February 28 "I'd like to introduce you to....."

We’re alive! J I woke up early to turn on the water heater light, glad that the inswa attack was done…for the night. I’m sure it’ll happen again. But as I woke up early and couldn’t fall back asleep, I once again visited the carnage of the flies in the living room and peered outside to see if any monkeys were eating the maize. I have yet to see a monkey do that here, but apparently they do it most mornings around 4 or 5, so I thought I’d try it. Fail. Anyway, after falling back asleep, I decided to ditch the run this morning because I knew it would be REALLY muddy. T and I pondered what we were going to do if it was pouring, since we tutor outside, but luckily, we didn’t have to answer that question today. For our morning session, the skies were clear. While we taught English in the church, that’s when it rained. When we returned to the guest house after classes, Mrs. A was sweeping up the remains of HUNDREDS of the inswa wings outside that were on our front step. Mr D&D was here fixing T’s light switch and was telling us that the locals here eat the inswa. I didn’t believe it, but it’s true! I guess these weren’t big enough to eat, otherwise we might have gotten to try those….All the rain and mud has caused many a frog to hop outside our door. The smallest are as big as your pinky fingernail! And I may or may not have kissed three of them today, but no handsome prince appeared. Shucks. Anyway….let me tell you about my students, as I haven’t done that yet! For M/W morning tutoring I have D&O, two boys who like to joke around, but they know I mean business when it comes to English class! Meanwhile, T teaches M&V—both girls—our lower group. On T/TH mornings, we flip flop groups and I have the lower level students while she has the older ones. I have R&J who are in third grade. They are shy boys, but really fun. J T, meanwhile, teaches J&E, our higher level girls. On T/Th afternoons, we team teach our bigger group of M/T/G/B, all girls, who are a bit higher level and grades than the morning groups. After their sessions, I work with A, a cute little second grade girl, on her letters and reading, while T works with M&M, our two high school girls. We have so many sessions because of the different levels of the students, when they attend school, and for management purposes. I have found it a struggle to manage the children at times because they get so excited and don’t always know what I’m saying when I ask them to do something. They know when they do something good and something bad, but that’s about it. I realize I need to have a lot of patience with them , especially because of the language barrier. Speaking of patience, that brings me to preschool, where I see 13 smiling faces stare at me. Man, I have had kids standing in the back for the past three class periods! Hitting is unacceptable in preschool or anywhere. I think I caught them off guard when M, one of the girls, wasn’t coming to me when I asked more than once and I bust out “Bwera Kuno” aka come here. That got them listening! And this time I even got them to apologize….in English. The preschoolers get so excited when we are they; they know we have fun chants and songs for them to learn along with their letters and numbers. I love seeing their excitement for learning! Today we even taught them to say thank you when you receive your crayons. After a rousing game of duck duck goose, preschool was done for the day. Sadness. Did I ever tell you why I feel like I live in Biblical times? Well, my feet are constantly getting dirty here, so I tend to watch them more than once today. Today’s nemesis? Mud. After cleansing my feet, I headed outside to hang with the kids again. They went nuts over my camera. And they all wanted to impress me, so they began singing “King of Kings” and “I just want to be a sheep” which we taught them last week. LOVE IT! J I’m gonna miss them so much…..Lastly, our ladies. We have them in two groups currently. I work with the upper group, or N/S/E for reading our novel and conversation time. I teach the actual lesson on our topics to the lower group: O/F/J/D/J/V. They’re all lovely ladies and I love seeing them bring their littlest children every day. Alright, those are my students. Don’t you feel like you know them? After school it was time for….wait for it…..lesson planning! You guessed it! M/W nights have less lesson planning than the other nights, so that was helpful. T and I took a brief walk around campus before our dinner of nshima, potatoes, pumpkin leaves, and beef with gravy. Afterwards, we finished the night with lesson planning, watching Antz (great movie, you should watch it), taking silly pictures, and dancing to songs on our touches. Lots of fun. J

February 27 "Inswa Invasion"

Sunday dawned bright and sunny, as I would know as the eastern sun awoke me a few times before my alarm did. We again attended church at Bethel on campus. Wow, what amazing gifts God has blessed the choir with musically! I lost count of how many beautiful songs were heard them sing. All of the adult songs were sung in Nyanja or Bemba or Tonga or another similar dialect, but I did happen to ask one of the sem wives for the translation of the title of one, which happened to be about how we were following the right path to heaven. The children’s choir, newly uniformed in their Bethel children’s choir t-shirts from a generous donor at another congregation, sang a few songs for us, as well, including one in…English! It was a splendid rendition of “What a Friend we Have in Jesus” to a different melody. It’s been stuck in my head ever since! Both choirs move rhythmically to the songs; the whole experience is awesome. I love it! The part of the sermon that struck me was when the sem student who was preaching helped about helping the poor. Poverty is relative, and I applaud the fact that they still view helping those poorer than they as their mission. Once again, we greeted everyone in church in the reception line and chatted with many of our students after church. Mrs. A made us more maize for lunch—love it! In the afternoon we finished lesson planning for Monday for the most part so that we could enjoy our afternoon. Since we were unable to go to the market yesterday, T and I decided to once again venture on a minibus into town to the weekly market at Arcades, but this time with the purpose of buying souvenirs. I was pretty excited because of all the hype I had heard on campus about bartering, and I haven’t bartered in a year or so (besides a failed attempt in Chinatown in London), so I wanted to see if I still had it. We were fortunate for one of the bigger minibuses on the way into town. When we stopped at the bus stop on the University of Zambia campus, I had the opportunity to sit by a university student and we chatted a bit about the school there. He was majoring in environmental education and he said the university had about 10,000 students. Finally, we made it to the market for some bartering. J Before the ominous rain clouds, too! T and I went to town, (literally, hahaha), and purchased many a souvenir for ourselves and others. Maybe you will be the future owner of one of these trinkets! My best bartering of the day: getting 2 wooden bowls for K30,000 instead of 1 for K30,000, which the man started out at. That’s about $6 for two. Also, I got a smallish mask for K10,00 ($2) instead of K30,000. Nice work! J They were wrong when they thought they could rip off this white American! Plus, you’ll be happy to know that I did find a new pair of flip flops here, so I once again have shoe wear. New rule: they are not allowed to be worn during duck duck goose or kickball, because those games are vicious to my sandals! On the minibus ride back home, we fit 19, yes I did say 19, people in the bus, all scrunched up while holding our souvenirs on our laps. As we stepped onto campus it began to sprinkle—wow we couldn’t have planned that any better! Referring to the ominous clouds during the sales with the locals helped my bartering skills, too. J After our excursion, we continued lesson planning, and tried to plan when we are taking our trips in the next few months. D&D came over and we finalized our game park plans (EXCITING!) and T and I talked over when we want to go to Vic Falls and Malawi. Dinner was again by Mrs. A, a lovely meal including noodles, noodles, NNN-NNN-NNN! (Noodles are the picture we have for our ABC chant that we have taught all the preschoolers. I think it’s hilarious when they start chanting when we walk past them.) J After dinner….you guessed it….we lesson planned! We’re such teachers….BUT, it also decided to DOWNPOUR outside. And me, being the curious person I am, decided I needed to stand out in the rain not once, but twice during this time. Love it. J Reminds me of dancing in the DOWNPOUR in Ukraine with friends. Well, on the second time outside, I was amused by the inswa—hundreds of double winged insects all fluttering under the security light and out of the rain. Unfortunately, they all decided to follow me into the house….even after I shut the door. They were coming in the cracks in the doors and windows! Soon, we probably had 100 inside too, even after plugging the cracks! I didn’t mind so much; they were annoying, but I was busy chatting with someone on the computer. After the short power outage, T, however, was on a mission to get rid of them. So she took the Raid bug spray and used almost THE ENTIRE CAN and sprayed them to kill them. Meanwhile, I’m sitting on the floor and taking in the fumes. As the fluttering began to stop, so did our breathing. T and I had to cover our mouths and noses with fabric so we weren’t inhaling the fumes! I definitely felt lightheaded the rest of the night! This, combined with seeing all the carnage over the floor of a hundred dead flies the size of dragonflies, made for an interesting experience. T and I retreated to our rooms and into our mosquito netting to protect ourselves from any other flying creatures. Sitting in the dark and taking brief breaths of air outside hoping that more bugs wouldn’t fly in was the name of the game for the next hour. T probably got sick of my saying “I hope I don’t suffocate in my sleep!” over and over again; but then again, that spray had really messed up my head for awhile! I feel asleep praying that God would let me survive the night and not die from the fumes and lack of ventilation to serve his kingdom another day. J

