Maundy Thursday

This morning it was very chilly—probably only in the 50s. We could just not warm up while we were eating breakfast and getting ready for the day. Neither of our morning tutees showed up today. Since it’s about to be Easter break, and most children don’t have school for the whole month of April we think that might have played into why nobody came. It was kind of nice for us though because we could just relax and read for an extra hour or so.

In English we stayed together as a whole group today. Recently the families here received a donation of clothes from a congregation in the USA so today we worked on writing thank you letters back to them. Some of the ladies wrote just beautiful thank you letters. Some ladies chose to write in Chichewa which was an option, so we didn’t understand those but I’m sure they were nice as well. The letter writing took most of the time. We first went through a brief outline of how the letter should look and gave them some suggestions of what to say and then they spent lots of time just writing and then re-copying a final draft. To finish the day we showed them some video clips of our gorge swing adventure, which they were very shocked at and couldn’t believe we did that. We explained how terrifying it was and how for a while after we jumped we couldn’t even breathe and one of the ladies said “Madam, why did you do that then?” It was quite funny and they must think we are crazy. After the video watching we asked them to sing another song for us. This time they got up in the front of church and even had some nice actions to go with it.

During lunch Steward, Regina’s husband, came over to ask some advice on a hymn that a choir from Bethel is going to be singing at an upcoming Music Festival. It was the hymn “The Church’s One Foundation”. Since nobody here really has a piano he wanted to make sure they had the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass notes down. So we did our best to sight read through it with him. He said he didn’t want to be the sole person to blame if the song turns out wrong, so now we can share the blame with him. J

After lunch we had preschool which went OK today as well. It seemed like we had less kids today than usual but that’s OK. We stuck to our usual routine pretty much, but we did give them more time outside today. Since the older kids don’t have school anymore, they joined us outside for games like Duck, Duck Goose and then Erika decided to have a quick kickball game as well.

Afternoon tutoring was with Chipo and Mwandida. We worked a little bit on spelling new words, which is quite challenging. Then we did subtraction and we did it the same way I did with Shad and Pimbi earlier this week, with the counting stones thing. They seemed to like that too! We finished a little earlier today because Uncle Ernie had invited us to come over and watch the Cardinal season opener game that they were re-airing from last night.

Cards won 4-1 and it was so cool to be able to watch the game. It was strange not seeing Pujols out on the field or LaRussa in the dugout though.

Since the game went a little bit long, we had supper a little later than usual. Anne made us rice and beef and a little salad. Then as we were eating she also brought over a chicken breast that she had cooked on her little grill. It was so delicious!

It feels like I should have planning to do but we don’t teach tomorrow so we have a free night. It’s quite nice!