I had another slight phone mishap last night. It’s very unpredictable. Sometimes I can go days without having to charge it, and sometimes it won’t even last 1 day. I went to bed with full bars of battery last night, and during the night it started beeping at me that the battery was low. Again, I was too lazy to get out of bed and plug it in, since my charging cord was out in the living room and there were no easily available outlets left in my room. I trusted that I would hear Erika get up. Turns out my phone still beeped at me when my alarm went off. Even though it had powered down it must have saved enough juice to at least let me know when my alarm would have gone off. So that was nice. I ended up getting out of bed around 8:30. I really enjoyed sleeping in.
Shortly after 9 I headed over to campus because I was going to take some family pictures of some of my ladies but campus was pretty quiet and I didn’t see either of them around. I assumed they forgot since we didn’t have class on Friday and I couldn’t remind them. I almost forgot myself. So I’ll have to do that another time. Then I went to the classroom building to check that it was open for our in-service training session. By 9:15 two teachers from Kaunda Square were already there. Good thing I was there early! We weren’t going to start until 10. So I told them they had time to wander around campus for a bit. Shortly after that Erika got there with the projector so we got that all set up and ready.
The teacher training went very well. We got started a bit after 10 because we were waiting for the final two teachers to get there. We had 8 teachers come: 5 from Matero and 3 from Kaunda Square. We were pretty pleased with the turnout. Erika did a great job presenting most of the material. She had e-mailed former Profs and friends she knows to get some advice, so she compiled their suggestions into the presentation. I took a couple slides and talked about management strategies for the younger kids, and a couple game ideas since I’ve used several of them with my ladies in English. In this case I was glad Erika was with me because she had lots of great advice for what to do with elementary aged children. I gave the best suggestions I had for the younger kids, pulling on things I’ve learned from Early Childhood classes and from my student teaching. The teachers wanted to know some strategies for classroom management, learning games they could play with their students and how to use resources. The last one was pretty difficult since we struggle with that as well: how do you mix up your teaching and teach in the best way possible without the vast amount of resources that you have in the U.S.A? We pretty much just advised them to use what they did have. Create things themselves like flashcards or pictures, use the students as props, use stones, twigs, or leaves as manipulatives and all the games we taught them require little to no materials so they could be easily used in classrooms with limited access to resources. The feedback from what we taught today was good. They said the main thing will now be to try to implement some of these things in their classroom. We told them that since we’re still here for a while, to email us with any more questions they might have after they try some of these things.
After the meeting I came back home and had wonderful leftovers from last night’s braai for lunch. I ate while watching The Gods Must Be Crazy. I love that movie. I always think of how Dad laughs so hard that he cries when he watches it.
At about 2:30 I headed back to campus to say hi to the kids for a few minutes. Erika was over there playing kickball with them and they were just finishing up as I got there. I got to say hi to Nathan Sargent too, since they just got back today.
Then we headed over to Bethel for choir. There were a lot more people that came today. We ran through the 2 songs that we “know” and then they practiced the other songs they’re going to sing tomorrow. Those are the ones that we don’t know, although they did teach us the dance moves to them so we’ll get to awkwardly stand up in front dancing poorly and not singing. It should be an embarrassing yet cool experience tomorrow. I wish I could get the Bemba song memorized but it’s so difficult. I can read the words piece of cake, but when I try to sing without looking I can’t remember them. The song is in the Bemba dialect, so some of the other choir members have to learn the words too. It’s based on the text Romans 8:31-35. I’ll give you verse one of it:
Bushe finsh twingalanda pa chitemwiko
Cha kwalesa ngali kulubali lwesu
Nani winga kanya amapalo mumyeo
Lesa tasungile mwanawakwe kuliwene
Koma alimupele kulibaifwe
Bushe teti atupele fyonse tukabila?
Toward the end of choir, Steward came over to help us with “The Church’s One Foundation” which will be sung at the choir competition next Saturday. The tenors and basses were having the most issues and Steward looked to us for help. So I suggested breaking up into sectionals and drilling our part over and over again. Erika led the altos, I helped the tenors and Steward helped the basses. It was challenging enough for me to sing the tenor part but I think I got it. The 3 tenors I was helping have amazing voices. We were using Steward’s music as a cheat sheet but I realized that these guys can’t read music. They sing everything by ear and by creating their own harmonies, which is an amazing talent. It just made it difficult to teach them the tenor part when they couldn’t follow along on the sheet. We definitely made progress though. We’ll also be singing this one in church tomorrow, so I wonder if they’ll have me sing the tenor with them or not. Choir ended up being about 2 ½ hours long today. J
After choir we went home and had a few minutes to relax before supper. Dee invited us over again, which was a pleasant surprise. Professor Cherney arrived today so he was there, along with Pastor Weiser, Mrs. Sargent and Nathan, the Birners, and Erika and me. We had lasagna, bean salad, broccoli, garlic bread and the most delicious carrot cake with cream cheese frosting I have ever eaten. Mrs. Birner made it. After another wonderful evening of visiting and hearing stories about Nigeria from Pastor Weiser, we went home.
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