Thursday 6-19-14
Today
started out pretty rough. Jove is sick again. He has a bad cough and poor guy
keeps sneezing then all kinds of lovely slime comes oozing out his nose.
Because of this they were up a half hour earlier than normal, and then came the
“get your feet off my side of the bed”. I am so looking forward to them having
their own rooms and their own beds again. I bet they are also. I got up and
went into the kitchen to start up on coffee and the kid’s breakfast. As I walk
in I see a giant puddle of water on the floor. Turns out that the handle on the
water filter finally finished cracking and breaking so the entire reservoir of
water that I made sure was filled all the way up since we were out of water,
was all over the floor. Not only was it all over the floor in the kitchen, but
it seeped through the concrete wall and was all over the floor in the living
room. I will have to just buy bottles of water for the next two days. When we
go through Morogoro on Saturday to do Mikumi, I will stop and see if I can buy
just the nozzle for the water filter. If not then I will have to buy a new one.
I don’t desire to go the next nearly two weeks buying nothing but water bottles
in support of Nestle (horrible company!)
I hate
that I have gotten this bad attitude about everything over the last week. I am
just feeling way too overworked, abandoned, tired, angry, and so many other
emotions in between, and I don’t even really have anyone to really vent to. We
still have no internet even though they were supposed to come yesterday to fix
the satellite dish, so I can’t Skype and talk for a long time with anyone. I do
have the cell phone and have been calling Asa every night before I go to lie
down, but I am limited in time because the calling cards are pretty expensive.
I miss the happy girl that came here; I don’t like this sad miserable person I
have become recently. The kids (both mine and the school kids) deserve better
than what I have been giving them this week. I need to get myself to snap out
of it.
I went
off to school hoping it would be a better day. On our walk to school I always
like to pass the chekechea 1 so I can see the kids and check to make sure
everything looks as it should. We saw Teacher Gladness. She said hello to the
kids and at least they said hi today. She always says hello and asks how they
are and it has taken them forever. Ayla is much better about it, but Jove, he
just never wants to say anything to her. And when I actually get him to, it is
in a grumpy voice. We continued walking and made it to school. I gave Jove big
love. He was telling me that he just wished that I could be the teacher in his
class. That he would be so happy if Daddy and Mommy were his teachers. It was
just the sweetest thing coming out of his mouth.
In std1
I began my day by checking the homework I gave out; “I will do my homework
correctly”. Well the ones that bothered to do it at all didn’t do it correctly.
When I saw that I just got so fed up that I sent them all back to their desks.
The ones that didn’t do it, had to go to the corner table to do it. Everyone
else, well, they were just on a short leash today. I am getting to a point with
some, many, of these kids where I just don’t care that much and that is not
fair to anyone. I just want them to care as much as I have. I tried to do past
and present in the class today. I have them ten verbs on the board and next to
that I wrote the words ‘past’ and ‘present’. I repeated myself in many
different ways stating that all they would write is if the word was in the past
tense or the present tense, and that is what I wanted to see on their papers.
Other than Ayla, there were only two others in the class of 17 that listened to
my instructions. Everyone else seemed to change the tense, or just copy the
words exactly as they were. The two other than Ayla sit on the sides of her and
are known for their cheating. So I couldn’t prove anything, but I am pretty
sure that Joan and Imani cheated off of her again. I told the three girls that
since they were the only ones that listened to directions I would have a piece
of candy for them after lunch. Within five minutes of me saying that, when I
was trying to go over rounding (something which Joan has a really hard time
with) I caught Joan and Imani talking over Ayla about something obviously not
math. I asked them why they thought what they were talking about was so much
more important than what I was trying to learn, and then I let them know that
they had just lost the candy they earned a few moments prior.
In std3
I was feeling really dragged down after everything that had happened throughout
the morning. I did my usual beginning of the class stuff then I let the kids
use the toilets. Ima came up to me and gave me just the biggest hug and said
“Mommy, why are you so sad today?” It broke my heart, and I decided that I
needed to be better. That kid just has a way of bringing a smile to my face
every time I see him. I gave the class a quiz mostly focusing on larger number
multiplication and long division. I wrote the steps that they would do on the
board for the division since many of them have a hard time, and then I went
over how they would do it. Only one student Cathius got all four of the long
division correct. My math whiz Dani got zero of them correct. Not only did he
get them all wrong, but he decided (like many others) to erase his work he did
in order to get that answer, so I couldn’t even see where he was going wrong.
While they worked on that quiz, I was correcting midterms for the two other
teachers. I wanted to make sure that their grammar, spelling, etc were correct.
I found many and more errors on both of their papers. So yesterday Logan and I
corrected 4 midterms. Today I corrected another 8 I think. They have a few more
for me. I asked them repeatedly to have them for me today, but they did not
have them this morning. They had their classes doing just about whatever so
that they could work on writing them up.
I went
home for lunch and didn’t even get a chance to eat. I made copies of two of
their Swahili midterms and then I juiced 10 limes and 10 oranges so that I
could make up a sweet and sour sauce for dinner later in the evening. I did
take the minute to make a cup of coffee and I had that in between juicing. It
was ridiculous how fast the time went by. I went back off to school.