February 26 "Thinking of Others"

Well, in the few times I woke up overnight, I realized we would not be going to the market this morning because of the rain. The Dutch Reform market happens once a month, and at first I was bummed that I could not go because of the rain. Then I thought, this is stupid. The Zambians depend so heavily on rain during the rainy season here. Without it, they cannot grow their crops, and therefore, do not have a livelihood. So after reassessing the situation, I realized that the rain was a blessing from God, as it had not rained heavily since we had been here. Plus, we have two other opportunities to go to the Dutch Reform, as well as the other markets that run on all the weekends. Enough being selfish. T and I spent the morning lesson planning and prepping for Monday, instead. It was a very productive morning! Mrs A was making fritters for the men who were staying at the other guest house today, and gave us a few to try. For those of you who don’t know, fritters look like Twinky bars, but they taste like funnel cake. Yum. She also boiled some maize for us to eat—my favorite! After lunch, it was time for…..the magic show from South Africa, held at the American International School in Zambia, that we were invited to (yes, I sure felt international!).  It was kind of a shock to see so many white people there! Overload! I’m used to being one of the only ones! Anyway, the Magic Man had some good tricks and some funny (adult) comedy in between, so it was a fun time to spend with the B family and the S family. The funniest part was when he was calling a few kids up on stage to help him and this little girl, about 4, just ran up there and invited herself on stage to be a part of the show! Afterwards, we headed to a restaurant called Kilimanjaro for some 2 for 1 pizza and the Magic Man actually graced us with his presence (or he was also at the restaurant….). Anyway, it was a lovely afternoon. T and I took advantage of the rainy evening to spend the night relaxing. That seems to be the way things go around here. When the sun goes down around 7, people head into their homes for the night. The campus kind of shuts down then, and we are not brave enough to try a minibus into town then either. Don’t know what kind of crowd we would meet….Anyways, we watched Never Been Kissed, and I read and Skyped with the fam before turning in for the night and actually getting some sleep.

February 25 "Wealth is so Relative"

Well, it was a pretty low key day today. Currently, on Fridays we only have English class with the wives at 9:30, so not only was I able to get a run in, but I got to sleep in, too! There are not many times when I get to sleep past 7 am here! On my run, four boys around age 12 thought that a “Muzoongu” running on the street was interesting, so they joined me for a few meters. On my way back when I passed them again, they yelled “Hello!” as I replied with “Mwi Bwanje!” I also heard them whisper, “Ask her for money!” Yes, since I am American, I obviously have a lot of money and carry it around with me as I’m jogging! English was a small ground today, so T and I ditched our lessons until Monday and did a reading activity with the entire group, instead of breaking into ability levels. As I am learning here, we always need to have back up lessons ready to go because it is an often occurrence that we only have 2 or 4 of the 9 students in attendance. Today’s reason: there was a children’s clinic in town that many of the women were taking their children to. After English, we spent the early afternoon working on our other project here. No, nothing to do with the English, tutoring, and preschool lessons that we’re working with daily, or even the schools we need to begin working with, but setting up the program for future teachers to come to Zambia. We’re a pilot program, so we’re trying to update an advice log along our stay here of things we’d tell the next group to make their time here a bit smoother than ours. Later in the afternoon, the LCCA Board invited us to their monthly meeting about the Christian Community Schools for Vulnerable Children, aka, the 2 schools run by the LCCA. The majority of the students are “vulnerable” meaning they are orphans or only have one parent who can’t support them going to school. The tuition fee for those who are not vulnerable is K10,000 for single parent families and K20,000 for two parent families per month, aka $2 or $4. Wow. The world is so different. A lot of the things I heard in this meeting kind of broke my heart. Like how they are in desperate need of a Director for the schools who can write proposals for donations for them. They want to pay this person $500 a month. That would be crazy talk in the U.S. It’s difficult to fathom sometimes how different lives can be. I’m currently reading a book entitled The Hole in the Gospel, too, and this book, which is about poverty, and the meeting have definitely gotten me thinking lately. I have been blessed so much and I want to be able to share with the people I’ve met in Zambia. People in the U.S. are not content with what they have; they always need bigger cars, houses, better jobs, etc. Zambians are very content with what they have, even if they do not have much. Alright, enough of me getting on my soapbox. Just ask T about it; I was on my soapbox for a good hour on this topic the other night! We ended off the night on a very American note: we had pizza, the most American tasting pizza I have had here, and watched a few movies. The ones tonight just so happened to be Ever After and Newsies. What fun! Tomorrow we are excited for the Dutch Reform Market and the magic show!

