FCL Sites Around the World: Chad

Ten breakout groups met throughout the workshop. They evaluated the results. “Why has Full- Circle Learning not come to Chad with this very education and spiritual education all this while?” Facilitators, translators, administrators and program developers make a local training possible. Cooks —Madam Celestine (Teacher)

Chad lies deep in the heart of Africa, a long journey away even for other Africans, but global idealists do not blink. Lynn Whitehouse (the Honorary Consul of Canada) had turned her own pain to tenacity to start a school in Chad and has adopted many children over the years. When she contacted Full-Circle Learning and requested a training at Les Etoiles Brilliante to launch a Full-Circle Learning training program, her resolve needed to be matched, though it took several measures to send volunteers to the country.

An Ethiopian facilitator had been trained in America. During a stay in Liberia, he trained a Nigerian administrator to become a traveling Full-Circle Learning facilitator, with help from headquarters. Meanwhile, a French teacher who had learned of the FCL program in Belgium went to work for the school in Chad and offered to offer onsite French translations. Full-Circle Learning flew in the facilitator and shipped in materials, and at last, the work began!

During the workshop, teachers learned five hours each afternoon and applied their learning with students the next morning.

No sooner had sixty-four teachers from six schools gathered than the government intervened and cut short the available holiday time, requiring school to resume. The teachers, however, were committed to their ideals. They simply added five hours to their day and used the opportunity to immediately apply their learning with their students, sharing their experiences later in the day. With each hardship, their commitment to high ideals grew stronger. By week’s end, they had even taught the children to sing some Full-Circle Learning songs, including “Beauty Is What You Do,” and a resulting school performance on the last day left them feeling aweinspired.

One of the most energetic teachers took ill the second day and passed away shortly after the training. The teachers gathered at the burial site to honor him. Where life is precious, the future rests in the hands of the children who must preserve and protect their community, making the importance of these days together even more poignant and their influence on the leaders of the future even more important. Vive les estoile brilliantes.

Samedi, teacher in a self-contained classroom, predicted, “This is going to be the quality and characteristics of schools, in no distance from five or ten years from now.”

In December 2010, a French translation of the training was presented for 64 teachers of varying grade levels (15 females and 49 males) from six different schools within and around N’Djamena, Chad. The schools included: Les Etoiles Brillantes, Rohani, Communautaire, Les Vertus, Vertus de l’Ere Nouvelle, and Centre Lynn Whitehouse. Join them on a photo tour of a Full- Circle Learning training.

Teachers of students such as these second graders of Koundoul taught in the morning and traveled to the training in the afternoon.

Students from Chad learned “Beauty Is What You Do” and performed it at the end of the workshop.