Kibera and Curriculum

We are now into week 3 of teaching and so far the journey has been incredible. On Saturday, we finished up teaching at John Paul II in Kibera, which was a slightly smaller school than Blessed Hands. When speaking to the principal, we were told that students are selected according to specific criteria: all students are residents of Kibera and they must go through an extensive interview process and meet the grade requirements in order to attend the school. Ever since we visited John Paul II to distribute the pre-training questionnaires, we were excited to spend an entire week with this group of enthusiastic and bright students. I taught a group of form 1 students along with Gaddiel, Vivian and Craig, and we were so impressed by their curiosity and passion for learning. They asked us many questions that challenged us as peer educators and they were always willing to join in on some rowdy psych games such as "wind your toy" and "steam steam panda".

In addition to teaching and planning outreach activities for the communities, YESS/QHO are taking on a bit of a challenge this year. With so many motivated and inspired individuals on project, we decided that it would be a great opportunity to look at revising and updating our curriculum. This is quite the task for our team but we are all looking forward to implementing the changes hopefully by the time we are teaching at our last school. The decision to update the curriculum came from a realization that the general knowledge of high school students in Kenya is changing quite significantly and through their anonymous questions they have highlighted some aspects of our training that they would like us to expand upon. We are also looking at rearranging the order in which some topics are presented to enhance the curriculum's comprehensiveness and flow. So far, the curriculum has been very well received by the students but we are always looking for ways to improve. Over the next two weeks, we will be editing every section of the curriculum and we look forward to seeing how things will turn out!