The team has smoothly transitioned from teaching at Wesley International School to teaching at Polehan. Polehan is the name of a lower income area of Malang, Indonesia. The leader of our site at Polehan, Winny, used to teach at Charis, a school with more affluent kids. She wanted to make quality education accessible to all kinds of children. She told her manager at Charis about her vision and the manager heard about Polehan and how the leader was looking for a successor. Winny became very excited but then was diagnosed with cancer before she was able to take over the school. She became sad because she thought her vision was just a dream. Then, as she was going through chemotherapy, she decided to bravely take over the Polehan school. With her husband's help, the school has grown from 6 children to 50 children. Polehan offers after school programs that works with both children and parents. Some of the children's fathers are in jail for stealing (the children don't know this). As such, the staff at Polehan teaches the mothers and children life skills so they can have a way to make money. The mothers make handcrafts to sell, and the children make cards.
I feel that being able to show these children our passions (writing, art, science) is such a treat for both us and them. We take language classes every morning, but still need translators to communicate. Still, the children seem to have a good time. I've been trying to teach the kids about engineers: observe nature and solve problems based on observations. I've asked them to observe birds, fish, and turtles and see what we can learn from them. Then we make paper airplanes based on our observations.
Today, I will teach the kids about density and buoyancy. Their design challenge will be to make a floating object out of 10 straws, 10 inches of plastic wrap, and scotch tape. The floating object must carry at least 25 pennies without sinking. We'll see how they do!
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