February 24 "No one likes you when you're 23"

Today I feel it is appropriate to tell you 23 things that happened today. Here goes. 1) Instead of the stray dogs chasing my on my run today, I ended up chasing them. 2) My stalker student did not show up for tutoring today which is good because he is no longer allowed to come. 3) Female D&D made me a yellow cake with chocolate frosting—my favorite!—and delivered it during breakfast, which was a bold move. She told me she didn’t decorate it nice because she didn’t want to try to take the place of my mom. J 4) I was asked in class by one of the wives today about how young girls approach puberty in America and equally awkward and more awkward questions. 5) Today (and most days), I taught students who happened to be breastfeeding their children. 6) T made me a HILARIOUS card and gave me a gift that made it all the way from the states. My favorite was that it was wrapped in tissues. 7) We gave the kids candy (or sweets, as they are known here) for my birthday today and yesterday and I heard some of my little preschoolers saying birthday as I walked past. J 8) While the preschoolers were waiting for their teacher, they got excited by sounds of me leading a rousing round of spelling words with the older students, so T had to literally chase and shoo them out of the guest house area. 9) After being shooed, 3 of the preschoolers continued to be curious and climbed a tree so they could see what we were doing over the wall. Yes, the lesson what that good that all the students wanted to come in! hahah 10) I celebrated my birthday by having no power or water for the entire afternoon. 11) When the transformer blew, my initial thought was that it was a Civil War cannon. My father has taught me well. J 12) We later learned that the “explosion” was caused by a monkey who got too close to the transformer. 13) During pm tutoring, the students got to illustrate and read a story about my birthday.  14) I FINALLY got my little second grade friend to spell her name correctly more than one time in a row (her name has five letters in it), and the ABC chant is helping her recognize letters and know what they say. 15) L and her son N brought me a basket full of yellow roses today! I didn’t even know they knew it was my birthday! 16) We went to The Tourist with D&D, which, to my surprise, involves a math teacher from Wisconsin. 17) The name would fool you, but we ate at Mike’s Kitchen tonight, across from the theatre, which is a South African chain. The food was pretty good. 18) D&D snuck off to tell the waiters it was my birthday so I received a delicious sundae, fully loaded with sprinkles and red and green sauce and even a sparkler on top, while they serenaded me with a birthday chant, comparable to the one at Friday’s. J 19) We found out what was going to become of the monkey. One of the sem students is taking the monkey, preparing it, and offering us monkey meat to eat tomorrow. 20) S&P and their daughter S were at the same restaurant we were at. When they came over, S invited us to a South African magic show that is going on at the school she teaches at, AIS—American International School—on Saturday. Random, but fun! 21) I am preparing to shop until I drop as D&D are taking us to the big Dutch Reform market that happens once a month on Saturday. 22) T and I FINALLY picked a date for our game park adventure with D&D. Three weeks away; I’m so excited! 23) T and I appropriately ended off the evening by taking a series (my word of the day for tomorrow) of awkward/funny pictures, while a spider and lizard watched on. We were just happy that the power had come back on while we were gone! And that is how I celebrated my birthday in Africa. J

February 23 "Burga, Burga, Ba-Ba-Ba! Good Job, Good Job!"

You can tell how hard I’ve been working by the amount of books I’ve been reading. Yes, we did travel a lot in the beginning, but by my third day in Zambia, I had finished four of my ten books for the trip. Yikes! The past two weeks have been busy, busy, busy, and thus, I have read significantly less, only 90 pages total! See, that shows you how hard I’ve been working! This morning had an excellent start as the computer that we use to print things would not turn on, so T and I took turns frantically hand copying a 4 page story while the other was teaching our kids about celebrating and parties in time for English class. It just so happens, that we only had 2 students in English today, too, because the women were taking their kids to a children’s health clinic. So we didn’t really need the story right away; oh what fun. So English turned in to two one-on-one sessions, which was actually really beneficial because I was able to work with our lowest learner and catch her up on the letter sounds. I found myself using strategies/materials from my child tutoring sessions with her, and I think it helped. Hopefully T and I will be able to find the time to give her the focused time that she needs. Today also renewed my respect for preschool teachers; I could never do it fulltime. Yes, the kids are adorable, especially when you hear them saying their chants all morning that we have been working on the past few weeks, without any guidance, as they run around campus. They’re learning. J And those of you who know me and my “Good Job” chant would be happy to know that the preschoolers love it and learned it in only one day. J However, they have started to realize that we cannot understand them, so they got a little loosey-goosey today. In the first hour and a half, I loving dealt with the following: hitting, stealing, pushing, yelling, running around the room, biting other children, and hurting others. It was lovely. But try to get 2 and 5 year old kids who don’t understand English to say sorry to each other. Now that was a challenge. Yes, language is definitely a barrier in these situations, but boy, did the students understand that they were naughty little children in trouble when I made them all sit in their desks silently for a minute; I didn’t hear a peep! After break we reconciled with a game of kickball, which resulting in my breaking of another flip flop. I can never decide if I want to run on the stones in bare feet or chance another flip flop’s mortality….In other news (aka, not school), Mrs. A made us guava punch today—delish! And a super tasty dinner, but she makes us excellent dinners most nights. I can’t wait for the pumpkin leaves again—so good! Here are some of the noteworthy things that happened while preparing for tomorrow’s lessons: 1) I spent over an hour hand drawing a replica of the ABC picture chart in full color from memory. I do hope it gets used—often. 2) My room is home to many huge spiders daily, but I thought it was interesting that tonight I could only see a few legs because it was hiding under the crown molding. 3) The men who are staying at the other sem guest house across from ours have been testing all week to enter the LBI and about ten of them sat outside today, singing a beautiful religious song in various keys, all in a cappella. It was beautiful, even though I didn’t know the words. 4) It gets really warm in our house, especially at night time, but we need to keep the windows closed at night because of the bugs—no screens. So, I find it ironic that I keep the windows closed to keep the bugs away, but I end up going outside to lesson plan, at least part of the night, where all the bugs are, just because it gets so warm!

February 22 "Unicorn starts with YOOOOOOOU!"

Hallelujah! The power came back on! I’ve been waking in the middle of the night a lot, but it was nice to see that the power was back at least, since I had to wake up. I’m glad that we didn’t have to go without refrigeration for too long again! Today was the first day that we implemented our split tutoring. We’ve given each child on campus 2 and ½ hours a week with us and we’re focusing on mainly English, and a little bit of math. The split time worked extremely well for management and there was so much more time on task. J For English, today was the first split class, too. T is teaching the higher level learners the lesson and I have the lower ones, and we flip flop the groups for reading and conversation. Yay differentiation! We began reading a Mozambican novel today; I will become as educated as my learners through this book, that’s for sure! Our lessons this week are focusing on church, and since we teach in the church, props were aplenty! Over lunch which included the Mexican cheese curls from Zambia, we planned afternoon tutoring, which will also be split. This week’s theme is parties/celebrations, so of course I had to write a story about my fake birthday party this week. J We didn’t get to it today, but I know they are excited for it because we learned the vocab today. After the first group, T and I split up higher and lower again; she worked with the two high school girls and I worked with a little girl named A. It was an intense hour and fifteen minutes. I don’t know if I’ve ever repeated letter names so often. She gets three letters of the five in her name incorrect, so I sat there repeating myself over and over and having her repeat, too, so hopefully she will remember for next time. I did get her to successfully go through all the alphabet flashcards we have and say “_______ starts with ______” or “heart starts with h.” It seemed to go so much better this morning. but that’s the difference between a 3^rd/5^th grade group and a 2^nd grader. Differentiation is definitely the key here. T and I counted up today that with the 9 wives we’re teaching and 28 children, we have nine different levels of English learners to plan for each day/week, and that’s being generous. But it’s a challenge we gladly accept! After classes today, we walked to the market to buy goodies for the kids for tomorrow/Thursday. J They’ll love us even more! The night was pretty low-key with quick lesson planning and some R&R after Mrs. A’s delicious dinner for us. She goes way above and beyond, with is especially key to note right now because she is also taking care of twenty men who are applying to the LBI all this week! What a big task! I sure am glad she takes care of us, though. J

