I can't even believe where I am right now, I'm so in awe of the things I've seen in the last 10 days! This past weekend we went on a safari and saw so many animals...I'm in heaven!
So, Friday morning we decided to walk from the home base to our school, it was about 2.5 miles. Emily and I walked with two of the othe volunteer who were at a school down the road from us. The walk was rally nice and gave us a bit of the experience that our students have to go through everyday. The teacher said that the farthest one of the kids walks is 6 kilometers, that would never happen in the states. Here they have to pay for school, there is no free education, they have public and private school.
After school on Friday we had lunch at the home base and then got picked up for our weekend safari! The lodge we stayed in was amazing! We had hot water, the electricity never went out, and the food was fantastic. We went to two different national parks for our safari, Ngorongoro Crater and Tarangire. The parks were very different, one was a grassland area where we saw zebras and buffalo, the other was more of a forest area where we saw elephants and giraffes. The whole weekend was just so amazing!
Today the weather was pretty good, it only rained a little bit, so most of the kids were at school. We got to school about 20 minutes earlier than usual and ended up going to a bible study type session with the teacher. Every morning the teacher, the pastor, and some of the people who work at the church do a 10-15 minute study session or devotional, they sing a song, then go over a couple of bible verses and pray. The teacher translated everything for us so that we would know what the verses were and everything the pastor was saying. It was neat to see their bibles, everything looks so much different, but they still sound similar.
The kids learned math and English today before we left and Swahili after we left. In math they learned the same thing, adding vertically, but she took a couple of the students aside and worked with them on adding small numbers. There are about 6 or 7 students that are really struggling with addition, these are also the kids that struggle with counting. The teacher wrote out separate problems for the students to do that were a lot easier than what the rest of the class was doing, but most them still didn't get it. While they were doing their math problems the teacher and I checked their homework, the same ones that were struggling with addition are struggling with English and Swahili. One little boy writes everything upside down or backwards, the teacher gets mad at him and makes him redo it, but he still brings it back with everything wrong. Then there are other kids that have really good handwriting, those are the ones that are always paying attention in class and the first to raise their hands when we ask questions.
After they finished math I taught English. Emily and I talked over the weekend about what they should be learning in English based off of what they were learning in Swahili, so I taught them the sounds that each letter makes. I wrote two words with each letter and then had them make the sound of the letter with me and then say the word. As usual only half the class participated, the others just stared or talked to the kids around them. Going through the sounds was really difficult because of the way they say certain words, so the words they say funny I would say slower and get them to say a little bit better. For instance jug, I had the hardest time the first couple of days trying to figure out what they were saying! So, I wrote the word and then did the sound for j, they pronounce words with j more like Spanish than English, then I sounded out jug and had them do that...I was pretty amusing. A lot of the kids were giggling through the whole thing, but they were paying attention and really loud when I would have them make the sounds or say the word. After English we were going to play outside, but the van came super early to pick us up so we were only outside for a few minutes.
After lunch today we had batik, which is a painting style that is really popular here. It doesn't take too long to do, but there is a lot of work that goes in to it. The first thing you do is draw something in pencil on cloth, I drew elephants. Once you have drawn what you want you have to make sure it is dark enough, then they wet the cloth and paint it using oil paints and a sponge. They did the background first, then you have to dry it out over a charcoal fire. Once the painting is dry they put wax on around the drawing and then you use black ink to fill in the drawing. The wax keeps the the black ink from spreading outside the lines of the drawing. Then it gets completely waxed over and once it dries you have break the wax off. To get the wax off you have to crumple the painting and rub it together until it's mostly wax free. Then they iron it with a charcoal iron, this gets all the wrinkles out and makes the cloth hard. After that we make corrections and then sign it. Then they iron it again and it's all done! We started at 2 and didn't finish until 5:15! It was so much though, it didn't even seem like it took very long at all.
The rest of the day was free time, which we spent siting around talking and looking at pictures from the safari. This whole trip is flying by so fast, we have done so much already and we have a full week this week!
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