Picture yourself trying to teach high-school science to 80 students in a classroom with no equipment besides a blackboard and some desks. Then imagine that these students don’t understand English very well. That’s the situation Eric Yff (’10) found himself in as a Peace Corps volunteer. Yff recently returned home after a two-year stint in Malawi, a small country in sub-Saharan Africa near Mozambique and Zambia. Faced with designing experiments for his students in a school with no scientific materials, Yff had to improvise. “If I was doing a titration experiment,” he says, “we didn’t have graduated cylinders or burettes so I’d go to the nearest health clinic and borrow syringes there to measure liquid.” To get magnets or electrical components he would take apart old speakers and radios that he bought at local markets. Creating the experiments was Yff’s favorite part of the job, and his students enjoyed the results. “They weren’t used to seeing a lot of experiments and they really enjoyed the experiments I did,” he says.
Mary-Russell Roberson is a freelance science writer who lives in Durham.