February 21 "Truck Bells, Tattoo Drawings, Teaching, and Tantrums"

I have been looking forward to today because today is the day we visit the two Lutheran Community Schools that work in conjunction with the LCCA. D and Pastor B took us to Matero first, which is on the other side of town. Matero had five classrooms and seven grades; five classes go from 7:00-12:00 and two go from 12:00-17:00. We met the teachers and saw a few classes in action. We had been prepared for big class sizes, and coming from a class of 32 during student teaching, I was ready. However, some of the classes were under 20! The two rooms that were split 1^st/3^rd or 3^rd/4^th had 40 kids, easily, in the room though. The public schools in the area put as many as 70 kids in one room, we heard. It wasn’t like that seen in Slumdog Millionaire, though; the kids had breathing space. Some of the teachers left their students alone to talk to us for awhile; that took some getting used to. The kids had a chant for greeting us visitors in each class and it reminded me of teaching summer school last year with our class chant and class greeters. J Some other happenstances at Matero: the road approaching Matero had so many big potholes that it looked like a stream/swimming pool since all the rain was filling them up; a man came in the gate from off the street and offered me two large shopping bags of dead caterpillar carcasses to eat and spread on the ground; we saw their version of “free and reduced lunch”—a pot of porridge the students are able to eat during break; the church’s bell tower is made from a truck frame stuck in the ground; and after we had been in the fifth grade room for thirty seconds and had left, a boy hung a picture outside the window and it was a replica of my tattoo on my ankle—crazy!  Next we headed to Kaunda Square where C works in the am. They have 3 and ½ classrooms (one is tiny) and have grades 1—7 as well, with some in the am and some in the pm. We learned that most of the students were “double orphans” and older than the average, say, 6^th and 7^th grader. I did see a few students who looked like they were 12 in 1^st grade at Matero. And C, the 6^th grade teacher, said she has students ranging from ages 9—17 and L, the 7^th grade teacher, has students ranging from ages 14—21. After seeing what the students are taught, I so wanted to jump in and try to catch them up, but I believe they are doing well according to the Zambian school system. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. However, at preschool, I did get to deal with two crying children and a one year old brother who was dragged along with one of the students. Oh, and mind you, they do not speak English. So that’s always fun. They always seem to understand when I need to discipline though. Naughtiness is universal. J They love duck, duck, goose now since we introduced it last week and they request it often. After dinner, we laid out our lesson planning materials outside on our grass mat, and after 30 minutes, the power on the entire campus went out! At least we were outside with our flashlights already! We enjoyed planning by candlelight and praying that the power would be on in the morning so we could take showers!

February 20 "How To Ride a Minibus"

As the women’s Bible retreat was continuing at Pioneer Camp, T and I stayed on campus to attend church and to get some planning done. We went to Bethel, the congregation right on campus, and I absolutely LOVED It! This is where the wives we teach and their children we teach attend, so it felt welcoming and homey to know so many of the members. The church was packed, too! I was sitting next to a little boy I didn’t know and he kept putting his hand on my leg; it was cute. J We were privileged to hear two choirs—the adult and children’s choirs—today, too. They sang in Nyanja (the local dialect) and danced beautifully to the accompaniment of the drums. It was quite a sight to see! The most remarkable part to me is how they welcome visitors. Before the final hymn, a church member reads the announcements for the day and asks any visitors to stand. We had this at church last week too, where they cheered/clapped for us. At Bethel, however, they sing a welcoming song for us! It was so neat! Then the congregation was ushered out to sounds of the choir singing and the whole church creates a reception line, kind of like a wedding, and you shake the hands of everyone in church that day. Our students loved seeing us there at their church; they had huge smiles on their faces and kept staring at us throughout the service. After church, we made a quick lunch and met a few of the men who are staying at the other sem guest house this week for some examinations to enter the LBI (Lutheran Bible Institute) in Malawi, which is the feeder school to the seminary here. We had to hurry because we wanted to be adventurous and attempt to take a minibus into town to the mall. Sounds simple enough, right? So we walked about ten minutes to a bus stop where we didn’t have to search long for a bus; we were called over by MANY minibus workers, insisting that their minibus was the best. (They’re all the same.) So, after we were herded into the bus, we headed towards town. Thankfully, everything is on The Great East Road in Zambia, so as long as we were on that, we knew where we were. So it was a nice, safe ride, right? Well, imagine fitting 16 grown adults into a van which is comparable to a 7 passenger van in the States. Luckily, we didn’t have any goats on our minibus, as D&D had warned us happens sometimes since you can bring anything on the bus. Oh, and did I mention it was 90 degrees outside, too? Yeah, it was a sweaty ride. However, it was a wonderful ride for K3500 at the most, which is about 75 cents, which takes you almost anywhere in town. Unfortunately, we missed our stop on the way there, but eventually made it there and enjoyed an afternoon of shopping and hanging out at Manda Hill Mall. On the way back we stopped at Arcades, the other mall, to look for something in particular, as the store we wanted to go to at Manda Hill was closed. On Sundays they have an open market at Arcades, so T and I walked through the area, scoping some things out and seeing what the prices sounded like. I love looking interested in things and then walking away. J But I did get a vendor to chase me down a row, trying to sell me a painting. That was fun. And T and I both got hit on to our faces instead of from afar like normal on our adventure….Add that fun to a few awkward student phone calls, a dinner with one of the D&D duo, talks of game parks, and a caterpillar that came to lesson planning while we were talking about caterpillars for our preschool lesson tomorrow, and it was an eventful day!

