"Making A Difference... One Village at a Time:"
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©2001 National Council for the Social Studies
"Making A Difference... One Village At A Time:"
The Peace Corps Partnership Program (PCPP) is a wonderful tool for exposing your students to another region of the world and helping them realize their own potential for making a difference. This is accomplished through entering a partnership with a Peace Corps volunteer working in the field. Within a single school year, your students can choose, help fund, and follow the progress of a small-scale development project in a village hosting a Peace Corps volunteer. Throughout the year, they will be engaged in a cross-cultural exchange with the people of the village. The Peace Corps Partnership Program has been around almost as long as the Peace Corps itself. Soon after the first volunteers went overseas in 1961, many reported a need for more money to help the villages in which they were working. Villagers desperately needed basic improvements in their quality of life - for example, wells, schools, and health care facilities - that were beyond their ability to provide for themselves. The Peace Corps responded by developing a program through which a volunteer could apply for money to support a finite, small-scale development project. Over time, more than 4000 such projects have been funded by schools, civic and religious groups, and individuals. In 1999 alone, some 151 projects were funded to the tune of $487,967. Corcoran High School students in Syracuse, New York, have funded a Peace Corps Partnership Project annually since 1983. These projects have included one each in Asia and Eastern Europe, three in Latin America, and eleven in Africa. Our current project is helping to build a maternity ward for the people of Gonse and ten surrounding villages in Burkina Faso. The project is being managed by the Corcoran International Relations Club and supported by students in Global History and Geography classes. The total cost of this project is $7,854. We raise funds by selling student-created note cards (this year's theme is children's faces) and peace theme t-shirts printed for us by former students (Holy Shirt! Inc.). Being situated next door to John T. Roberts School (K-8) has enabled us to combine efforts in supporting projects. The younger students at Roberts have conducted penny drives; for example, in 1991 they collected 65,000 pennies to purchase a Braille writer for the first school for the blind in all of central Africa. This project, for which we raised $8,500 in construction funds, was coordinated by Rod (Corcoran 1979) and Megan Fick. Many young people in the Central African Republic develop river blindness (falaria) from the bites of a small fly; this school aims to help them live independent lives. Another advantage of working with the Roberts School is the opportunity it gives our students to teach younger children what they have learned from partnering with a Peace Corps volunteer. Our students have developed lesson plans about other cultures - language, children's games, foods, and so on - using artifacts sent back to us by volunteers.
Choosing a Project
Peace Corps volunteers provide you with quarterly reports and photos of progress (and other information you may ask for). Your students may participate in a Peace Corps Partnership Project by committing to one-half of the total cost, if you hesitate to commit to the entire amount. One of the best aspects of the program is that the Peace Corps will advance the funds you pledge to raise as soon as you make your commitment. In this way, you can follow the progress made on the project as you work toward raising the funds. For our maternity ward project, the entire time-frame from commitment to completion of construction was six months, although it took considerably longer to finish the fundraising. You should initiate a project early if you want to see it completed within one school year. Some years, I ask all of my Global students to select a project, other times, only the members of the International Relations Club. We begin by determining the criteria that are important to us - cost, geographic region, urgency of the problem addressed, and efficacy of the solution proposed by the Peace Corps volunteer. We consider how many people the project will help, specific ways it helps women, and the project's life expectancy - as well as other factors students may bring in. For example, students nine years ago wanted to help a village in the Ivory Coast that was facing a cholera epidemic. They were unanimous in choosing a project to build twelve latrines for the market town and its schools. They also supported a need brought up by the PC volunteer-teaching the villagers how using the latrines rather than the fields would help prevent illness.
Once students choose a project, they should call at once to find out whether it is still available for funding. If so, they should write a letter immediately to the Peace Corps volunteer. The PCPP will provide you with a copy of the complete proposal. This document is a wealth of information and potential lessons on such topics as the country's history and culture, any colonial impact, ethnic diversity, the economy and development problems, and the health and standard of living of the people. It will also contain a complete project budget - petfect for teaching math - in both local and U.S. currencies.
