from Joy Handicott, Community Educator, MoneyMob Talkabout, Darwin, Matrix on Board
Well, we’ve done it! We set off to Palumpa first thing this morning. Palumpa is 45km from Wadeye. The road was in really good condition so we had a good trip. Lots of kangaroos and wallabies hopping across the road, but no really bad road conditions.
On arrival we caught up with the GBM, Ken. We discovered that CatholicCare are interviewing at the moment for a Money Management Worker in Palumpa, and we met one of the interviewees, and talked to the staff here.
We also made contact with Dave, The Vic Daly Shire Services Manager for Palumpa. He gave us a current overview of Palumpa.
We visited the Community Store, which was a little bare, but staff were over in Wadeye picking up supplies from the Barge, which comes out from Darwin fortnightly. We were assured the store would be fully stocked tomorrow.
We met with Sue, the Principal at Palumpa School, who expressed her disappointment that our program was only going to be able to visit communities once. She believes that remote communities would benefit from a program like ours which has the potential to be ‘valuable through repitition’. Sue arranged for us to run three 1 hour sessions with another 1.5 hour session with middle year students tomorrow morning. (The MoneyMob Talkabout program is a pilot to learn how to do financial literacy well in remote communities, so this feedback is really valuable.)
Our timetable was:
11.00 – 12.00…..Year 2-3
12.00 – 1.00….Year 3-4
1.15 – 2.15…..Year 5-6
8.30 – 10.00 …..Middle Years (2 Classes) tomorrow morning.
Lorraine and I found this was very full-on today. The 3 continuous sessions were challenging as we were dealing with 40 students of various learning levels, with many behavioural differences as well. It was a great opportunity for us to revisit the way we deliver some of the activities, and after a ‘debrief’ this afternoon, we will trial some new delivery methods next week.
We both arrived back in Wadeye slightly exhausted, but really pleased with the response to our visit so far.
Hope Darwin is treating you all as kindly as Wadeye/Palumpa is treating us.