February 19 "Ecclesiastes--Greek for teacher. Yes, Greek, in the Old Testament"

Saturday was day of the Bible study. We arrived back at Pioneer Camp by 8:30 a.m. and studied God’s Word until about 6 p.m. with a  few short breaks. It was very well done, though. I have a much better understanding of Ecclesiastes now! By the way, did you know that the word Ecclesiastes is Greek? And it's in the Old Testament! Why? (These were questions I was being asked.) I did enjoy myself the most on the part about education because I felt I could contribute to the conversation about teaching and education. Made me feel like I was at home, talking in my apartment about the educational system! Here are some highlights/random facts of the day: 1) Cows were mooing during the first hour of the study this morning. 2) We read an article about a Malawian man who had 11 divorces, 1 current wife, 5 current girlfriends, and 15 children. He thought God’s command to populate the corners of the earth was directed right at him. His wives and girlfriends don’t get mad at him according to his charm, or so he says. 3) Lunch was a delicious chicken and veggie salad with peanut dressing. YUM! 4) SOOOO many people walk around in the pitch darkness at night in the middle of the road. I’m surprised we haven’t hit them in the car yet. 5) Women here can carry 25 KG bags of maize meal on their heads without the use of their arms for support. 6) We ate Malawian pineapples and bars made from Malawian ginger. They were gooooood. 7) Between a few of the different missionary wives, we now have places to stay when we visit Vic Falls and Malawi. And I met my cousin’s friend who works for the medical mission in Malawi; hopefully we can visit her station too! 8) Before dinner we had an hour break and a number of us (there were 11 total) took a walk. We were walking down a dirt road through the tall grass and on this walk I truly felt like I was in Africa. So far, being in the capital, I haven’t felt that. But this seemed more authentic. Unfortunately, we didn’t turn back soon enough, so we ended up walking in the darkness for the last ten minutes. 8) We saw our first wildlife in Africa (besides the bugs, spiders, frogs, and lizards). It was just an owl, but it was still pretty cool because we walked up really close to it. 9) After we came back, we ended the night with some ice cream and a movie, but the intellectual exercise this weekend just made us both sleepy and we fell asleep pretty quickly tonight/during the movie.

February 18 "Off-Roading, yet on the Road, the Road to Ecclesiates"

Well….we had more fun dealing with the frig in the morning, but one of the D&D duo helped find a replacement right away, so not everything was spoiled, thank goodness! I was leery about drinking the long life milk after it had been opened and it hadn’t been refrigerated for about a day…..but I survived. I don’t drink it plain though, just on cereal. I can’t bring myself to drink a glass…I love my Wisconsin skim milk! Thankfully we didn’t have am tutoring so we could take care of that…..And English went well today. We read this cool African poem I found that builds on itself to help with the flow of the words. And we read children’s stories. I was fun listening to one group read the three little pigs and look at me questioningly when they got to chinny-chin-chin! After English we had a break. We ventured into using our TV for the first time. There were about 50 channels relating to religion, 2 news programs, and a soap opera thing that we couldn’t hear. News it is. And the TV also is a radio, too, so after weeding through all the religious stations again that were telling me I was going to hell, we found an interesting one which has some current American tunes, along with some British and Spanish, too. Anyway, for the retreat, the ladies were staying at a camping lodge with a cottage and chalets right outside of Lusaka. They had no room for us, but the nice men on campus said they could take us to and from the Pioneer Camp for the first two days. The four day study was on Ecclesiastes. M, the leader of the group, is an older woman and she makes the Bible study so intense. On a scale of one to ten, I’d put my Biblical understanding at a 4. The level of this retreat was definitely at an 8 or 9. I’ve never been asked to recall so many Old Testament names and dates and places and Bible passages and references from memory! But it was definitely beneficial. I sat in awe just listening to the gifts God has given to M in the areas of studying His Word. We had an intense three and a half hours of intro, followed by a delicious meal at the main house. Beef stroganoff; not as good as mom’s but close! Then we hitched a ride back. Besides learning a lot from being immersed in the Word, here are some other things I learned/observed today: 1) The booklet that our study came from was a road map with some catchy names, but the cover had an old map of Milwaukee on it. WLC wasn’t there, but I did spot Carroll College. I bet my sister would never have imagined I saw her school in Zambia! 2) In the Southern Hemisphere it’s not the man in the moon, but the rabbit in the moon. We saw it tonight as it was a full moon. 3) Roads outside of the capital are more like four wheeler tracks. I almost had to bust out the motion sickness bracelets to make it to the camp. 4) The male in the D&D duo is very adventurous. On our way home he decided to take a “short cut” which just so happened to go through a river……thankfully it was pretty dry, which is hard to believe in the wet season. It should make the game park with him next month all the more fun. J 5) On our walk to get refill Zain (Internet) time, the girl manning the little stand on the side of the road said “Hi, I would like to be your friend.” Wow, things are easy here! We made plans for next weekend with two girls our age today! 6) Beware of people drinking Shake-Shake.  

February 17 "Refrigerator Down!"

Let me tell you how I start my days. Everyone here gets up with the sun and goes inside with the sun. We feel like bums if we’re in bed until 7 am. And we do get some lovely phone calls and SMS’s from missionaries before seven quite often! However, my day begins at 5, when I get the privilege of waking up to turn on a light switch which heats our water. Unfortunately, we didn’t put together that this light has to be on to have hot water for awhile, so for the past five days we have had COLD showers. After flipping the switch, I head to bed for another hour. At 6, I wake up to take a run. But before that, we need to let ourselves out of the guest house area, which can take a few minutes! There are six, count em six, locks and keys that need to be used to get in and out of the guest house area. What fun. Then on my run, I try to ignore the many stares. Yes Zambians. I realize I am white. And no, you don’t need to make mention of it all the time! I’m back in time for a quick shower and heading out to tutoring before 8. Sometimes the students come early, and sometimes late. Zambians have no sense of time, which I love; it’s so different than America. Usually they leave at the earliest when they are supposed to arrive. But today our tutorees arrived a half hour early, so we had to kick them out before they caused too much mischief! Today was our first Thursday, and our last day of am tutoring for the week in our current schedule. I had come up with an idea to teach thirty action verbs through charades, chanting, and repetition. We had students from grades three through twelve enjoying the activities AND learning new words and how to spell, so I call it a successful morning. J Next was a two hour English class with the ladies. We could tell they were feeling the effects of the English intensity this week as some of the ladies skipped out today. Previous to this week, they had received one hour of English per week and now we upped the ante to eleven hours. Nonetheless, we had a great and beneficial review lesson for the ladies who attended. Some of the kinks we have run into this week with scheduling, such as this one, will help us decide what we are going to do as far as how many hours to have of English vs tutoring and such. Afternoon tutoring was pretty much the same as the am; the kids are better behaved so it went even better. J I shouldn’t say it like that….the students here respect their teachers so much. Sometimes the a.m. students get a bit carried away in their own language though. Not to worry! T and I are going to thwart that next week! Over the lunch period we ran to the market to top off on Internet and purchase ice cream. We were so excited for it, but it was disgusting. Our quest for real ice cream is on! After pm tutoring, we went to the mall, too with one of the D&D’s for some teaching supplies. I’m excited; next week we’re starting small groups for reading, conversation, and vocab lessons. I have the higher group for the reading portion and we’re going to read an African novel. Should be fun! Our planning tonight was pretty light as we just had English in the morning. This was good because our frig broke tonight, so we had the fun of trying to sort all of that out.....right after shopping, of course! We cancelled pm tutoring tomorrow because the missionary wives invited us on their annual Bible retreat! It goes from Friday afternoon through Monday morning, and we are joining the group for Friday and Saturday. We will get to meet the Malawian missionary wives, too!

February 16 "Busy, busy, busy!"

