A Week in Kosovo for Assessment
May 28, 2010
I’m in Kosovo for one week. I’ve never done this before. Two Psychology Professors from University of North Texas came to Kosovo to do research on our program and why it works, and brought me with them. They bought my plane ticket, and I was happy to be able to come back to help them, and especially to get to see the kids. I’ll be back again at the end of June and will stay until September.
The flight over was long—Phoenix to Atlanta, to Zurich, to Ljubliana, to Kosovo. 2 days and lots of sitting up straight. But it’s worth it to be here.
The UNT researchers asked us to start a classes with a new group of children so they could assess a group who hadn’t had our program and track their progress. We always start classes in a new village each summer, so we started the new village classes a month early so that they could assess the children now. We had to send permission slips home to the parents for their children to be in the assessment, and they were extremely complicated (drafted at UNT) so hopefully the parents won’t get scared off! On Saturday they will also meet with and assess the children attending our programs at the two schools in Gjakove, and throughout this week they have been meeting with the youth volunteers to assess them and train them in gathering this information so that the youth volunteers can continue to gather data for this study and send it to them after this week.
Being in Kosovo with visitors from the US is always interesting. Explaining how the society works here—especially in regards to rights for women—is difficult.
The Youth Volunteers are studying for school exams really hard right now. The volunteers who are graduating from Primary School, (1st through 9th grade) take a test to determine which high school they will attend. The text is extremely hard and very important—only those who make the very highest scores will get to go to the best high school. The volunteers graduating from Secondary School (10th through 12th or 13th depending on the school) are preparing for two tests—first, to determine whether they will get their diploma and graduate, and second, college admission exams, which are also extremely hard. Because of this, I’m not seeing the volunteers as much as I’d like to this week. It’s strange to be here and not have my house full of teenagers all the time. I look forward to being back at the end of June when I’ll have “my kids” back!
It’s great to be here right now, though. The week is going by way too fast. Burim and I are getting the planning done for the summer and also starting to think about how we will make next fall work so he can go to Uganda. I wish I had more time but it’s so nice to know that when I leave I will be coming back soon!
I’ve asked the Youth Volunteers to write something about themselves for this blog. So the next few blogs should be fantastic—stay tuned!!!