The chewa word for rain is mvula and supposedly the word for thunder is paliwali, although every time I repeat it back to them the kids just crack up laughing at me. Anyway, as the title says, today is a day of mvula and paliwali. Erika and I love it though—it’s nice for teaching because we don’t sweat up a storm under the sun. There’s a nice cool breeze, the wonderful smell of African mvula and the occasional clap of paliwali.
I kind of figured today was going to be a cooler, rainy day because when I woke up at 7, it wasn’t as bright and sunny as it usually is. I felt pretty putzy this morning so before I knew it kids were showing up for tutoring already at 8. This morning’s tutoring was awesome for me. We have several glitches with our schedule, which is to be expected. So today I ended up having the older kids, Dalitso grade 6 and Gertrude grade 8. Since they are a higher level we were able to use one of the novels that St. Marcus donated to us. We read the first chapter of James and the Giant Peach. One of the boys from Erika’s group wanted to join his friends (he’s the same age as my group but not at the same level) so I let him. His name is Given. Although he enjoyed being with the older group, he really struggled. He couldn’t keep up at all. So Erika and I are thinking we’ll have him switch groups every time. One day with me, and one day with her. James and the Giant Peach is full of great vocabulary and descriptive language, which made it quite challenging for Dalitso and Gertrude. They were able to read it pretty well, but we spent a lot of time summarizing and explaining what things meant. Erika is getting this group on Friday, so she might delve more into vocab and grammar etc.
After tutoring we headed over to English. The ladies have Bible study with Pastor Phiri right before English class and today Bible study went a little long. By the time we got set up and ready it was probably 9:45 or so. As a whole group we went around and had to say 1 thing we did yesterday, and 1 thing we did or will do today. We really want to try to get them to speak more English, and as simple as this sounds, it was still quite difficult for some.
Today in my small group we had a quiz on the spelling of kitchen verbs: boil, cook, open, sit, stir etc. I also orally quizzed them on the directions: right, left, in the middle, next to, up, back, front, down. I wanted to put the directions into more practical use so we tried using them to describe where things are in our kitchens, using the diagrams they had done. This was very hard! Instead of them standing up and showing their diagrams and describing directions, I had to scaffold a lot! I held their papers up and fed them the sentences they should say, and they filled in the blanks. Then I did some oral directions: draw a table in the middle, draw a stove on the left etc. and they had to draw it on the white board. We took turns that way to just get some more practice.
Then we played the fly swatter game where I wrote all the kitchen nouns in random places on the white board and they had to swat the correct word. Before we started, I got the chewa translations for all the words we’ve learned. So I said the chewa word, and as quickly as they could, they had to swat the English equivalent. I think they enjoyed this because they had a good time laughing at how I butchered their pronunciations, and they had little disagreements on how to pronounce things themselves—there’s a variation between the Malawian way and the Zambian way. After this little game we went back and talked about nouns and verbs and their definitions. When I wrote out a sentence and they had to identify the nouns and verbs, they were very good at that. But when I said “give me a list of some verbs”, they couldn’t do it. So I re-explained it the best I could and then asked Bertha to try her best to translate for the women. She did, and they spent a good 3-4 minutes talking about it in chewa, so I think they understood it a little better after that. That was their homework then: to go home and try to think of as many nouns and verbs as they could. I said if they feel like they can, they could also use those nouns and verbs to make a sentence. I doubt many of them will feel up for that challenge though. Right at the end, Bertha was asking me how to make the past tense of a verb so I showed her an example or two, but past tense is so difficult. Cry=cried, chop=chopped, eat=ate. All of those are different. She said she was interested in having a lesson on that, and she might be able to handle it, but I’m not sure about the other women. We might spend a whole lesson on that sometime next week with drilling, drilling, drilling and going over many examples.
When we got back for lunch Anne came over with some maize on the cob for us. She had said she was going to make some for us sometime. It was actually pretty good. Anne said it was straight from the garden. It’s similar to sweet corn obviously, although definitely not as sweet and quite a bit starchier. It was still good though with a little bit of butter and some seasoning salt. It was also nice to have something different than our PB&Js. The power also went out while we were in English class, so lunch was spent in the relative darkness and listening to the big rain shower.
