Camille Minns ’20, Namibia —
With six weeks of living and working in Omaruru “under my belt”, I certainly see this place more different than I had when I first arrived. During the first few weeks, most of my energy was spent on trying to obtain a certain level of comfort in this unfamiliar space. When that achieved, I focused more on being (passively) receptive and observational. I’m now at the point where, in addition to those qualities, I’ve become a little bit more critical. I want to know “why?” – why things happen, why certain people are involved, why things don’t work out, etc.
‘My Future, My Choice’ was a programme developed several years ago, “which aims to give young people the information and life skills they need to make decisions about their future”. Branching off from this curriculum was the ‘Window of Hope’ programme. Every Monday from about 1:30 – 3 pm, Olivia and I attend these meetings with a small group of 6th and 7th graders. During these sessions, the students sang jingles and read about topics such as sex, love and healthy relationships. With a more critical eye, I couldn’t help but notice the gap: the delivery of the content seemed so juvenile and glossed over. Yes, they were just primary school students, but these 7th graders would matriculate and become the same 8th graders whom we had the Life-Skills sessions with – the ones asking us about their realities with sexual assault, contraception, prostitution and homosexuality. The rhetoric of these ‘Window of Hope’ sessions didn’t seem to match the realities.
We spoke with our liaison here in Omaruru, who conveniently assisted in the formation of the ‘My Future, My Choice’ programme, and he understood this all too well. Apparently, ‘My Future, My Choice, had a more international (read: non-religious) focus. It was successful in reducing the number of HIV/AIDS cases among young people for several years after it was launched. The government, noticing these positive changes, decided to adopt the programme and implement it into the school curriculum. From what I understood, in doing so, the programme began to assume a slightly more religious undertone. Perhaps this was only because of its Christian facilitators, but discussions on ‘sex’ became somewhat superficial. Imagine telling a curious, young child that sex is “a gift from God that should take place between a married man and woman” when their friends are doing it and it’s everywhere. Of course, this is a problem that happens everywhere, not just in Omaruru/Namibia. Several secondary school teachers, however, mentioned that many 8th grade girls become pregnant very early. The way I understood it, is that they go from being ‘big fish in a little pond’ to ‘little fish in a big pond’ without the same attention and relationship with teachers. They’re lost with many distractions, and when life-skills courses and programmes like ‘Window of Hope’, among other things, fail to match the reality, students are bound to fall through the cracks. The impact obviously differed from our intent (and Ivan Illich is probably rolling in his grave at this statement).
Olivia and I experienced this at our own hands.
Last week we hosted our 3rd career guidance session for the 11th graders to talk about ‘College Preparation and Career Planning’. Let’s just say that it didn’t go as well as the others, and Olivia and I both left feeling uneasy. Though they expressed interest in the topic, the learners admitted that no one had ever really discussed it with them. With the hour and a half that we had, Olivia and I would attempt to summarise the information. Now, right off the back, we tried to accommodate the fact that not every one of these learners would go to college by including information on entering the workforce after high school. I think, however, that by talking about college first (with career planning coming later), some of the learners became discouraged. Half way through an activity in which the learners walked around the room, it became noticeable that half of the room walked out. “What the heck happened?”, I wondered.
Immediately, it became clear to me that for many of the learners, the idea of college was unrealistic and it was an under-explored and foreign concept. The mention of the financial costs coupled with the reality that not many of them knew what they genuinely wanted to do, made for a foggy conversation. The eldest children in both my host-family and Olivia’s are enrolled in or are on the fast track to entering college, but that’s because they attended hostel schools in larger cities, like Otjiwarongo and Windhoek. This is what many perceive to be the only way to attend college.
I felt foolish and deflated; the students who left probably felt the same way, sadly. I personally tried to make sure that we were as realistic as we could be, like not including “become a doctor” in every career example we had and trying to incorporate those who weren’t so academically-inclined, but perhaps worked well with their hands. Despite that, there were still some shortcomings. With each fall-back, lessons are learnt. What doesn’t go right this time around will be improved upon in other sessions, and at the very least, we can fix our mistakes for those who may come next year. We are the first CPS group here in Namibia and that’s what this is all about.
CPS Summer Fellows 2017 