More Summer Projects

In between the traveling I've been doing a couple other projects this summer.

First is renovating a new English Cabinet for school. (i.e. English room). The way Georgian schools are set up is that each class stays together throughout the whole day, they have the same schedules and the same room, and teachers come to them to teach. this makes it hard to use resources and to plan out some activities, so my counterparts and I put together a grant last spring to make an English room where the classes come to us and we have everything in one spot. We are repainting, having a bookshelf made (all the school's English books are locked up in the library where no one ever goes), putting in round tables for group projects, and getting a computer to do videos, listening, and other activities with a projector. We have most of everything bought now, so hopefully I'll get some pictures as the project commences.

I also helped out with a kid's camp at an IDP camp near Tbilisi for one week in July. Another volunteer and I had been interested in working with refugees and got in touch with an amazing coordinator at a local community center to take part in their summer camp. This place is really amazing - they provide classes of all kinds, computers, shoe making, English, etc, for the local population who were all forced from their homes in South Ossettia during the war two years ago. So four of us ended up doing two sessions a day, one with older kids and one with younger kids, and came away from it hoping to be involved more in the future because it was so well run.



(Thanks to Erin for sending me these pictures)