The Progressive Women’s Club of Pleebo High School

Arriving at site, Sarah and I talked a lot about what we wanted to accomplish with our time in Liberia.  We both signed up for the Peace Corps with high hopes; education is important, and we hoped that we could make a difference in the lives of our students.  After that, though, what were we going to do here?  We quickly realized that though we were busy teaching, we also had a lot of free time to fill.  While it has been great reading three or four books a week and discovering music on my iPod again, I wanted to fill my time with something that would be a little more productive.

Enter the women’s club.  We decided to start a women’s club on our high school campus to give female students a place to learn, a place to study, and a place to be supported by each other.  At the start of the second semester of this school year, we started The Progressive Women’s Club of Pleebo High School.  We meet weekly and after five meetings, we have a group of about 40 students who attend.  While our main focus is their education, we also want to have fun in the group.

Every day, Sarah and I now arrive on campus at 11:00 am, two hours before school starts.  We open up the computer lab (which is no longer a computer lab – the computers are all “spoiled” and no one here has the know how to fix them) and host study hours for our club members.  The girls are encouraged to attend at least one study hour a week, and with ten hours to choose from, many of them are coming for more than the required one hour.  During these hours, the girls can study notes from any subject, study with their classmates, or work on homework assignments.  They can also sit down with Sarah and I for extra practice or explanation in math or science.

Our meetings so far have been very introductory in focus, as we just want the girls to get to know each other better and to understand the goals of our group.  Starting next week (this week is finals week), however, we are starting a unit on HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention.  We polled the girls on topics they would like to have workshops on and from that information, we are planning the rest of this year and next year.  Topics include malaria, HIV, safe sex, career development, art, and science labs, and between Sarah and I we have the resources to teach much of this information.  We are also looking into ways to involve NGOs from Harper and students from Tubman University as guest speakers on various topics during the next 18 months.

My favorite part of our meetings, however, has been the games we play or the activities we do at the beginning.  The first meeting, we played the game where you tie a balloon to your ankle and try to pop everyone else’s balloon without getting yours popped.  It got very aggressive and noisy, but we all had a good time :)  Our last meeting, we introduced musical chairs, and with a group of 40 girls, it got rather hilarious rather quickly.  We used Liberian music and the girls were dancing around the circle until the music stopped.  Sarah and I would join in “small small” and that is always the funniest thing to them.

This women’s club has been the most fulfilling thing I have done in Liberia yet.  Many of our students have been showing up for study hours regularly and Sarah and I can see definite changes in their behaviors in the classroom and their performance on quizzes and exams already.  One student in particular was not a stand-out student in class by any means, but after coming to study hours and practicing and practicing with Sarah, she earned a 102% on her final exam for the marking period.

Today, Sarah gave this student and her friend their exams back (her friend earned an 88%, which is not typical for her).  Upon receiving it, she proceeded to dance around the classroom and cheer, all with a huge smile on her face.  As corny as it sounds, it gave us both chills.  These students earned a grade much higher than they were expecting, and it showed them that they have the opportunity to pass an exam over material that at one time was difficult to them.  It was an awesome moment :)

The funniest part about this women’s club, however, is the male students’ reaction to it.  They are all asking when they can attend our “lady meetings” and why they cannot attend.  We tell them that maybe one day we will have a meeting that they can attend, but until then, it is a club for the women of our school.  We have opened up our study hours for them to attend if they wish, and a few students have started coming in to study before school.  I think the biggest draw to those study hours is that it is a quiet place for them to study without the distractions of home or of the classroom before school.  Whatever we can do to make them focus on their lessons just a little bit more is good for me :)