New principal and teacher at Narromine Christian School, Greg Arnold, spent last year as a teacher in the small African country of Lesotho. Carmen McIntosh spoke to him about his experiences.
What is your background in regards to teaching before Africa?
I began teacher training after finishing high school, completed two years and then had a break. I went back to finish a few years ago and graduated at the end of 2006. 2007 was actually my first year out as a teacher.
What made you decide to teach in Africa?
My wife and I, well it was more my idea, we wanted to go overseas somewhere and do some volunteer work.
We ended up going to an Adventist hospital in the small country of Lesotho. I’d never heard of Lesotho before, the Adventist church has a worldwide volunteer website so that was how I first found out about it. It’s a tiny country, about two million people live there, it’s enclosed within South Africa and is probably about one-third of the size of Tasmania.
It’s very mountainous, extremely poor and has one of the world’s highest HIV rates, so the average life expectancy is 35-36 years of age.
There was a little school on the hospital campus and I was teaching Years 5 and 6, I had 14 students. It was a pretty amazing experience.
Were there any experiences which stuck out in your mind as a teacher?
Our school had mostly donated library books, some of them were 20-30 years old and our library was an old shipping container. The kids were super -keen to borrow these books, even though they were quite old. Their enjoyment and their hunger for learning was there, it didn’t matter to them that there wasn’t all new books. When I first started I was teaching in a shipping container as my classroom. With 14 students I could barely walk up and down the rows. On the hot days we would open up the back door but on a few occasions because it was so crowded the kids would fall out the back. Eventually we moved into another room. Lesotho is also well known for its lightning storms. One particular day there was a very bad storm and our power went out and everyone jumped. We found out only 10 kilometres down the road there were a couple of other kids at a school that had been struck by lightning and one was killed.
What did you personally get out of the experience?
For me the whole time was pretty difficult. It was extremely rewarding learning another culture and experiencing another culture from a grassroots level. I think the thing I got the most out of it was appreciating what we have and what we take for granted. Seeing people living a simple lifestyle with extreme hardship but also having such a spirit to them - tough people that wouldn’t give in, orphan children raising other orphan children, they mightn’t have had much but a lot of them were still happy.
Have your experiences affected the way you teach kids here?
I’m still trying to figure that out. They’re just the same, we’ve just got a different covering on the outside. There’s cultural differences but essentially we’re very similar as people. They’re naughty too like kids here and they want to do the same things - kids want to have fun and play with their friends.
How is it going being Principal of Narromine Christian School?
I was never expecting to be principal and I’m only a new teacher so I’ve been kind of thrown in the deep end, but it’s been an interesting challenge that I’m enjoying. I’m teaching grades 3, 4, 5 and 6, I only have a small group of eight and I’m taking care of the principal job as well. This is my old home school, I went right through primary school here so it’s interesting to be back in this position - life goes in giant circles sometimes - I would never in a hundred years had expected to be living here and working here at my old school. Narromine is an amazing community, it’s typical of small communities and small country towns how friendly they are and how supportive they are. This school has a huge amount of support from parents and past students and just people in the community helping out and it wouldn’t work nearly as well without that, we rely on that support being a small school.
Email a friend