An Alliance Connection
Becky Herian
January 27, 2005
What do Jamaican boys and Mrs. Herian"s students at Emerson Elementary have in common? They have Adam Rhoads, a Peace Corps Worker with the Southern Trelawny Environmental Agency in Albert Town, Jamaica. Adam is an AHS graduate with an interest in helping to educate children in this area. He has formed an attachment to boys in the town of Wire Fence where he lives and in his spare time is teaching them to read and write. He was interested in forming an email partnership and because second graders read a story that centered around a Jamaican family we thought this would be a great cultural and geographical experience.
Then Mr. Tom Fletcher approached Mrs. Herian with an idea to motivate children to collect money for a cause and in the process win a pizza party from him. So the class set a goal and began collecting coins (although we"re at a standstill right now) which we used for money counting practice during our money unit. Near the end of April we"ll send the proceeds to help educate the Jamaican boys. Hopefully we"ll get a pizza party.
Although our email process was slow getting started thanks to Hurricane Ivan obliterating the electricity, we began emailing the boys with questions important to second grade kids. Here are some exerts from a recent email: Chase asked, 'Do you guys eat cheeseburgers and do boys fish?' Their response was neither of them had ever eaten a cheeseburger, didn"t even know what it was, but they both like to fish. Kaelia asked, 'Do you celebrate Christmas?' Yes. Jamaicans celebrate Christmas, just not as big of a deal as it is in the United States. 'What kind of games do you play?' asked Nina. Both boys answered batball and football. Batball is kind of like cricket, a very popular sport in Jamaica. Kody asked, 'Do you celebrate Easter?' Jerome"s answer was: 'Yes, me nyam bun and cheese.' Adam"s translation informed us that Jerome was speaking patois, the Jamaican language and what Jerome said in essence was 'Yes I eat bun and cheese."' Bun and cheese is a popular snack made with a spiced bun and a slice of cheese and at Easter there are special Easter buns made.
We"re sure the boys have never thought about snow, so we"re sending pictures of us playing on the playground dressed in our snow gear. I bet we generate all kinds of questions from them.
We recently found out that we"ve been chosen as one of thirty schools in the United States to have a conference call with Adam, our Peace Corps partner on March 2, 2005. We look forward to asking questions about what he does and the area that he lives in.
So, more to come.