Components of the Project
One component involves what you want students to learn from the project and how it fits into the curriculum. Global History and Geography is a two-year course required of all 9th and lOth graders in New York State. Virtually any Peace Corps project matches issues found in Unit 8: Global Connections and Interactions of the New York State social studies curriculum. We devote one or two class periods per month to learning about the people and culture of the village involved in our project. Good sources of information beyond PCPP materials are the Culturgrams published by Brigham Young University. What we teach often depends on what we receive from the Peace Corps volunteer. Some volunteers have been wonderful about sending artifacts - everyday tools, toys, fabrics, and so on used in the village. Over the years, we have collected a small "museum" of materials to use with students. When we ask them to guess the purpose of each item in a scavenger hunt, the "stick" (read: toothbrush) gets 'em every time. On a higher level, development issues are part of the state curriculum, and our projects encourage students to think more critically about issues that have acquired a personal meaning for them. Consider, for example' the project involving a school for the blind in the Central African Republic. Ideally, helping to prevent the disease that makes children blind would have been a better project, but that lies in the realm of UNICEF and WHO rather than a single Peace Corps volunteer. The discussion of this injustice provided students with food for thought at the time.
Our students, in turn, use the knowledge they are acquiring to teach students at the Roberts School. Writing lesson plans for younger students is a terrific way for older students to absorb the lessons a project teaches. The older students work in teams to prepare for teaching primary age students. We try especially to learn something about the lives of children in a village - their day-to-day activities, games, and language. Our students have asked the younger children at Roberts to draw pictures and write letters or stories to send to the children of a village. Sometimes we send crayons and paper that they can use to write back. A popular lesson involves presenting "artifacts" sent by the Peace Corps volunteer and asking younger students to guess what they are and how they were made. We have also used audiotapes from the village - recordings of music and of children talking and singing. And we have prepared authentic meals (in whole or in part) using foods eaten in the village. The variety and success of lessons depends on the quality of the exchange between our students and the Peace Corps volunteer. Several of our student teachers have gone on into elementary teaching, for which I hope we can claim some credit.
The most time-consuming aspect of our projects is fundraising. This is done for the most part by members of the International Relations Club through their annual newsletter. Club members staff exhibits at arts and crafts events and social studies conferences, and make presentations to interested community groups. All of these efforts help them to develop important interpersonal skills. We also raise money by printing notecards. Each year, art students at Corcoran are invited to participate in a competition for the design of these notecards. They are given the theme - the last three having been children's faces, animals of the Peace Corps world, and medicinal herbs of West Africa. Next year, they will draw birds of the developing world. The winners receive five sets of cards, all the publicity that goes with promoting the cards (often including a plug by Willard Scott on the Today Show), and - not least - the satisfaction of having made their own personal contribution to the project.
Service learning has become an important part of the curriculum in many schools. The Peace Corps Partnership Program offers a fine opportunity for your students to engage in community service, both locally and globally. These projects offer your students a real life experience that no textbook can. And they engage students at a very direct level. In the Ivory Coast project described earlier, the plan was to dig the pit latrines ten meters deep and build outhouses over them. Unfortunately, in one instance, the structure was not in place before a farmer's cow wandered into the pit and had to be destroyed. The students were very concerned, thinking it unlikely that the farmer had more than one cow. They asked if we could find out how much a cow cost, and then raised the $500 needed to replace it. In return, the farmer sacrificed a chicken in honor of the students at Corcoran - an honor most young Americans haven't experienced. Over the years we have helped construct six primary schools, one well, two maternity wards, a medicinal herb garden, a community health center, and the school for the blind, among other projects. Some of our students have grown up to become teachers-more than one as a result of the experience of teaching at Roberts - and several of our graduates have gone on to serve in the Peace Corps. Your students have much to give and much to gain by participating in the Peace Corps Partnership Program. Our motto is "Making a difference…one village at a time!"++ James G. Miller, Jr. teaches Global History and Geography at Corcoran High School in Syracuse, New York.
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