Boy, are we spending a lot of time working as volunteers here! T and I have a full load today; six hours of teaching between tutoring, English, and preschool. During tutoring this morning, we acted out “football” vocabulary, so the students were excited. This week has definitely showed us how basic we are going to need to get to reach all our students. Despite their ages, T and I will be going back to basic arithmetic and vocab/spelling for the kids, and some adults, too. Our morning ESL lesson was complete with a segment where students had to create infomercials for everyday products which were their vocabulary words. T and I modeled this of course, “selling” a few items, including a water jug, a church pew, and a backless chair. Preschool, surprisingly, is my favorite part of the day. I get to make up chants and games for them to do as we work on writing our letters and counting! Today was so adorable; the kids all cheered as they saw us walk into the room instead of their regular teacher! Their participation with the letter of the day, B, was impressive! Some students decided to be naughty today, too, so I got to try my hand at disciplining little kids who do not understand what I am saying. It was fun. J I am such a teacher. Our afternoon ESL lesson was spent a bit on spelling, and mostly on conversational skills. It was a lovely class period as we all sat out on a huge woven grass mat in the sun. J We had a lunch date today with D and the Director of the Lutheran Community Schools in Town to talk about visiting the two schools and possibly helping out the teachers there. I am excited to see their schools. Schools in Zambia go for five hours a day so that some children can go in the morning and some in the afternoon and the same classrooms can be used for different classes. I think of my kids at home, many of whom are in school for ten hours a day, twice what these children are used to. That blows my mind. About three hours of prep/planning is done daily to be set for teaching for the next day, and as we have no curriculum and the ages of our learners vary from two to thirty, it is not always the easiest to figure out what we want to do and what will help. As we have been told numerous times already, whatever work we can do will benefit those who attend our classes. In other news, here are some more tidbits from the day: this afternoon it was raining on one side of the building and not the other, we had a fish n chips dinner and I was so glad to see that the fish wasn’t staring at me, although the scales were still on….., our transition song for our kids to leave tutoring is “Hey Driver,”  a lizard ran across the ceiling in my room tonight upside down and decided to spend the night somewhere…., I had TP hanging out of my nose from blowing my nose and didn’t notice it, a three legged spider crawled across the wall, M—our new friend who is our age—wants to take us out and show us around town soon, and as I always seem to find the huge spiders, I hear T’s voice say “Do you want to kill him now or later?”

February 15 "Long Life Milk, Shawarma, and Zambian Ministry"

Tuesday means six hours of teaching. Tuesday also means that we get to meet the students who will attend the afternoon tutoring session. Tuesday this week apparently meant that a huge spider should be INSIDE my mosquito netting, too. What a lovely way to begin the day. The a.m. tutoring period got a bit crazy this morning; three new students, all high schoolers, joined us, so we had to try to shimmy them into our plans for the time being. A few students decided to be class clowns, too, and being unable to understand what they are saying, it took T and I aback a little bit. We will definitely need to regroup and create a game plan for tackling this situation. My favorite question from tutoring this morning was “Can you help me name the 23 ministries that are a part of the Zambian government?” Yeah, like I have THAT on the top of my head! English went well; we gave a preassessment on vocabulary words and began a pen pal project with the ladies and some wonderful college students back at home. Since we currently were teaching without any supplies whatsoever, D&D kindly agreed to take us to the market between classes, but not without dropping a few kids off at afternoon school first. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a road with more potholes before. But on to the market we go. Hurray! We finally have a few supplies! Paper and pencils can go so far….And all of our lovely hand-copying and creating worksheets has been a hoot. D&D really love shawarma, some dish with pickles, fries, chicken, etc all wrapped in a tortilla and baked (I think it may be Swedish?), so we joined D&D with the schvarma for lunch. We got back to campus just in time to meet our new students for the afternoon tutoring session, which seems like a bunch of nice and well-behaved kids, many of whom don’t speak a lick of English. Should be a challenge. Tuesdays also mean an extra hour of ESL in the afternoons, so we had some ladies join us for spelling and conversation in the afternoon. J, a very eager sem student, also joined us for this time, although he has a great grasp of English already! By the end of the day at 17:45 I was pooped. But, lucky T and I; we were able to spend the rest of the evening planning our lessons and figuring out paperwork. But, this is a teacher’s life at times. We were busy and tired for the rest of the evening, but we got everything done, with even a few laughs to spare. J Those laughs, of course were in preparation for our English lesson commericials tomorrow. We had to set the bar and do some ourselves, of course. So T may or may not have "sold" me a Zambian travel book and I may or may not have "sold" her a 5 gallon water jug. PS, long life milk, milk that doesn’t have to be refrigerated until it’s opened, does NOT taste good on its own…

February 14 "Trivia, Picnics, Tattoo Rubbings, and V Day"

The dreaded day that has been haunting us since we left the States is here. Well, actually, I don’t think Valentine’s Day is bad, but it feels like we have been bombarded with advertisements in London and Lusaka about it constantly for the past week and a half. I sure wasn’t expecting that! But I did get to eat some delicious chocolates from a suitor back in the States today. J But anyway, on to the good stuff; it was our first day of teaching! We started off the day with tutoring, and had eight children between the ages of 9 and 15 for the morning session, after turning away three preschoolers who wanted to learn, too! The kids liked our introduction activities. T and I even came up with some Zambian trivia questions which fit in kind of with a game I remembered seeing on Legends of the Hidden Temple. We had fun. J Upon first observation, it looks like the students need a lot of guidance with some basic facts. Back to the fundamentals. Right after that, we had our first English lesson with the ladies. We played “Going on a picnic” in a few different versions—thanks Dr. B!  After doing a KWL chart (see edu profs, we did retain some things you taught!), we had them reading stories at their levels (ahem, differentiation, hello?!?!) and answering some reading comp questions. Boy, did those three hours this morning go by quickly! The afternoon brought on preschool, and T and I had planned some pretty spiffy activities to help with learning letters and body parts. The ABC chant went even better than I had hoped! The students were SOOOO eager to learn and so excited. J I have been so excited to teach preschool all day; what will my middle schoolers back home think of me now? The rest of the day was spent block and lesson planning, complete with a dinner of nshima, laying on the floor and racking our brains to think up activities, and listening to Mulan. Lastly, my mother and sister commented the other day that I haven’t done anything embarrassing or klutzy yet. Well, let me just fill you all in with the daily happenings on the klutziness level for today: I spilled water on the floor twice (all over), broke my second flipflop here (playing duck duck goose), got ink all over my hands (from doing LOTS hand copying), random bruises have popped up, I got a heat rash, I always miss when squishing the spiders, I slide across the cement outside all the buildings and almost fall daily, and I ran into my bed frame. So there. Now my mom and sister can be happy. Final thought for the day: the most random part of the day was when all my preschoolers were rubbing my tattoo simultaneously to see if it would come off! People here are transfixed by it!  

