So the title of this post is an example of the enthusiastic greetings I’ve gotten during the past week here in Maseru, Lesotho. The “How’s it” caught me off guard the most because it’s mostly yelled, not spoken, so it sounds like “HOWWWZZITT!” I kept asking “Whose house?” But, all in all, everyone I’ve met so far has been incredibly friendly, helpful, and curious about us and our projects!

For clarity’s sake, I’ll do an overview of what our project is. For the class Intro to Global Health, I worked with Karthik Soora and Cindy Dinh (side note: hands down, best partners one could ever ask for!) to design a career guidance camp for secondary school students in Lesotho (specifically at Masianokeng High School and SOS Children’s Village).

The main issue we had at the beginning was well, where to begin! After doing our literature review, we concluded that nothing like this has ever really been tackled before – career guidance for students in developing countries isn’t exactly seen as a top priority. Mr. Chimombe, the principal of Masianokeng High School, has seen the effects of this – he has reiterated over and over again about how the students lack confidence in their own abilities and about how they often do not know what to do after high school.

In addressing these issues, we designed a camp that seeks to empower students and meet their needs in the most practical (and fun!) ways possible. Our camp first focuses on getting the students to know themselves better and building up their confidence through assessments, icebreakers, and other interactive games. The student will then be sorted into career groups based on their interests and will work together to develop their professional skills. We are also in the process of arranging for different local professionals to come in and act as mentors for each career group; they may even be able to offer job shadowing experiences!

Besides the main component of career guidance, our camp is also incorporating math review and health and business education into the curriculum. Math is not a strong subject for many of our students and the extra review was something the faculty at Masianokeng was happy to hear about! Health education will focus mainly on understanding and preventing HIV/AIDS – as the Lesotho Times duly noted in an article this past week, 1 in 4 people in Lesotho has HIV/AIDS, so, addressing this issue is a must.

Another component of our camp is the scholarship contest, which is made possible through Rice University’s Envision Grant. The students will be given the chance to compete for scholarships which will pay for the next year of their schooling. The contest itself was designed to incorporate all the knowledge that the students will learn during the camp – students will have to sit for an interview, an essay, and a standardized math test in order to be considered for the scholarship.

In order to connect the camp to the real world, we will be bringing the students on field trips to different locations in Lesotho (hopefully to the Baylor Clinic, the local hospital, and a university or teaching college). Many of our students have expressed the desire to give back to their community – after visiting these places and participating in our camp, we hope that the students will have the confidence to go out and bring about the change they want to see! The capstone on the camp will be the student-led projects. We want the students to tackle their own projects as career groups (much like how we tackled this one!). Whether it be the health professions group building incubators for the local hospital or the education career group choosing to create their own HIV/AIDS education materials, we hope that the students will identify issues and design/implement solutions to them in order to help their communities.

Whew, that was a bit overwhelming to type out. Looking at it now, I must say that this is definitely an ambitious program to carry out. However, with an awesome partner like Karthik, a supportive and friendly faculty, and so many eager students, I can confidently say that this camp is going to happen!

On a side note, I really like the taxi service (Perfect Taxi) here. They know us interns by name and voice! I just placed a call to Perfect Taxi and just from my “Hello!” they knew I was Ann and that I needed at a taxi from my apartment at Leseli 10. I am getting SUCH a kick out of this.

All right, hopefully an update about actual stuff will follow. I figure that some nice groundwork should be laid before I dive into the details of the day – I think a big lesson I’m learning right now is the power of careful and thorough preparation (especially in readying our curriculum for the camp), so I might as well exemplify it in my blogging routine 🙂

 

I promised some pictures, so here they are!