Practice English Club

Part of our training this past week involved doing a practice English club. Since the majority of us will probably have some kind of English club at our assigned schools, our education team thought it would be a good idea for us to get some idea of how to conduct one. In our language groups (the group that we have Amharic class with) we were told to pick a focus for our club and an age range for the children. Next, we had to pick children from our neighborhood to come to our club where we would meet at our language teacher’s house. We’ve been here 2 months now so many of us have gotten familiar with the neighborhood kids. As a group, we decided to pick children ranging from ages 8 to 12. (We tried to get kids that were at about the same level in English).

Our club was to meet on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for one hour each day. As a group we thought it would be a good idea to have an environment day. Keeping the environment clean does not seem to be a major concern here seeing as how trash is dumped everywhere around the neighborhood. Many people in our kebele burn their trash and the materials that do not burn get dumped in the gorge which is unfortunate. For these reasons we thought it would be a good idea to teach the children about why they should keep their neighborhood clean.

On our environment day, we started with a discussion on why we shouldn’t throw trash on the ground explaining that the trash can get in our water and is dangerous for our bodies and how harmful it is to all the animals that graze on the land. We then split the 12 kids into teams of 4, each one of us leading a team. Each team had one trash bag and had to pick up as much trash as possible within 10 minutes. I wasn’t sure how much the kids would enjoy picking up trash, but to my surprise they were so excited and really into it (it probably helped that we made a game out of it). The kids were running around the dirt streets picking up all the trash they could, some even getting into the prickly bushes to grab what they could find. It was great to get to see the children understanding our lesson and being excited about keeping their home clean. We then got back together as a big group, decided on a winner, did a quick recap of our lesson, and were left with 4 piles of trash…what do we do now?

We started off with a great idea, but obviously we didn’t quite think it through. Yes, picking up trash and learning about keeping the neighborhood clean was great, but what were we supposed to do with the trash we had collected? So that’s why people are dumping their trash into the gorge and burning it. There’s no other option. Realizing that we had four big bags of trash and nowhere to put it was extremely frustrating. We had had such a great idea, but now had no clue what to do with it because we for sure weren’t going to throw it into the gorge and burning it releases awful chemicals into the air. I’ve never cared much about the environment. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think trash should be thrown on the ground but to be honest, back home I didn’t recycle all the time and I’ve never taken environmental classes or just ever been into it. It’s just never been my focus. However, standing there with all of that trash felt terrible because I knew that there was no good option to get rid of it and I suddenly became angry, angry that we use all this stuff and then just dump it somewhere.

Furthermore, there is no trash pick-up here in Butajira and there is no recycling, but the system we have going on in the United States isn’t perfect either. We don’t see a lot of the trash in the US because it gets dumped in places we don’t see or know about. A lot of our trash gets dumped in Africa. So if we leave our trash for Africa, where are the people in Africa supposed to dump their trash?

So what did we do with our four bags of trash? Well after about 20 minutes of bouncing ideas off of one another, our boss was driving through our Kebele. We asked him what the Peace Corps office in Butajira does with their trash. The PC office is located in Kebele 3 and there is a trash pick-up there as he informed us. You pay a man about 10 birr and he comes by with his donkey-drawn cart to pick up the trash. But just because he picks it up doesn’t mean the trash is taken care of. He just takes it somewhere outside Butajira and dumps it. So our boss took the pile of trash out of our hands to the PC office where we didn’t have to worry about it anymore. However, I’m still frustrated about this. In that moment I realized the importance of using reusable material and recycling because there is no good way to get rid of all this trash. And there are a lot of materials, such as Styrofoam, that you can’t ever dispose of, so we should stop using and making such items. My job title may be teacher trainer, however I have the freedom to start projects outside of this and veer off in different directions. As I said earlier, I’ve never been one to do much to take care of the environment because the truth is, I’ve never had to deal with it. In America, we have people who take care of our trash for us. They take it away and we never have to worry about it. We don’t know where it goes and honestly, it’s easier not to know. Well I’m where a lot of the trash ends up, in the Global South. And here in Ethiopia, people do not have the luxury of having a trash system that takes cares of all their crap for them. So I’ll be thinking of some sanitation projects for Butajira and teaching my teachers and students about caring for the environment because we can’t keep this up forever.