Std2
was a small class. Rahabu had gotten picked up by her brother to go to her
Aunts funeral. Then Teacher Martha and Teacher Pasiana took two more of my
remaining 9 students with them so they could go to the funeral as support for
Rahabu and Siri. This left me 7 kids. We finished our flash cards and while I
was trying to figure out what to do, Grace and Freddy both fell asleep. They
were both sick, so I asked them if they would like to go home and lay down. I
was surprised when they both said yes. I have asked this question before when
someone was sick and the answer is always no that they want to stay in class so
they don’t miss anything. I knew at that point that they were really pretty
sick. Hopefully tomorrow they will feel better. With them sent home, my class was
down to five kids, half of what it usually is. It is pretty difficult to do
anything with that few kids, otherwise so many others will be missing out, so I
decided that I could use a fun day. I had them write whatever they wanted to in
their journals, and then it was book time. I told them they could go pick one
book at a time out from the library and come back to the classroom to read.
When they started losing attention on reading we played some hangman thanks to
Jove’s suggestion.
We
walked home and I gave Ayla and Jove some jelly beans I still had in my pocket
from lunchtime (this was the candy I brought for Ayla for being the only one in
the class today to pay attention the whole time). They were so excited for four
jelly beans. I do love that they get excited about smaller amounts of treats
now. It used to me if they had less than a handful they would complain.
Once
home, Ruth came over to let me know and introduce me to the Simba Net guys. I
was so excited to see them here. As it turned out, they left some of the stuff
at the office or whatever, so they will come back tomorrow to finish installing
the new dish. I am so excited that tomorrow I will have internet again. I went
into the kitchen and started to cut up the chicken. I had two that I had to cut
up because the freezer wasn’t retaining the cold enough and the second chicken
was starting to defrost. While I was in the kitchen, Ayla started yelling from
the back yard “Mom there is poop on the chairs”. I thought she was talking
about bird poop or something like that. But when she continued to say it, I
went to investigate. Sure enough there was what looked like, human poop on each
of Mamaliz’s chairs. The nasty little village brats had gone too far. I went to
show Ruth and she informed Isaac. They got the cushions cleaned off, then
stripped down of their covers to get them washed for me. Isaac said he is going
to have someone basically keep security watch on the house when I am not at
home since this happened while I was at school. We decided that we will
basically have to make it that no kids will be able to play here. It is really
very sad. I will still allow some of the
school kids, but not nearly as many, because it just becomes too many for me to
keep an eye on. I believe I will have to take the swing down tomorrow. That is
the reason that the little punks did that. I had to tell them to go home
yesterday because they were on the swing and they are just not allowed here at
this point in time. They were very rude, then began throwing rocks at all of
the kids that were allowed to be over here playing. I am just glad that Isaac
was able to see what happened and handle it. He really was funny though in his
reaction, he just didn’t know what to say or do at first. He just kept kind of
mumbling to himself.
I had
to get back into the kitchen to finish with my chicken and get the rest of
everything for dinner taken care of. Yummy fried chicken for dinner with rice,
sweet and sour sauce, and eggplant veggie mix. It turned out very good. I had
Logan eat with us to help get it consumed since we have no fridge right now.
Even with the two of us and two kids, we had a lot left over. Teacher Charlene
got into Berega tonight and I ended up sending a hotpot filled with food with
Ruth so Charlene and her boyfriend Scott could have some food and not have to
worry about cooking or anything. Hopefully they enjoy it. I am looking forward
to meeting her tomorrow and showing her around the school.
The
kids got to stay up late watching Peter Pan and eating a second helping of
dinner. They worked up quite the appetite. Before dinner they played outside.
First they went up to Joan’s house and fed the chickens with her. They each
also helped her wash her socks by hand, and either watched or helped in the
making of her dinner. Then Joan gave them some corn to feed the chickens over
by our house, so they brought that down and just had so much fun prying the
corn open and looking for the hair inside. Ayla even found three worms inside.
They looked like something similar to meal worms. She was just so pleased that
she was lucky enough to not only get to play with corn and find hair inside,
but that she got to have new worm pets as well. She can really have her little
tomboy moments. Jove was sad he didn’t get any hair in his or worms in his
corn, so she shared with him. I love it when they play nice like that. While
this was going on Ima was inside playing one of the kid’s tablets. He is just
too sweet I couldn’t tell him no. Finally Logan went outside and him along with
Ayla, Jove, and about ten other kids, played a nice game of hide and seek, then
chase as it began to get dark. I finally called them in because I didn’t want
anyone getting hurt by tripping over anything in the dark. As it was, Ayla had
already slammed her foot into a tree root when she was swinging. Her poor foot
was starting to swell up. Hopefully it is better by tomorrow. She didn’t seem
too bothered by it during the game of chase, although earlier in the day when
it happened she fashioned herself a cast out of paper and tape (Just like
Ramona Quimby in Ramona the Brave. Man do I love my silly girl).
As I
sat back in the quiet that comes with the kids being asleep, I realize that as
odd as it sounds, I was not mad about the poop on the chairs. It was just so
ridiculous that I found a lot of humor in it. I believe it would be hard not to
find humor in something like that. I mean, kids got so upset with me because I
wouldn’t let them play on my swing that they pooped on my chairs. I giggle to
myself just typing that.
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