Monday 6-9-14

Monday 6-9-14

                Ayla was up so much of the night with horrible stomach pain. I was going to make them both get up at normal time and go off to school early since they acting badly yesterday, but instead I decided to let them sleep in just a little. I felt so bad for her, there was so little I could do to make her feel better.

                My attempt at downloading the printer driver did not work. I found it on the HP website and began the download. It said it would take 17 hours so I decided to leave the computer on overnight. Well partway through the night there was an error and it didn’t work anyways. I guess I will have to see if Ruth has the CD with the driver on it. I worked so hard on making these exams perfect I don’t want to just email them to Ruth and have her print them up. It seems like when they get emailed to a MAC there ends up being formatting issues. So hopefully we can come up with the disk, otherwise so much of my work to make them perfect will be for nothing L

                Even though Ayla was the one with bad sleep last night, she woke up just a moment or two after me, Jove on the other hand, he is my sleeping beauty, I had to wake him up a half hour later. Poor guy has gotten the same upset stomach his sister had last night. Oh my poor babies. I guess I have a sick stomach to look forward to seeing that I always get sick when they do.

                Ayla was telling me how she can turn into a wizard at night and she flies home to say hi to dad and she can be back before morning time. Then Jove came up and told me how he is magic too because he didn’t have any beans in his pockets, then he said “bipity, bopity, boo, I am magic” and there was a bean in his pocket.

                The kids are trying to be good so I don’t send them off to school for the breakfast time. So they are playing school. Ayla is the English teacher and she is having Jove do spelling and adding in his journal. At one point she said “sawa” which means okay in Swahili, and then she corrects herself and says, “okay I mean, this is English class”. They are so funny when they are trying to be good.

                We got to school and went straight into teaching. In std1 Robert wasn’t there, I guess he still hadn’t finished his homework after the whole weekend to work on the sentences. I refuse to back down though. He can just stay out the rest of the time if he doesn’t do his work. As I looked over the material to still cover, I realized I have covered nearly everything that will be on the test. I was very excited because that means that I will be able to review again a few areas that the kids were having a hard time. I talked to the whole class about being monitors while at my house to make sure it is only St. Mary’s kids there to play now since the incident over the weekend. They were all excited about being given the responsibility of monitoring.

                Std3 had their book report day. So we did our flash cards and word recognition sheets and then they got out their journals to write about their library books from the past week. A few forgot to bring their books so they will check out new ones next week. I love that they love to read so much. Ima Mkulati, in this class now calls me ‘mommy’ instead of ‘teacher’. I am fine with this. He is such a sweet boy every time I see him it is hard to not get a smile upon my face. In his book report he talked about me telling them to write a report and to get a new book if they brought theirs, instead of actually writing a report about his book. It was really funny. I let him know it was good writing, but that next week I want him to write about what he read in the book. He agreed and gave me another hug. I think I got more hugs from him today than from Ayla and Jove put together. And if anyone knows Ayla, she is constantly clinging and hugging me. I felt very loved today J

                I went off to the house for lunch. Logan came up to the house today also. I heated up some leftovers and we both vegged on the internet. I got to talk with Asa a little on chat, and felt like no time had gone by when I realized that lunch break was coming to an end. It is just so relaxing sitting and chatting with him with my cup of coffee in hand. But I was needed, so back to school I went. When I got back to the school Ayla had showed me that her hair was braided up. She had two in the back and a bunch in the front. I am not sure if it was the teachers or the kids, but she was so excited about it.

                I got to std2 and as always the kids have prepared for the start of the class. All the flash cards are on the table, the word recognition sheets are there, many times the pencils and erasers will even be passed out. They are just always so eager to learn. I decided to start the day with journal entries so I could figure out what I wanted to do in class today, and because they love their new journals so much. I went through and gave each child a different topic to write about. I let them know that even if they don’t have what I tell them to write about, it is okay, they just need to pretend. I gave out things like “my horse”, “my shoes”, “my dog”, etc. I gave Kevin “my snake”. He asked if he could write about my snake instead of pretending he had his own snake. I told him that was fine. It was so cute I had to take a picture. I love seeing how much fun they take in writing. I hope so much that it sticks with them through their lives. We got a lot done in the rest of our class time and before I knew it, class was over.

