WorldTeach Orientation

We've been doing our WorldTeach orientation now for ten days and it's been quite an intense experience. Our days tend to be fairly long with many sessions on Namibian culture and language (taught by our field director) or on how to teach Namibian children led by me). We spent four days at Eengedjo Secondary School (which by coincidence is the same school that I'll be teaching at this year). During those days, we ran a sort of summer school for kids. This was intended as extra teaching practice for our volunteers, the majority of which have never formally taught before. Attendance slowly increased over the week and we had over 100 kids by Friday. Some of the kids were very young (3-4 years old) with absolute no English experience, so it was a challenging time for many of our volunteers.
The condition of the school was a bit of a shock. We stayed in the hostel part of the school, where many of the learners live throughout the school year. Initially, there was no water or electricity. When we did get power, it was only one 2400W circuit, so we were limited to using two elements at a time on our stove. This makes cooking dinner for 30+ people a slow process. Water came and went throughout the week which will apparently be the situation for the rest of our year. We got eaten alive by mosquitoes on the first night but we're all on mefloquine or some other medication, so malaria shouldn't be a problem. I slept a lot better on the following nights once we put up our mosquito net up. It was the psychological effect of the night that was most rewarding. I found the sounds of mosquitoes buzzing in my year to be quite distracting on the previous night. Other people had no mosquitoes but faced bedbugs instead. Pick your poison, I guess.
Classroom conditions were also shocking to everyone. I'm not sure what happened in the last couple days of school in December but localized hurricane seems like a possibility. The classrooms had garbage strewn amongst them and many of the desks and chairs were broken. Broken glass was also very common on the floor. This had most of us pretty depressed but after cleaning the rooms for an hour, the improvement to both the classrooms and our morale was noticeable.
The cumulative effects of the school and hostel experience were pretty rough on some of the volunteers. There were a lot of tears and general culture shock. Chloe and I, because we had already spent two months in Africa, were a little more hardened to the experience. One volunteer decided that he couldn't handle a year here and has already returned home.
We did get a chance to look at the house we'll be living in but haven't been able to go inside yet. We've been assured that teacher housing is much nicer than student housing but are keeping our expectations low. We are in pretty good spirits right now and are thoroughly enjoying spending time with the other thirty volunteers. They bring a wide range of ideas and experiences to the country and we are looking forward to spending one more week with native English speakers before we head into our village for the year.