Last week, Rachel and a couple of other volunteers went to the local secondary school to try out their teaching skills. They had about 60 students who were around 17—not much younger than the volunteers themselves.

The volunteers are learning dialects instead of highland Malagasy, so, although the students speak the highland version of the language, the three volunteers were speaking Betsimisaraka (East coast dialect) and Antandroy (one of the southern dialects).

Rachel said that they were with the class for 2 hours, during which they each made a brief presentation, then played ecologically educational games with the students. Since that sort of learning is very foreign to schools in Madagascar which are still patterned on the French education system with lots of rote learning and little time to be creative, the Malagasy students really enjoyed the experience.

Rachel got some feedback from the Malagasy ‘sister’ of another volunteer who had been in the class and said to her PC ‘brother’, at home that evening, “That red-headed girl [Rachel] sure was a lot of fun to watch, even though I couldn’t understand her very well!â€?