Thursday 5-29-14

Thursday 5-29-14

                I woke up with the roosters, as usual. I was worried about going to bed without an alarm clock since it is all on me to get to school on time, but apparently one cannot sleep in here, so all was okay. The kids were up just a moment after me. They were thrilled when they learned that they could stay home until I went to school again. They even used the time to do homework type things. Jove practiced his letters and Ayla practiced her addition and subtraction with borrowing and carrying. I am very proud of them. I tried using the morning to finish my journal from yesterday. I was so tired that last night I only wrote bullet points down, and I wanted to turn that into a proper journal entry today. The kids, although using the time to learn, also pestered every few seconds, making it difficult to write. But I got it done and we all had a good morning, so I suppose that is all that counts.

                The first portion of the morning was good. Again, Robert in std.1 gave me a hard time. He didn’t do his homework because someone stole his notebook, so I gave him some paper enough for the day to do the work and to write his old homework and his new homework so he could do it in the notebook he had at his house. Later in the day, his notebook showed up in the chekechea (preschool). Either way, he still had to do the new homework for letting his notebook get taken. We got through a decent amount of material and before I knew it, it was time to go to std.3. We did English in there today and the kids did pretty well with it. I love doing our word recognition sheets with them. They are really getting the hang of how things are pronounced. That class is even getting the difference between ‘r’ and ‘l’. I love having them say things like parallel. It is cruel, but fun, and they enjoy it also.

                At lunchtime, I gave the kids big love, and then went home. Logan came as well; he didn’t want to go to the lunchroom again today with the kids. But he did go yesterday when Ayla and Jove asked if he could. I made pretty much the same lunch as yesterday because it was so tasty. I tried to talk with Asa, but he wasn’t on, and the power was off. They had the generator on for the office, so I was able to have internet for that little while, but not now and my battery will not last very long as I write this. It was almost time to leave for school and I remembered that we were almost out of bread. So, I got some dough ready so it could rise while we were at school.

                Back to school for std.2, I always have fun with this class, but today many of them were not listening and I was not feeling well, so I very much looked forward to the end of the day. The end of class finally came and we went to the house to start our after school lessons with the few students. We did that quickly and we were off. Logan was going to go pass out pictures with Samweli (that turned out to be a bust because most of the people live farther away and we will have to do that on a weekend when we all have more time). I had to go visit Stan at ‘I love Stan’s’. I had some fabric for Stan so that he could make me a few skirts and make Jove another two shirts and Ayla another two skirts. He said it would only be three weeks, that way I could take them all home with us instead of giving them to Mamaliz to give to us at a later point. I am very excited to see how they turn out. One will be Tanzanian style and the other will be more hippy flowing, basically the kind of skirts I already have, but with a new pretty fabric.

                After Stan did his measurements of me the kids and I went to Bismillah and got some dinner of rice, beans, and goat. They were thrilled and I even let them each get a soda. What could be better than that in the eyes of my children? J

                We then came home and I gathered laundry from the line so I could hang it up around the house to finish drying. It looked like we might get rain tonight. There is still no power, but luckily we do have a solar light in the living room. The kids played for a while, but when it started to get dark I had them come in.

                Abdullah stopped by to bring the few things I had Mamaliz pick up for me in Dar. I let him know that I wanted to take the kids to Mikumi again before we leave and he seemed very excited about it. The kids just ate some apples since we now have those. I have a feeling they will not last too long. Jove really loves his fruit and we can only get the apples in Dar es Salaam which is a five hour drive away.

                I currently have bread in the oven baking so we will continue being able to eat sandwiches and toast, but that is about the plan for the rest of the evening. Get the kids bathed. It is an absolute must do every night with how dirty everything is here. Then I borrowed a book from the school library so I could read it to the kids. Katope, the story of the boy that was made of brown earth. Mamaliz said it was a good book and the kids seem pretty excited.

                And right as I finish writing this, the power came back on. Very nice, very nice, now I don’t have to bathe the kids in a dark bathroom or a barely lit kitchen. Yay.

 

UPDATE: I read Katope to the kids while they were in the bath and the story was about heeding the warnings of mothers. At the end of the book, Katope didn’t listen to his mother and he got rained on, which caused him to melt into mud. Both kids said “poor Katope!”. I then tapped them on the head with the book and said “That is why you always listen to mommies because mommies know best.” Jove’s reply was, but daddies know better. Oh my boy. How cute you can be!