34 chickens!

Today was a pretty routine day. This morning’s tutoring was Daliso and Gertrude although Gertrude didn’t come again. So Dalitso and I read some more of James and the Giant Peach and then I did something a little different with him. I showed him pictures and video clips of our time at Victoria Falls and all the things we did at the gorge. I told him to listen carefully because I’d be asking him questions later. This was to work on comprehension and being able to talk back to me in English. Plus, I just thought he’d find it cool to look at pictures of the crazy things we did.

In English I did a review worksheet on verb tenses with the ladies first. They did pretty well on this. It was just identifying the verb in the sentence and telling what tense it was.

After this we got back to our work with church vocabulary. To start off, we played Bingo. They made little game boards on a piece of paper and put the vocabulary words in the boxes randomly on their page. I read off the definition of the word and then they put a token (piece of paper) on the word they thought it matched. If they got a row across or down they had to yell “Bingo!” Bertha ended up winning, although several of the other ladies had Bingos but just forget to yell it out. Either way, it still helped with learning the words. After Bingo we played another game where one lady stood up and faced the other ladies. I stood behind her holding up a piece of paper with a church word on it. The other ladies could see it, and they had to use English clues to try to get her to guess what the word was. So this time, instead of just giving the one word vocabulary word, they had to go the other way and give the definition. This was a lot harder but we had so much fun playing it. There definitely moments of loud uproarious laughter! We’ll have to do this game again tomorrow.

By the time this game was done, class was over. Today’s class went by very quickly! Dee was there right after class to meet with the ladies about helping out during the CELC conference.

Lunch was rather bizarre since we were down to almost no food let. I had a bowl of oatmeal and some avocado. Kind of a random lunch.

On our way over for afternoon tutoring I saw Shadreck playing with some friends on campus so I yelled, “Shad, are you coming? It’s your turn for tutoring.” He just looked at me and smiled. So I expected him to follow me shortly. However, he never came. Just Pimbi showed up. That’s OK though; Pimbi and I had a great afternoon session working on words and flashcards. She is such a sweetheart!

After tutoring we walked back home and I had to change into something cooler since it was another hot one today! Then I walked back to campus to make some more copies at the press.

All the sem students were out and about on campus doing work. They’re making the campus look nice for the upcoming CELC conference. There’s lots of painting, mowing and yard work getting done. The campus looks really great!

We caught a ride with Dee into town this afternoon for groceries. This is where the 34 chickens come in. Dee is doing a ton of shopping for food for the conference. Today the big thing on her list was 34 whole, frozen chickens. Her shopping cart was quite a funny sight! We ended up getting quite a few groceries too to replenish our dwindling supplies and also to stock up for some of the food we’ll need when we’re on our own for cooking the next 2 weeks. We always love it when we can coordinate a ride into town with Dee. To have to mess with a squished minibus with all those grocery bags today would have been a disaster!

We helped Dee unload the frozen chickens and then went to watch the last little bits of the kickball game. Before heading in for supper I got 5 minutes of cuddle time with Aubrey and we picked a couple avocados.

Supper was delicious meatballs with tomatoes and onions, kale, beans, and noodles. Even though Anne is so busy these days she still spoils us with such good food. Thankfully we’ll be able to help her out on Friday. We’re going to make beds in the guest house for all the pastors that will be staying there.

We were going to watch a movie on our TV over here tonight, but we couldn’t find the remote to turn it on, so we ended up just going on our computers and prepping a bit for tomorrow. I got to chat with a lot of people on Facebook tonight: Mom, Dad, Megs, Caleb and Stepf. It was very enjoyable for me! Great alternative to a movie.