Atlanta Teachers Partner with Primary Schools in Zimbabwe

Follow Abby and Melissa as they travel back to Zimbabwe this summer!

To read about our wonderful trip to Zimbabwe during the summer of 2011, click on the posts to the right! Thank you for all of your support, this would not have been possible with out you.
Enjoy!



Sunday, July 31, 2011

Update...

Good morning from Johannesburg, South Africa! We've had a few airline glitches over the past few days, so some of us are still enjoying life in Africa today. Four members of our group were able to leave late last night, so Paige, Jaclyn, Sam, and Sarah should be arriving in Atlanta early Sunday morning. Jedd will be heading home tonight, and the rest of us will leave Johannesburg Monday night. Despite our airline issues, we're excited to be able to experience one last city before leaving! We're heading to a lion park today to play with baby lions, and we're going to a primary school in the city tomorrow morning before heading to the airport for our flights. There's still so much to see here, so we're grateful to have the unexpected extra time!

We can't wait to share our pictures and stories with you when we get back. Our blog will be fully updated with posts from each day when we have a more reliable internet connection back in America. We're looking forward to seeing all of our family and friends in a few days!

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Just a quick update...

In ZIM! We just went on a Safari in Botswana today and saw 22 different kinds of animals, Victoria Falls tomorrow, and then a week of teaching in Matobo Hills, a home stay overnight in a village, and then we begin to journey home on Friday. We are loving every minute, we are all safe and well, we can not believe we are here. Thank you for all of your wonderful thoughts and prayers! We will try to update the blog in the next few days with more detailed accounts of our travels and time in Africa so far.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

12 more days!

It's crazy to thinkthat in 12 days we will be on
our way to Zimbabwe! First let me update you on our garage sale; we made about $400!! Let me start by saying Abby is the garage sale queen, she can sell anything to anybody. :)
Plus our yummy sweets and some precious students from our school selling them didn't hurt our cause either. It was a fun day for us and a great success in fundraising.

We've had a couple of meetings to decide what kinds of teacher trainings we are going to do. Ashley and I (Melissa) met with a teacher from Perimeter School who just went to Tanzania. She participated in a similar trip, so it was wonderful to meet with her and talk about what worked and what didn't work. We came away feeling excited and energized about our trip to Zimbabwe. As a team we discussed how important it is for us not to "Americanize" the schools in Zimbabwe. We want to help them use materials they already have and give them advice on how to enhance the ways they are already teaching their students. Plus, we are there to learn too! We are eager to see how they teach and what we can learn from them. We also decided to participate in a home-stay. We will go in groups and cook/eat dinner with some teachers in Zimbabwe and spend one night with them in their home. We hope this will give us a better understanding of their culture and allow us to get to know the teachers better. It will be outside of our comfort zone, but we know we will learn a lot!

We are still raising money and could use your support. Thank you so much to all of you who have already donated money, you are helping us get one step closer to our goal and Zimbabwe! We will update again before we leave and hopefully we can update while we are in Zimbabwe. I'll leave you with a sweet picture of the lovely girls that helped us raise money! Who wouldn't want to buy a cupcake from them?