Wednesday 4-30-14

Wednesday 4-30-14

                Ayla started waking up at midnight asking if she could play her tablet. “No, go back to bed!” She did but started waking up at 6 am. It took an hour to get her and Jove to eat six animal crackers in order to be able to take their anti-malarial pill. I asked them if they wanted peanut butter with them. Ayla said no thank you, and Jove asked for Nutella. I told him no, so he responded by saying “a great big NO”. Ayla broke down at that point by telling Jove that would make me sad because they wouldn’t see me for seven hours since they had to go to school. That poor kid just needs to stop worrying about everything. She is just strung so tight.

                I very much wanted to go to school today to help teach seeing that it is Asa’s last teaching day and I so love to watch him teach. He is a very good teacher as long as he is the one making up what is to be taught. But I decided to do the smart thing and stay at home again. I would have hated it if I couldn’t make it to the bathroom at school. So at the house I stayed. It turned into a decent morning though. I laid out on the back patio with some pillows and a blanket. I read my book and watched the birds flying around. The yellow birds came to tease me again. I think they knew I didn’t have a camera so they could come as close as they like without hiding behind the foliage. Little bastard! But they were very peaceful to watch and I still have the memory. I even had a rooster come to peck at the ground near me. There may be many things backwards about this place, and there are things I miss dearly (like fabric softener and a good washer and dryer), but if nothing else, this place is truly relaxing for me. Now if only the burns on my face would go away. I can’t tell which is worse, dealing with these constant chemical-like burns from the sun, or getting malaria. For now I suppose I will continue with the anti-malarial medication since the mosquitoes do so love me.

                I made some Africa style Jook (chicken, ginger, gooey rice soupish thing with soy sauce), the main difference is that we had no chicken. It was great for my sick stomach. After lunch I went into school with Asa to teach std. 2. School was a lot of the same, but that was okay, nice and easy since I was recovering from sick. We did reading, math flash cards, and then tried to teach fractions and multiplication. Many, if not all the kids had a lot of difficulty with this. So after trying to teach these concepts, we attempt to doing a small test. The kids actually tried to cheat. Asa had to yell at them. “If you cheat now, what is it going to matter? It isn’t! But when the time comes to take your advancement tests, you will not know the answers and you will not get to go on to std. 3. Is that what you want to do?” They seemed to get this, hopefully.

                The kids finally did great in school and so we walked them over to the duka and they got to use their money to buy a sucker each. They were very very happy. Next we went over to buy the wood to make the treehouse/fort thing tomorrow. The rest of the evening was pretty mellow. We did go up to the main part of the village to get some chips (French fries, sort of) to fry up at home to make potato egg frittatas for dinner. There were more kids over today than I have seen on any other day. At one point Jove came up with some of the bigger kids, they had found a turtle. It was pretty big. I think it was some form of box turtle. I went outside to check it out and the thing nearly pooped all over me. After that I set it down near some produce scraps. The kids all sat around waiting to see if it would come out to eat. After a good 30 minutes they realized it was too scared and so they all went and found other things to do. Turns out, at least for now, they remembered the lesson about being nice to animals. This made me very happy. Other than all of that, Asa, Mamaliz, and I sat around reading the std. 3 journal entries. These kids are awesome. They have their little stories they get to write about, but some teachers will have them copy articles from magazines or whatever they have. A few of them had entries about a temper-pedic pillow, one even had an entry about being a sergeant in the U.S. Army in Iraq. This was too funny.