Friday of Frustration and Fellowship

Morning tutoring went a lot better yesterday! I split my 4 boys into groups of two, and the management was so much easier! We probably got more accomplished in that shorter 40 minute period each than the full hour and 15 minutes we’ve done together in the past.

In English we had a quiz on the verb tenses. I gave them the present tense of a verb and they had to give me the past and future tenses. They did really well on this. It’s nice when you can follow some sort of equation: past add –ed, future at ‘will’ plus the verb. After the quiz we went through a verb tense PowerPoint that I found online. Sometimes I can find great things already prepared for me online! I just change some of the example sentences so that it’s more relatable to them and has words they understand. For the rest of the class time I wanted to get them speaking again so I put together a “Get To Know Me” PowerPoint with a bunch of questions like: where were you born, do you have siblings, what are their names, where did you go to school, where did you meet your husband etc. I also included my answers…when applicable. J I really enjoyed this! Part of the reason for doing this was just so I could get to know the all better. Now that we’re really comfortable with each other, these ladies have become my friends and I want to know more about them. The other reason for doing this was because these are the kinds of questions they might need to use English for in their future, and it’s an easy way to get them to practice English. It was very interesting hearing all their answers! My favorite question was “what is your favorite passage, story, or book of the Bible?” The ladies chose some great ones!

After English Anne had cheese fritters waiting for us. So, so delicious!! We needed to run into town to do some errands and we were able to catch a ride with Dave and Dee around lunch time. We went to Manda Hill and printed off the pictures of each family we had taken a couple weeks ago. We weren’t sure how expensive they’d be or how easy it would be to do this, but it was almost easier than in America. We uploaded them onto the store’s computer from our flash drive, they printed them out, and they were reading in a couple minutes. They also had a great deal. Since we were printing around 30 pictures, the price went down quite a bit, so I’d say it was pretty comparable to the States. So glad we did this!

Since that stop was so quick and painless we thought we were on a roll. Little did we know the frustrations that were to come. I should have known that this is Africa, and that there’s no way everything can always go 100% smoothly. We went to fill up our internet modems and stood in line for a while. When it was our turn she said their system was down and they couldn’t top them up. Bummer! Then we walked to the Arcades mall because they have another Airtel store there and they told us the same thing. She said the system might be up and running in a couple hours. We considered going to see a movie to make the time pass but decided, who are we kidding?? The system will most likely not be up in a couple hours so we decided to head home. Before doing that we stopped in at a travel agent at the Arcades to start getting some options for a Luangwa trip. We were not in a very good mood after this, so a minibus ride back was not the most fun, but we made it. We had picked up a few groceries and gotten some anti-itch cream for the bug bites but another thing we forgot to buy was ink for a printer. So that was annoying as well.

At home I decided to blow of some steam by playing with the kids. They always cheer me up. I also brought the family pictures along in case I ran into any of my ladies. I was able to deliver most of them. They were so happy to see the pictures! I played with the kids for a while and then came back to fold laundry and I watched part of a movie before supper.

Supper today was over at the guest house on Dave and Dee’s property. Instead of a full blown Easter Retreat this year, a few missionary families from Malawi drove up to Lusaka and we’ll spend a couple fun days together here. The Martins and Holtzs game, along with 2 nurses from the medical mission and their friend from America, and a WELS couple who is doing Bible translation work in the Eastern Province of Zambia. Add those people to the Wendlands, Birners, Hartmanns and us it was quite a big group. It was great seeing the Martins and Holtzs again. Last time I saw Heather and Rachel Holtz they were very little! I’m not sure if they even remembered me. And the Martin children I barely knew—I think I remembered the oldest, Jeremiah. Since they were in Zambia while we were in Malawi I don’t think we saw them very often. We also had a nice chat with Melissa Schuetze, one of the nurses. Turns out she’s the sister of my Prep classmate, Christopher. Small WELS world. We had pizza from Debonairs, carrot sticks and soda. It was such a wonderful end to the day—we had such nice conversations with everybody. We have a lot more fun things planned the rest of the weekend.

The other awesome thing we found out is that we can top up our internet by buying airtime for the phones. For your phones here, you buy these little cards with a scratch off pin number, and when you insert that into your phone you top up your call time. Kind of like tracphones in America. You can buy these top up cards anywhere and everywhere! Well, everyone had told us we can’t buy internet time that way, so that’s why we were always going into town every time we needed internet. Not anymore!!! We can top up our internet using those same scratch-off cards. It’s a somewhat complicated procedure that would be too confusing to explain, but it’s going to make our life so much easier. When we run out, we can literally walk 100 ft. down the road to a little Airtel booth and buy those scratch-off cards.

So that explains why I couldn’t post this yesterday. We had no internet time left. J