E-I-E-I-O

6/17/09
Ah yes, this was the moment I was waiting for…the reason I created this blog. It has been three days since I wrote and I definitely would not have made myself stay up to journal if this wasn’t a blog others were reading. In other words, this is going to be short and to the point so I can go to bed :-) First, thanks to all of you who commented (even if it was because my mom told you to).
Ok so Monday and Tuesday of this week we had our placements in the morning. My placement continues to be great, but I definitely have a lot of respect for teachers of little ones because man my patience runs thin sometimes. Like for example when one of my little troublemakers decided it’d be a good idea to climb up on the desk, up on the windowsill and hang from the bars on the window…nice. Overall, though it’s an amazing placement and I get so excited when the kids show progress in such a short amount of time. One of the funny things that happened this week was courtesy of my fantastic artistic abilities: We were singing Old MacDonald Had a Farm so I was “drawing” the animals on the board and writing the names so they would understand. Well, much to the kids’ delight, my horse looked like a poorly drawn lion and my monkey looked like a crazy octopus (yea, I know, bad). I can however have them understand my drawing of a cow because the cows here have this weird hump on their backs (kinda like camels)…so I was drawing a cow and it was going downhill like the monkey/lion but then I drew that dang hump and poof “cow, cow, cow” they all screamed :-) Stephen is enjoying our placement too and I think his favorite song the kids sing is “elefont, elefont, go to the bath, no no no, why why why, because I’m too big, because I’m too big”. Matt is enjoying his too but what a different experience he has….like none of his kids speak English and most of them may only eat the one meal they get when they come to daycare. He said Monday it was raining so the kids were late cuz they have to walk so far so they didn’t get breakfast at all :-(
Today, we didn’t have our placements because they took us on this hike to a waterfall and a visit to the Chagga village (another of the native tribes). It was so beautiful and we all went swimming near the falls. We also had the chance to go in some ancient Chagga tunnels that they built to hold the women and children during attacks from the Maasai tribes and to hide the whole family (even cows etc) during the times of the slave trade when white people would come to steal Africans from their homes. It was really interesting and it was nice to get some exercise hiking to the falls.
Ok, time for sleep…we are off to the Serengeti tomorrow to track the migration!! (I know can you freaking believe it!?! We can’t!)
Amani,
Valerie
p.s. addendum to last entry…the velvet monkeys…I walked too close to one and it tried to eat me….ok maybe it didn’t try to eat me but it sure scared the crap out of me. I took a picture of it as it looked right at me and started making this crazy noise and running toward me. All of its friends then started chasing all of us down the road as we sprinted back to our jeep….oops!