Teacher! Teacher!

6/11/09
The last two days of teaching have been amazing/crazy! The kids in my class are so adorable…like seriously adorable! So adorable that one little girl peed on Catherine and she was like, “never have I been anywhere that a little kid could pee on me and it’d be ok because she’s so cute”. And their names are the best…I have a little boy in my class whose name is…”Good Luck”…spelled exactly like that. The first day when they said it I was like, hmm that sounded like they said good luck, so I looked on his notebook and sure enough, “good luck” it was.
Today, I went in to my classroom and it was all 11 kids and no teacher…then the head teacher came in and told me that my class’s teacher wasn’t going to be there at all for the next two days. So today it was me and 11 kids who speak pretty much only Swahili. They definitely take advantage of that too, but really what kid in the world wouldn’t. So needless to say I spent the whole day running around like a crazy person but I managed to do a letter/color game, make some letter/English worksheets for the kids to do and teach some numbers/math. It wouldn’t be so bad if the range of ability was from being able to trace numbers only to being able to do subtraction up to ten. It is also hard because they had about 4 pencils, 1 eraser, and 8 broken crayons for the whole class before we brought some more supplies. But regardless of the craziness it is so fun and fulfilling being there and helping and the kids are freaking awesome. I was so worried beforehand that I wouldn’t be doing any good here, but now after only three days I see how much we really are doing here. If the four of us volunteers weren’t there today there would have been 3 classes with one teacher in total!
Tonight, we are going out to dinner for the first time with promises of cheeseburgers…mmm! The food here is actually pretty good, I definitely eat a lot better here than in the states. We eat a lot of rice, beans, lots of awesome kinds of meat, and TONS of avocados. They also have Ugali which is the primary food substance of the people here. Since it is traditional they make it every night for us, but I’m pretty sure after trying it once only one of the 16-year-old volunteers still eat it. He’s like, “it fills me up”, whereas I’m like, “it tastes like playdough”. The things I miss the most (which I’m sure with shock all of you reading this haha) are ranch dressing, French fries, cheese, and cheetos.
Ok last journal for a few days since I’ll be on a SAFARI! We are going to Arusha, Lake Manyara, and Ngorongoro Crater….we are so stoked! The jeeps we are going in are really nice and it is only 6 per jeep so everyone has their own window seat and you can stand up and look through the top. They also have plugs to charge your cameras in the jeep and they bring all the drinkable water for you.
Amani,
Valerie