Back to Business

I can’t tell you how amazing it felt to be back in my own bed last night! I wasn’t waking up every few hours wondering what little bed bugs were gnawing away at my legs! It was a glorious night’s sleep. I got up and got ready for the day…I was pretty excited to see everyone again.

Morning tutoring was Raph and Sam. We had a wonderful laid back morning. We did some more flashcards and practice with small words. They did a lovely job today and it was fun seeing their smiling faces again.

English also went very well. We reviewed past, present and future tenses of verbs. I had them pick a verb and write one sentence in each tense. That was challenging but they managed it! Then we played a little game where I had tons of little slips of paper with the 3 tenses of different verbs and they had to sort the pile into tenses. They enjoyed that. I also showed them some pictures of my trip and showed them all the bites on my legs. They were quite horrified, like I am. J It was a good class. They didn’t want to leave either. After class was over everyone kept sitting there talking for a good 5 minutes.

For a lunch snack we had the last maize of the season and we shared a sweet potato. It was good! Anne also brought us over a mini little paw-paw from the trees outside her house. She said it’s rare that they get ripe this early. It was delicious—I can’t remember the last time I had one. It was so little that it didn’t even have the black seeds inside it yet.

I got some things prepped for preschool and read some of my new book “Swiss Family Robinson”. I was so tired though that I ended up taking a little cat nap before preschool.

Preschool was challenging today. Not sure if it was because the kids were excited to see us after a long break or just because we were out of routine. There were several children that caused some management issues today. We did our best to keep them on track and stop the issues but we were mostly unsuccessful. When we split, I had the little kids again and we mainly just colored and sang songs. Even though today wasn’t the greatest preschool day we’ve had, I still enjoy being with the children. Not every day in teaching is going to be wonderful and peachy, no matter where you are.

After preschool I had ½ an hour until my next group came. It was nice to have a few minutes to breathe. We have 3 pastors from Cameroon staying in the guest house across the way from us. They’re here a few weeks early for the CELC conference in April. They were having some kind of meeting out under tent by the tables, so I took Chipo and Mwandida out on the mat outside the gate of our houses. It was very nice in the shade! We did more practice with sight words and spelling and using Bananagram tiles for letter recognition. I was quite impressed with the girls’ work today.

This afternoon I ventured out to play with some more kids again before supper. Aubrey is the best little hugger. I cannot get enough of his hugs. He has taken quite an attachment to me and I love it. J

Supper was delicious chicken, rice, cabbage and chips. It’s good to be back to Anne’s cooking!

The rest of the evening was spent putting together some PowerPoints for English class and thinking about what I want to teach for next week, while being serenaded by Fernando.