Class is in Session!

Looking into the classroom

Eight students sit in pairs behind four treadle sewing machines. Two teachers stand or sit at the front of the small room, next to the chalkboard.  And two white girls sit off to the side observing the classroom and its happenings. What does all of this mean? The time has finally come (well, actually it came about 2 weeks ago). The beginning sewing class has officially begun!

As most of you know, this sewing class is the butter to my bread, the main reason I wanted to return to Jinja and resume working with Fount of Mercy.  Having written the curriculum and trained Sarah and Margaret to teach it, I was very eager to see how my hard work would actually play out in the classroom.  This wasn’t however, without a few unexpected turns.

Sarah (r) & Margaret (l) in action

The first occurred before I even arrived in Uganda.  Upon my ‘homecoming’ I quickly learned that Margaret would not be available to co-teach our first round of classes. I was very disappointed at learning this fact, as I had taken quite a liking to her last February during training. Despite this setback, I was informed we had already found a very capable replacement teacher whose name, wouldn’t you know it, was also Margaret.  

With the teachers in place, the next step was arranging a start date for the course.  Originally we were told early August, and after shifting the date a few more times we had it. At 9am on Tuesday, July 23^rd Sarah, (new) Margaret, Katie and I met at the office then walked over to class, where we would meet every Tuesday and Thursday from 10am – 1pm for the next twelve weeks. 

I was a bit nervous to see how class would go. I was preparing for the worst (i.e. each class being a near if not total disaster and having to make monumental revisions to the curriculum) but hoping for the best.  I had no idea how it would go - I’d basically just met Margaret and had no idea of her teaching style or how she’d work with Sarah, among a number of other reservations I had

Learning how to thread the machine

weighing on me. But at the end of class that first Tuesday I couldn’t have been more pleased. Sarah and Margaret worked so well together!!! I don’t think I could have planned it better! When one teacher was lecturing the other would be writing on the board or demonstrating and vise versa.  To summarize, the first day of class could not have gone better!

 As mentioned at the beginning we have 8 students, 7 women and 1 man. We also have a ‘teacher-in-training’ named Sylvia. She is a member of the group but already has tailoring skills and will be learning how the class is taught from Sarah and Margaret so she can teach it to future groups. The classroom is small and each sewing machine is shared by two students.  The group varies in age, but I would say the majority of the students are pretty young (at least in comparison to the business classes, where most of the students were significantly older).

So far the four classes we’ve had have gone well. All of the students seem to be very smart and eager to learn, which is exciting and encouraging. However, it became quite clear this last week that learning measurements and how to read a ruler/tape measure is much harder than I remembered.  The result of this is getting behind schedule. My goal
was to get through at least 1 lesson each day,

Explaining measurements

but so far we've only completed 2. Only time will tell how long the course will actually take to complete.We estimated 12 weeks,but I don’t have much faith in finishing up that quickly. Things tend to take much longer than anticipated, especially when two people are sharing a sewing machine. I’m just hoping we can finish up before 16 weeks (especially because if we go much longer than 12, we’ll need to scrounge up more money to pay Sarah and Margaret with!).

Until next time . . . 

Leaving after class