If you would like to contribute to our efforts to improve the conditions at these schools you can make a donation here to the PoD Charity

For more information on our work in Nepal and how to join our our team, look at our website or contact Gemma in the UK on 01242 250 901.