Tutoring in Chiwengo Village

One of the most significant aspects of the ministry that our interns do each day is tutor our children in Math, English, and Writing. The interns are divided into teams of two or three at the most with one national intern and one global intern spread out between standards 1 through 8 (1st through 8th grade in the US). The tutoring has been both challenging and quite rewarding.
Since our children come from village backgrounds, where education is generally not seen as all that important, many of our children find it difficult to study hard each day…Of course they are children. Who wants to study anyways when you have fifty other children to play with, plenty of things to do (coloring, playing with toys, running around, and various sports like soccer and net ball), and a group of 8 global and 7 national interns who want to play as well? With all this being said our tutoring has been extremely successful.
Each day at 2:00PM we gather the children into their groups and teach them until 4:00PM. Sometimes it is quite frustrating because they aren’t ready to settle down, but we have seen great strides in only a few weeks. Even after a week or so, the children began to show up at the right location and at the right time, which is quite a big deal…quite often 2:00 means 2:30 so those are great signs that something is going well.
Most importantly, tutoring has provided us an opportunity to get to know our children and has been an opening for deeper relationships. We do our best to teach them, but we know that learning is slow process that has to be continually cultivated. Our love however can take deep roots and tutoring has been one of the best places for our interns to express love and care for our children.