Tutoring
It’s easy to enroll a child in school, it’s much harder to make sure they understand what is being taught, especially when you consider the public schools have an average class size of 55 and often times illiterate parents with an elementary school education.
When we first arrived in Muxara, we saw that one of the biggest needs in our village was help with education. Although the children go to school, it just isn’t enough. The children need help learning Portuguese (the national language), which they learn by immersion on the first day of school, and they need help with homework.
Our tutoring program was started to meet some of these needs and more! Five days a week, we tutor about 60 children. We try our best to keep our class sizes to 10 students or less so that each student gets special attention from our staff. In addition to these classes, any child that is behind their peers can be tutored one to one.
Pre-school: In 2018, we started a pre-school class when we noticed that little children were coming for tutoring who weren’t even in school. The children here all speak Emakua (a tribal language) at home and are introduced to Portuguese on the first day of 1st grade. It’s no wonder the children all struggle with school when lessons are taught in a language they don’t speak. We hope to give these children a jump-start on Portuguese that we teach through games, singing, playing, coloring and fun activities that teach colors, counting and other basics.
Grades 1 – 3: Tutoring at this level is still learning a lot of Portuguese but also the alphabet and how to write. We hope that over time the preschool program will make the transition into 1st grade easier. At the end of 3rd grade the students must pass a proficiency exam to move on to 4th grade. The months leading up to this exam are spent preparing not only in the classroom but also making sure the children have a proper birth certificate, which is needed to be admitted to the exam.
Grades 4 and up: Starting in grade four, we get to focus more on reinforcing what the children are learning at school. As the students get older and their homework and tests get more demanding, we decrease the class sizes even more.
We believe the impact of our tutoring program goes far beyond the students enrolled. We look forward to seeing what would come of these students and believe they will be better teachers, doctors, farmers or stay-at-home parents because of our fun, relational, hands-on approach to education!
High Risk: Starting around age 12, the likelihood of a girl dropping out of school drastically increases. For some it’s to help at home by caring for younger siblings, because they are pregnant or to get married. Nothing about this is easy. This is the way things have been done for generations, typically a parent or grandparent knows and even arranges these marriages because once a girl is married off, she becomes her husband’s financial responsibility.
Our goal is to empower these girls to make their own choices, when they are adults. We meet with each girl’s parents to remind them that marriage under 18 is illegal. We meet with them again after a girl has had her coming of age ceremony, letting them know that we will report any underage marriages to the police.
The first time we did this, we were concerned that we would alienate people in the village. The exact opposite happened; many leaders came to tell us how much they appreciated our taking this stand and giving the young girls a better future.
Our female staff spend extra time with these girls, often painting nails and other activities that the girls love. Any time it’s appropriate, we offer additional incentives to these girls for attendance and effort. Whenever possible, we make it so that the incentives help the whole family.