February 13 "Intense Day (camping is intents...hahah)"

Sunday greeted us as a very warm day, and I heard the same was true in the States. We went to a church off campus that the missionaries tend to attend called Good Shepherd. Now, I am used to contemporary services, so when I saw a hymn board with hymns posted, a liturgy from the hymnal, and the pastor in black robes, I was a bit taken aback! That is not what I expected in Africa! There were African parts to the service, but it was very traditional like I would have seen at my church growing up. The bush churches that we will visit later are another story, though! After church, we were greeted by the congregation and introduced ourselves. Several members and important people that I will need to meet again to remember introduced themselves and added another facet to our stay here. We will be helping with the two schools set up through the LCCA here, too. An intense women’s Bible study followed; man, are the women here smart! It is going to take all my energy to keep up! The afternoon was mostly devoted to planning and preparing for our first day. We have an hour and a half of tutoring and of English on Mondays, as well as two hours of preschool. English is instruction for the sem wives and preschool is for 4-6 year olds, although we have a 2 year old. Tutoring will be the issue as our range is from first to ninth grade, which is basically their entire range here. We shall see tomorrow! While T was taking a nap this afternoon, I decided to venture out on my lonesome for the first time and head the other direction down the road. I felt very touristy as I snapped pictures and heard many shouts, honks, and whistles as I was walking. Oh, the joys of being a young white woman in an African country. It hasn’t been too bad yet, however. On the way back to the guest house, several of the children were hanging out on a little ledge together. I stopped and watched them perform songs to which they sang, danced, and played the drums, while the preschoolers tried to impress me by jumping off the wall, and the one year olds just smiled at me and shook my hands. So cute! Mrs. A made us a lovely dinner to break up the hard work of the day. Most of it was done without the use of technology, as we have found that going online usually requires a computer, an Internet USB, and a book, the last one to be used while waiting for things to load online! I now head to bed with the sounds of frogs croaking and bats squeaking, knowing that tomorrow, our first day teaching, will be a great day.   

February 12 "Water, Water, Everywhere...."

First weekend in Zambia. Saturday was a nice day to take off from all the planning/scheduling/prepping from the week. Tammy and I ventured into doing our laundry; simple enough task, but in Zambia, nothing is quite that simple when it comes to technology. Silly us, turning the machine on wouldn’t start the wash, but turning on the outlet and the water sure did! With the length of time it took to fill up the washer with water to begin the cycle, I had read two chapters in my book! Then we ran into the difficulty of cooking our grilled cheese for lunch because we couldn’t have the stove on with the dryer, otherwise bad things would happen. Numerous occurrences of turning outlets on and off later, and we had successfully made lunch and started the second load. But boy oh boy, did our two loads turn into a daylong event practically! Besides laundry, we walked down to the market nearby, in the midst of several stares from the locals. We made it to the store for our supplies, but, of course, it started raining as we left the store. However, I was prepared! The two of us tried to keep our newly purchased school supplies and bread under the umbrella for the ten minute walk home. Good thing we got back when we did because we soon found out why it’s called the wet season! A 20 minute downpour ensued as we checked our laundry again. The rest of the afternoon was filled with more visits of the families. Pastor P was going to take us at 14 hours, but we didn’t end up leaving until 17:30! As one of the sem students explained to us, Africans are event oriented, not time oriented. If we were supposed to meet at 14:00, then people start getting ready at 14:00.  I felt like I had read that line right out of a textbook; it was funny hearing it from him. That, and Pastor P was stuck 150 km away made it impossible to begin earlier, but all families were visited in time. J Again, they were so thankful that we were there and it makes me excited to begin teaching on Monday! We were taught some more Chewa and I think it goes something like this: Mwacomo bwanje, which means good afternoon. African languages are nice in the fact that they sound just like they are spelled, so as soon as I see things in print, I’m usually ok with pronunciation. We had a lovely meal at “Arabian Nights” with the missionaries. They were all getting together as a late Christmas gift, but invited us along as well. It was good company with D&L, D&D, S&P, and M&E, along with the children N and S. I had Afghani steak and it was delicious! I also think it’s humorous that I’ve never been to an Arabian restaurant before this trip and I’ve already been to two of them! A little R&R for T and I meant a lovely evening with a movie.

February 11 "Muzoongu!"

I was adventurous today and let me tell you about it. I went for a run this morning. Twenty minutes in the humidity and countless stares later, I survived my first run. Since D&D always run, hopefully the locals will get used to seeing me, too. In the morning, T and I started planning our ESL curriculum for next week, using the materials from the female D&D. We’ve got a plan established for next week, complete with preassessment, review, and new activities—doesn’t that sound fun! My next adventurous move was trying new foods. I had lunch meat and mayo, which looked questionable, on my sandwich today. Tomorrow, I will try the long life milk, aka, it’s not refrigerated until I open it….We also tried some real Zambian food for dinner, including enshima and cooked pumpkin leaves—they were both very good and filling! The next adventure was teaching 2-4 year olds about body parts on the fly today. Three of the four did a superb job and could wiggle their fingers, bare their teeth, and show off their muscles on their arms. J We ended with a riveting game of head, shoulders, knees, and toes (knees, and toes). I can’t wait to begin teaching songs and chants to them next week! So cute! Another adventure was trying to fix my flipflop, which decided to break on day one in Zambia. Well, in the battle of me vs. super glue, the super glue won, as it is all over my fingers still! The flipflops are currently fixed, for the time being. Another adventure was beginning our home visits tonight. We met five of the amazing families. They are all so excited that we are there to aid them. Everyone is so polite. Each of the kids sort of bows to us as they shake our hands. They welcome us to Zambia and ask how we like it. They invited us into their homes and asked us to come again. Although they do not have much, they are proud of what they own. The country as a whole is much friendlier than America; wherever I go, I am greeted with waves and shouts of “hello, how are you!” whether I know them or not. My final adventure was learning some Cheywa, the sort of standard dialect around here. English is the language of business, but unless you are a businessman, you most likely know one or several of the 72 dialects in Zambia. We learned three words today: muzoongu, odey, and zicomo, or white person, knock knock, and thank you. The last two came about as a product of the home visits, but the first one is a word we hear often in preschool. C, the teacher, told us what it meant. That, and sounds of “teacha!” (teacher, with a Zambian accent) ring throughout our days at preschool as this is what they call the teachers. I’ll leave you on one last note: T and I are struggling with technology at times. We often forget to turn on the outlets and plug in our USB Internet drives before connecting. J   

February 10 "Movies, Mosquito Netting, and Munchkins"

