It's Getting There That's Hard!

The Seli River Writing Project operates Young Writers clubs only in rural areas now. Getting to schools in rural areas in Sierra Leone can be not only expensive, but alarming.

Here's a section of the road from Kabala to Dankawalie, that SELI managed to slide through at the end of October trying to get to, and back from, the writing club at Dankawalie Secondary School.  We were also trying to get to the community to talk with them about DSS's exciting new school library and what everyone's role will be.

Of course, we're not the only ones who use this road. Vehicles full of traders and their produce regularly get stuck trying to get to or from the weekly market in Dankawalie, either in sections like this, on makeshift "bridges," or up and down very uneven steep hills, or over and through large rock outcroppings. People get sick in villages along the road and need to be brought for care to Kabala. If you want to build something in the village, some of your building materials will need to be brought from Kabala. This is an agricultural area, and everyone would like to send crops to urban areas to sell--this is the only road going there. Children walk this road regularly, trying to get to schools. The many people who want to trade in Kono to the southeast, have to travel west along this road to Kabala and take another circuitous route around to Kono. How we all wish something could be done about THIS ROAD!

Make Your Voice Heard!

This student at the Ahmadiyya Muslim Agricultural Secondary School (AMASS) in Yogomaia, Kabala is reading her first draft aloud for feedback from her peers.

Her classmates listen carefully, pens poised as this boy's is to write comments or questions about the content in her piece.  Following this discussion, and armed with the questions that each student writes down for her, she will write an improved second or third draft.

SELI has encouraged the schools where there are Young Writers junior secondary clubs, to give girls the added support they need to attend. We were so glad to see girls made up 1/3 of the students in the meeting we attended at AMASS last week.  Families depend on teenage girls to take care of younger siblings and prepare food, so it is particularly difficult to include them in after school activities. Young Writers clubs improve students' English communication and thinking skills as well as their cultural awareness. We don't want to undermine the structure of the family, but we need to keep trying to get girls the benefits they deserve!

We're pleased, too, to hear that AMASS has just launched a school library, and that the Young Writers are the first approved borrowers! Long live the Young Writers and all who support them!

SELI Young Writers Takes Shape

Attendance hasn't been all we'd like in the last few meetings, but the SELI Young Writers program is really taking shape.

Since most of the students have domestic work to do at home, they come at varying times. We have found that it works to have a journaling table. When they enter, the first stop is to take their writing folders, and the second stop is to do the journal assignment. Today it was to describe and to "perhaps" about the photograph you see on the table. Who is this woman? Where does she live, and what is she up to? Why are we so sure she is not a Sierra Leonean?

The girls in the foreground are in the third draft of their first (analytic) piece of writing. At this point, they move to word processing, where it is easier to revise and build good paragraphs. The girl on the left has just cut a sentence from one paragraph and pasted it into the next, where it makes more sense. Not bad, for a novice computer user and paragraph builder!

The student at the far table has moved on to the first draft of his second assignment, a personal writing challenge. We read all our first, and sometimes our second drafts, aloud to others for discussion and feedback. And we need more students to enrich that discussion!

A visit to a Young Writers club

SELI visited the Young Writers club at Sussex Junior Secondary School on the Freetown Peninsula for the first time this week. It is a very small school located in sight of, and just a few hundred yards from, the shores of the Atlantic.

These students are deep in thought, either drafting or revising their work after a peer content conference. At least four content conferences were going on in the room at the same time. The facilitators, Moses Gbondo and Kandeh Conteh, demonstrated well how content conferencing can be carried out in a crowded classroom where other people are at other stages in the writing process, with minimal movement, by simply having students turn around on their benches to face the students behind them.

Because this is a new club, no one has reached the self-, peer-, or teacher-editing stage yet. We have great expectations for the Young Writers at Sussex JSS!

At the end of the meeting, the students clapped and asked to take pictures of of their teachers with their certificates from the Leading Young Writers training that SELI conducted in August.