The heavy rains continued most of the day. The only short break from the rain that we had was during our afternoon tutoring group. I had Sovereign and Shadreck again today, although Sovereign was about ½ an hour late (she came when the rain stopped) and Shadreck didn’t show up at all. So it was a really nice tutoring session. I decided we would make our own letter flashcards instead of just drilling the pre-made ones. We got through 6 letters but it was a lot more fun because we used construction paper, and she could practice using scissors and we also got to do some drawing when we drew the picture that went with the sound. The big thing I’m noticing is that the kids can sing their ABCs but they can’t tell what sound the letter makes. So I really worked with Sovereign on this today and she got it! So I was really happy!
After afternoon tutoring there was still no power so Erika and I both just read a while and talked about the rest of our week. We got a little interruption when Anne came over and said some workers found a baby black mamba snake. They brought it over to show us, so I got some pictures. I wished it were a bigger one. J We also played a couple games of Bananagrams under the tent in the rain, and I whooped Erika both times, much to her chagrin. We felt like lazy bums the rest of the afternoon because we didn’t have power so we couldn’t get on our computers (we didn’t want to waste their charge in case we wanted them for later), and we couldn’t play kickball or go on a walk because of the rain. We were also too lazy to plan for Friday. That’s the bad thing when you know you have a day off tomorrow.
Anne made our supper a little early so we could eat before Lenten church. She had to cook it over the fire because of no power, but it still tasted delicious. Rice, sausages in a sauce, and eggplant. We headed over to church with flashlights in tow. Church was awesome tonight! Good message by Pastor Birner, and the church was full. There was also something about only worshiping by the light of the two candles up front which was amazing. Believers gathered together in the dark with just the basics: our voices, the flame of a candle, and the Word of God. By the end of the service it was almost completely dark outside, so we had to skip the final hymn because there weren’t enough flashlights. J Church was the highlight of my day. I especially love greeting everyone after the service when we shake hands through the line. And now that I know the kids and the wives more, there are a lot more friendly, familiar faces in the line.
My favorite buddy, Paul, suddenly showed up next to me after we were done greeting everyone. He’s seriously like an ant that swarms to sugar and food left on the counter overnight when it comes to technology. He hones in on anything slightly technological, whether that’s Erika’s watch, my camera, or in this case, the flashlight. I let him figure out how to turn on my flashlight and asked him if he was going to escort us home. He said yes! We got a little delayed because we stopped to talk to Uncle Ernie and Aunt Margie for a few minutes, but little Paul stood respectfully aside and waited for us to finish, while he played with the flashlight some more. We ended up walking Paul home because he lives just a little past where our guest house is and we wanted him to be able to see where he was going. Literally right when we got to Paul’s house, the power came back on. Yay!! So the grand total we were without power today was about 9 hours. I’m glad it was off during the day though, it’s worse when it’s off at night.
Paul is 6 years old, and I’m curious as to why we don’t tutor him. He comes to preschool, but that’s the only time I get to see him other than when we just play with the kids outside. Some of the other kids I tutor are that young. I would love to tutor Paul. If I’m completely honest, he’s my favorite (and yes teachers, I know you all have your favorites too, even though you’re not supposed to.) I think he might be my favorite because he’s the first child here that I met and played with, and he’s such a good helper in the preschool. He translates for me when he can, he helps with the other children, and he’s just so curious and smart and sweet! If I tutored him I would LOVE to just let him explore all the technology things I have here with me like my laptop, mp3 player, alarm clock, cellphone, kindle and camera. I can just see his brain working when he sees things like this and I would love to feed his curiosity of technology! Maybe I can still show him these things another time, one on one. Paul already has a huge place in my heart and even though it’s only been 2 weeks, thinking about leaving him is already heartbreaking!
I think I’ve mentioned the frogs before, but I told Erika that some night we’re just going to have to go outside and keep a tally of how many we see. They’re everywhere!! And some of them are just ginormous! Tonight I caught one and pretended to kiss it to make it turn into my prince charming. Erika took a picture and then I fake threw the frog at her and she freaked out. I laughed. Haha!
I feel pathetic saying this because it’s not even been a week of teaching, but I’m looking forward to a day off tomorrow. It’s nice not having to do planning tonight!
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