During the Day...

So in response to a couple of questions about what I’m doing at work, here goes:

I’m continuing to teach conversational English classes two days a week. Right now this consists of getting the kids to talk – a lot of their English language knowledge is grammar and while that knowledge is necessary, it means they can tell me about the types of nouns a lot better than they can tell me what they did yesterday. So I’m sure they’re sick of all of my questions, but they are speaking more than they used to and that’s good – even if it’s not perfect they are hopefully increasing their confidence in it. They’re also recognizing that they don’t need to know every English word before they can speak English – for example, they’ll ask me a word in English and a couple of times I haven’t known the answer – not the translation, but the English word. Part of it is because I’m not a walking dictionary and part of it is that I don’t know British English – what, a swine is the same as a pig?

My organization also has computer classes at our center in Ucar. There are many villages that surround Ucar and are varying distances from the actual town. We currently have locations in a couple of the villages and would like to expand to another one. This village, Shadlig, is about 20 – 25 minutes from Ucar and only has public transportation into Ucar once a day. So this town is ideal in its location because the residents do not have easy access to the center in Ucar unless they have their own transportation, which is not common. An arrangement has been made with the local school for use of one of their empty classrooms, now all we need to do is get the computers. But to get the computers, we need money. That’s where I can help. I’m going to write a grant that will hopefully be approved and then we’ll be able to purchase computers for this village “branch” of our center. Right now I’m working through all of the logistical questions:

• What besides the actual computers do we need?
• What’s the budget?
• With this grantor the organization needs to put in 20% – can they afford that?
• What are some of the risks associated with undertaking this project?
• How will it continue to be sustainable after the computers are installed?
• What exactly will be taught in these classes?
• And on and on and on...

Well, now I’ve written on my blog about it. I guess it’s about time to work on the application…