                During the time when I was teaching std2, Ayla and Jove were in std1. Teacher Grace and the kids, I am assuming with Ayla’s help came with African names for them. Ayla’s African name is Neema and Jove’s African name is Maharage (pronounced Ma ha ra gwA). It means beans. The kid is obsessed with collecting these seeds that they find right outside of the school. They look like the beans you would find in a fairy tale talking about magic beans. I don’t know about Ayla’s nickname, but I think Jove’s will stick around for quite a while. I suppose it doesn’t hurt that one of his nicknames with us already was Jelly bean. It just fits.

                The kids and I left the classroom and saw that Jove had thrown his sweater on the roof of the school, but it was close enough to jump up and get. Freddy however decided to grab the broom to try to get it down on his own and instead pushed it farther up. He said it was okay because he would get it down. He then shinnied up a pole and hung from the rafters like a monkey. I don’t know how he thought he would get to the roof like that, but it was funny to watch. I finally took the broom and being much taller than them, was able to get it down. They thought it was amazing. Silly kids.

                We got to the house, dropped stuff off and were getting ready to leave for Monday market when an egg lady came. Why yes, I would love to buy your ten eggs. Thank you so much J So now I have more fresh eggs, which meant I could feel okay using the last of our older eggs. We ended up making breakfast slop for dinner (and it was so delicious the kids asked for more). We made it up to the market and I was surprised that it is getting bigger. It is nice to see. We went around and got lots of stuff. I decided I wanted to make sweet and sour chicken sometime in the next few days, so I got limes and oranges with which to make the sauce. I got bananas and tangerines (that although they are green actually taste very good). I found eggplant again which made me so very happy; greens and tomatoes. I got just all kinds of delicious food. Ayla said she really wanted to buy some sugar cane. I told her it was fine. So Samweli helped us locate it and found out that it was only 100 shillings for a piece about two feet long. Ayla and Jove each got one with their money. I bought Samweli one for helping. He was so excited. Ayla made me try it, and I am glad I did. It was so good, that after we had gotten back to the house, I went back up to get more so that we could have some for through the week. Oh and I even was able to finally get a flash light for when the power goes out and a few more of the soft blankets. That way if Jove has an accident (which he does quite often) there are spare soft blankies for the in between time that laundry isn’t being washed. It is always times like that when I miss having a washer and dryer so much.

                We saw Pili on the way home and she came back with us. I was glad to see she understood that even though we have said that there are no village kids allowed at the house anymore that she is still welcome. Ayla and I were worried she wouldn’t come back and Ayla loves her so much. Even with the language barrier and the fact that Ayla is almost 7 and Pili is like 14, they get along very well and play great together. Ayla shared a piece of her sugar cane with Pili and when Jove had a tangerine, he shared a segment of that with her as well. She is picking up some simple English like ‘thank you’. If only she weren’t so old already, I would sponsor her as well to start school with us. It would just be too hard, she would be a 14 year old girl in the preschool.

                Dark was coming near and so Ayla and Jove came inside to eat their dinner and watch ‘Hook’ again. Why they can’t find new movies to watch is beyond me. They find something and will watch it until it drives me crazy. But it was their movie time, so ‘hook’ it was. They didn’t even get to the part where they went to neverland when it was time for bath. Then we read a book and tucked into bed. Poor kids, both of them I think are getting a cold or something. They both have a runny and stuffy nose with coughs to boot. Hopefully Tylenol helps a little because I have no cold medicine here.

                Even though I am still in lots of pain, to the point of not even being able to erase the blackboard with my left arm because it hurts too much to raise it, I still had a very good day. Oh, while I was cooking dinner I got to Skype with Asa. At one point I was telling Asa about how Jove stunk up the room so bad with his fart that Teacher Logan forgot the song he was playing. Well, Jove heard this then got very serious and began telling me about how he doesn’t fart too much. Maybe one or two or three times a day, that is all; and that actually, only the one or the three. That on 129 days he farted the three times, and on 129 days he farted the one time, but only on 6 days did he fart the two times. Through this whole five minute conversation (that I was so happy Asa was hearing on Skype) he was so serious. It was a very important conversation to that little weirdo.