Thursday, July 8, 2010

Graduation Ceremony


The team was lucky enough to witness the graduation ceremony for the school at the Handicap Center today. Today marked the last day of school for the students at the center after ten straight months of school. Most of the students at the center (there are about 250-300 total I believe) live with host families in the area for the duration of the school year, so after today they head back to their actual homes and families until school resumes in September. Today the students and teachers hosted the ceremony for an audience of staff, some parents that had arrived to pick up their children and our team.

The ceremony started off with some singing (as with most everything in the African culture, as far as I can tell) and then lead into the different groups of students showing a skit, song, or skills they had prepared. Some of the skits included students pretending to be teachers in a class of their peers and almost every skit mentioned the importance of the parents encouraging their kids to come to school every day and helping with their studies. One student (I believe he was in 2nd grade) put it this way: “The wind is very powerful, but it cannot blow away a stone by itself.” He then went on to show that the role a parent plays in their child’s education is an important one.

Most of the skits included humor (most of our group did not understand what was being said, but the reaction from the crowd was self-explanatory) but had an important central moral to the story. One of the skits showed a group of handicap students that were not helped at other schools were given a chance at the handicap center. The students were able to obtain a great education and went on to be a doctor and nurse, helping people in the community.
Some other demonstrations included songs, showing arithmetic skills or French grammar skills, or how blind students were able to read braille. Some of the parents watching the ceremony did not believe that a blind child could read because they had never heard of braille before. The ceremony ended with gifts being awarded to the top students in each class as well as thanks being given to the teachers and staff who help to run the center. All in all, it was a great experience to see how the work of the local teachers and staff at the handicap center had paid off over the last then months and it was great to see that they were recognized for their time and efforts.

In an earlier post, we mentioned that the mobility team was having some trouble with the material available at the center for us to work with while manufacturing the trikes. The tubing we normally use has walls that are thick enough that the tube can be bent in a hydraulic bender here at the center. (This saves time and money, avoiding cutting and welding the metal at 90 degree angles for every necessary turn on the frame.) However, the tubing that was available had very thin walls, so that when we tried to bend it the tube would crumple and was not able to be used. We tried filling the tube with sand while we bent it to keep the walls from collapsing which had some success and some failure. What we ended up doing however was taking old trikes that were not being used any more because of broken parts or outdated models and cut them up for spare material. We were able to get some good thicker walled sections that we welded together and bent up for our new uniform frame design. We got enough material to make 2 more trikes! (Which brings us to a total of 3.) We have two trikes painted, one of them should be ready to go by the end of tomorrow, and one more that is bent up and ready to be welded together using a fixture Charlie made before the trip. Yempabou, a man who works at the center that uses an electric trike and puts tons of miles on his, will be getting the first trike that we crank out. He puts a lot of wear and tear on his trike so we can get the most feedback from him on our new design. We moved Yempabou’s seat off his old trike (a previous Collaboratory electric trike design) onto the new uniform frame trike and plan on using his old trike, fitted with a new seat and some modifications, for the man who lives out in the bush who we visited last week. That way this man gets a trike that we have gotten plenty of feedback on and Yempabou is right at the center to offer us feedback if need be for this new design.



We were glad to see Dr. Hare walk in the door tonight and join us for dinner! She arrived safely from Ouaga this evening with stories of some crazy adventures on the way here as well as with some extra groceries for the team. She will be joining Bethany and Katie as they officially kick off the Summer Enrichment Program at the center (they will have more students join their class now that school is officially out). Katie and Bethany have had a great time teaching the students in their class so far and have learned a lot themselves working with the handicap children. The stories they have are encouraging and fun to listen to at the end of each day.

Finally, we ask for prayer for a short term missionary who is staying in the same compound as us. Demarise (I definitely did not spell her name correctly) and Rachel are two Swiss short term missionaries who came with us from Ouaga to Mahadaga, though not a part of the Collaboratory, when we met them at the SIM compound in Ouaga. Demarise is very sick now and needs to go back to Ouaga to get some more help there. We pray for her returned health and a safe trip back to Ouaga. We also are very thankful Dr. Hare has gotten to us safely and are very grateful for the successes we all have had as a team working on our projects throughout the day. Thank you for your prayers and support!

Justin

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