"Date Night"

This morning I tutored Raph and Sam. We did some new worksheets, colored, and did some flash cards. The time really seemed to go by quickly this morning.

English also went by quickly and it went very well today. We had some church worksheets prepared and also did some more work with writing sentences using church vocabulary. Sometimes it’s nice to have a worksheet, and something tangible the ladies can see and complete. For the last part of class we had conversation about church type things. The thing to remember when trying to get the ladies to talk is to give them a lot of time to think of their answers. If you give them a good few minutes of just silence, then they can usually come up with a pretty good answer. There were also some good laughs today. At one point we were waiting for one of the ladies to answer the question of why Job was her favorite person from the Bible. The ladies each picked their favorite Bible character and had to explain why they were her favorite. It was very difficult for her to think of what she wanted to say and she didn’t want to do it. I heard her say “mawa” which means “tomorrow”. She wanted to get out of it by doing it tomorrow instead. So I said, “we’re not doing it ‘mawa’, we want you to answer it now.” And they all burst out laughing. She didn’t realize that I understood what she said. J It was so funny!

We got invited to join Dave and Dee, as well as Prof. Cherney to date night tonight. Thursday nights are usually when Dave and Dee go out for a movie and dinner. So in order to leave in time to catch the 5pm movie, I wanted to bump my afternoon tutoring girls, Chipo and Mwandida, earlier. So after lunch we headed over to campus. I had told the mom of one of my girls to send them at 1pm this afternoon since we don’t have preschool, which usually would have been at 1. My girls didn’t come, but from where I was standing I could see them outside of their houses. So I waited a while and then walked over there. I told them to come to “school” now. I gestured and repeated myself a lot. I started walking away and was expecting them to follow shortly after. But no, I don’t think they had a clue what I was saying. So I decided not to fight it and came home to print up some worksheets to make copies of. Then I headed back to campus and made a bunch of photocopies. Right as Erika and I were heading back, I saw my girls show up for tutoring. Since Erika had already tutored her kids she headed back home. I decided to give the girls a short tutoring session because of the miscommunication issues. We had a short but productive session learning some new words. Then I sent them home with instructions to come at 13:00hrs on Tuesday. So we’ll see if we can figure it out next time. I figure as long as we’re not doing preschool, I’ll move my tutoring a little earlier so I can be done for the day a little earlier than usual as well.

For date night we went to see the movie “The Grey”—the one where there’s a plane crash, and the few survivors all die, mostly by being eaten alive by wolves. Not the most pleasant movie on earth. It was definitely not my kind of movie. Even though it was quite gruesome, it was still kind of nice to be out and about at night. Usually as soon as it gets dark we’re locked in our house for the night. For dinner we headed right across from the movie theater to a restaurant called Mike’s Kitchen. It was very nice! I got the chicken stir fry. It’s a restaurant that you could easily transplant in the United States and it would fit right in. Again, sometimes the modern-ness of Lusaka shocks me. J

For some reason I am really tired tonight so I plan on getting to bed a little early. Tomorrow is Friday though—woohoo!