Inzogira ishuri or school bells

In the last two weeks I was more or less in charge of English lessons with the ladies from the NWC as Nina was taking care of the NWC technical matters. I must say that I was sometimes surprised by their excellent knowledge of English, however the pronunciation proved to be a bit more problematic, so I focused the lessons on the correct pronunciation. We started off with simple sentences as I wanted to find out at what level of English each individual was. Some were brilliant and some still need more exercise. That is why Nina and I are encouraging them to use as much English as possible, even among themselves on Mondays, which are usually reserved for handicrafts. We did devote one whole class to prepositions of time and place as they were troublesome for some of the students and wanted to improve their knowledge.

During the classes we try to read at least one English book (for children) in order to practice reading and pronunciation and I even gave them some books to take home and repeat what we've read. They are very happy when I ask them how certain words are pronounced in their language, Kinyarwanda, and they seem to enjoy their role as teachers. They are absorbing new English words really fast, which is helping them to extend their basic English vocabulary. To help them overcome the fear from talking in English (I think they are afraid of making mistakes and sometimes some women become more silent when we are in a bigger group) I ask them at the beginning of every lesson about their previous day or weekend and they put sentences in correct tense. I've noticed that younger girls are usually more talkative. Then we have role play, which includes dialogues from everyday life and sometimes described situations are so amusing that we simply have to laugh.

Due to the ladies' preoccupation with the handicrafts before our project coordinator left, we had to postpone English exam to this week. We even had a small test, where I dictated some sentences and some of them did very well whereas others did not perform that well. However I believe that a small progress can be seen if I compare their pronunciation and some sort of fear of speaking English they were having at the beginning of our classes and now. Classes are now running in a more relaxed environment.