CAFOD blog

A couple of weeks ago we had the brainwave of using the story “Oliver Twist” for reading and comprehension with our classes.

I’m not sure how Charles Dickens would feel about having his classic novel reduced to two sides of A4, but it has worked so well!

The children here identify with Oliver. Most of them have also experienced running away, sleeping in cold and dirty places and being hungry.

They completely understood Oliver’s dilemma in deciding whether to pick pockets in order to stay at Fagin’s or refuse to steal and continue to sleep on the streets.

In Janet’s class one child asked what an orphan was, and another boy said “children like us!”.

All of them said that the orphanage was “like our project” – though obviously a far happier version!

They have greatly enjoyed learning shortened and Ethiopianised versions of “Food glorious food”, “Consider yourself”, “Who will buy?” and “Pick a pocket or two”,

This has led to lines such as ”Food glorious food, injera and gulash” or “I believe birr don’t grow on trees, you’ve got to pick a pocket or two”!

We gave out colours and asked them to draw their favourite characters.

Lemlemu, who now sleeps at the project as he has no relatives to care for him, drew a detailed picture of the main street in Mekelle with Oliver sleeping by the roadside.

Their character descriptions were lovely and some are decorating the walls of my classroom.

On Wednesday we asked them to paint big versions of the characters to hang in the main hall.

These will form the backdrop when the children perform “Oliver” as part of our awards ceremony next Friday afternoon.

We haven’t started rehearsals yet so it will be somewhat rough around the edges, but everyone will sing the songs and a few of the drama group will mime the story while some of the older students read out our summary.

We really wanted to show the children the original “Oliver” film - the Ron Moody version.

We searched the DVD shops in Mekelle with no success, and Janet finally ordered it from Ireland and was promised that it would arrive in a week.

A week later she checked her emails to find that the couriers would not deliver to a PO box, the only kind of address we have here. We were so disappointed.

As a last resort yesterday morning we rang the Salesian community at the other end of Mekelle, hoping that they might have it in their video collection. And they had!

We picked it up after breakfast, drove to the project and managed to set up the machine (despite a dodgy plug) by 9 o’clock.

The TV room is not really large enough for all the children, but somehow they crammed in.

They were completely spellbound and seemed not to notice the rising temperature and lack of air!

There were whispers of “Fagin”, “Oliver”, “Dodge” as the different characters appeared, and gales of laughter at the funny dances.

The movie was cut short when lunchtime arrived, so we’ll be showing the last few minutes on Monday morning.

Can’t wait to see what the children’s performance is like on Friday!

Posted by KathleenOB

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