Today I woke up feeling sick. L I’ve had a cold for the past few days, which is not fun to deal with. I can’t breath.  T let me sleep in an extra hour or so while she got up and RAN out in the heat! I have not adjusted to time here at all, which is funny because I was fine in London, which is only an hour behind!. Everyone goes to bed early and wakes up early here, and if you know me, you know I like to stay up late. Well, I didn’t fall asleep until almost 2:00, so 6:30 came a BIT too early! I just can’t fall asleep at night! And when I wake up in the morning, I’m always stuck in my mosquito netting somehow….By 15:30 I’m usually ready for a nap though…today was the first day I didn’t take a nap! Hopefully that’ll help with the sleep. Today was another planning day. We had to run some copies, but more importantly, reconfigure the schedule, which took most of the day. It’s difficult to plan around everyone’s lives, especially since we’re implementing a new program and don’t want to overwhelm them. The seminary students at the LCCA (Lutheran Church of Central Africa) graduate in May after 6 years of study: three at the Bible Institute in Malawi and three at the seminary in Zambia. So, coming in to this at the very end of the program is a big adjustment for them, but they are willing to learn! We also did some research and prep for teaching ESL, as we begin our program on Monday! Preschool was once again on the agenda for the afternoon, but today we just helped out instead of leading like yesterday. Preschool is just two hours long, and at 15:00, we get to play kickball with the little ones! They are so adorable! I think that by the end of the experience I will want to adopt an African child….T and I are excited to begin teaching! Monday is coming oh-so-ever closer! One of the D’s talked us through what she had done with the ladies in the past two years with ESL so we knew where to go off from. It is going to be a big endeavor with a lot of differentiation all around! D&D go on date night every Thursday and they said the only thing to do in town is see a movie, so they invited us to bum along. Debonair’s pizza and “Burlesque” were on the docket for tonight; D&D had seen Burlesque and told us we had to see it. For about $3, it was a good deal! We felt like we were back in Milwaukee while we were in the theatre; it was nicer than the Budget or the Cheap Seats at home! We also changed money. I felt RICH holding onto 1,000,000 of anything, even if it was just Kwacha! (about $200) On the way home, one of the D’s was driving and we had a bit of an adventure as we may or may not have bumped another car—I don’t know! But everyone was fine. J Just another piece of the adventure. I don’t know if I’ll get used to the driving on the left. We were a bit lazy tonight, so we popped in “Emperor’s New Groove” while catching up on journaling, blogging, and making our game plan for tomorrow. Off to bed and looking forward to another gorgeous day. Today was day four and we’re in the wet season; so far it has only rained for 15 minutes tops! Glad to be out of the snow that is back home!

February 9 "Humidity, Homecookin', and Helping with Preschool"

Today we snoozed a bit longer than normal and I woke up not feeling so good. I don’t know what’s up with this school year, but I’ve been getting colds and sick more than ever this year! We FINALLY unpacked and got ourselves organized this morning, which was good because it made our house mother’s job easier when she came to clean our rooms! We spent the rest of the morning figuring out teaching schedules of who we’re teaching and when and got that ok’ed with all the higher ups! After a delicious lunch of PB&J, we headed over to observe/help out with preschool again. Now preschool has three different classes in it: baby, middle, and reception, ages 4—6, and there are 13 children of the 10 seminary students in the school. C, the teacher, wasn’t feeling well today, so SURPISE! we got to teach preschool today! Who woulda thought….I left teaching algebra to eighth graders and today I taught letters to four year olds! They’re so cute though! We found out we will be teaching them twice a week actually, so that should be fun and a new experience! After preschool, we visited with one of the D's and Pastor P a bit about more planning and that same D invited us to the movie theatre tomorrow when D&D were going. Who would have thought I would be going to a MOVIE THEATRE in Zambia? Crazy! Today was a HOT day and we went exploring a bit on the main road and more in the enclosed campus area. Well, it was about 72 degrees, but the humidity is 100% and the sun feels warmer since we’re closer to the equator. We have become QUITE familiar with some of the wildlife: tiny frogs which are half the size of your thumbnail, lizards which crawl all over the walls inside and out, and spiders that hang out on our ceilings whose bodies are two inches long and as wide as your pointer finger! The little kids wave to T and I wherever we go on campus; everyone is SO friendly here! We went to the chapel service on campus, which was conducted in Cheywa, but it was nice that the hymn that was sung had refrains so that we could join in, even though we had no idea what we were saying! Afterwards, A cooked us our first meal here, and it was DELICIOUS! Nice homecookin! The evening was pretty low-key with a walk before it got dark and more planning. Everyone goes to bed so early here!

February 8 "Orion's Belt"

Today we got to work right away with a meeting with Pastor P and one of the D's about how we are going to go about teaching. Everyone is excited that we are here and wants us to begin straight away! After our initial meeting, we stuck around for the current English and basic health classes that the women are currently receiving, which is once a week for two hours. We want to increase what the women are learning as far as English goes, but we don’t want to overwhelm them, so setting up a schedule to fit everything in should be interesting! Plus, we didn’t think they had any background at all in English, but they were all reading it at different levels, but still reading nonetheless. With ESL and tutoring split 50/50, we should have some full days! The rest of our day was kind of spent toying with the schedule and different ideas we had for what should be taught and when. We also visited the preschool on campus where thirteen of the seminary students’ children attend. They were so cute with their chants and songs! T and I got to help “teach” by helping them with their worksheets. We found out from D&D, the Kingdom Workers, that C—the preschool teacher—wants us to teach them two days a week while we are here! The kids are very well behaved and so adorable, but as T and I are used to the big kids, this will be another adventure! We are starting next week! We talked with A, our “house mother” for awhile this afternoon while sitting in the shade of the mango trees. She is the guest house manager, so she keeps it clean and will cook us dinner nightly. Yum! D&D were so kind as to drive us to the mall again tonight to grocery shop and we ate at another lovely little food place—chicken pitas. Delish! Once we returned to the seminary, it was past 7, and T and I decided to talk a walk and start exploring our new home. It was dark when we were walking past 8, and very quiet. It seems that the families mainly stick to their own houses after dinner, but we sure see many kids playing, husbands learning, and women working throughout the day! Our night was complete with a look at the stars from the Southern hemisphere and some good time to catch up on logistics for the trip.

February 7 "Malls, Mint Cafe, and Many Marvelous Missionaries"

What a day! Today was our first day in Zambia. From stepping off the plane to an airport with three gates—their largest airport in Zambia—to driving on the left hand side of the road, to wearing flipflops and shorts in February, to seeing lizards crawl through the buildings, to meeting and being overwhelmed by meeting so many awesome and caring people, it was a wonderful day, complete with shower and nap. J We started to get settled in the guest house—some very nice accommodations I might add—before heading to one of the malls in town for some grub and shopping. You would think that a third world country would not have a nice big shopping mall, but no, they have TWO! We got all set with the Zambian forms of Internet and cell phones so that were can stay connected to our students and coworkers. We spent the majority of the day with D and L, two of the missionaries here, and D&D, some more nice people that WELS Kingdom Workers sent along. They showed us the ropes and treated us like family. J We ended the evening by watching a rerun of the Superbowl, or at least ¾ of it before the power went out. But we learned the Packers had won, making it even more of a great day. J

February 6 "Superbowl Sunday!"

Today was our last day in London. L But also the first day in our journey of Zambia! We successfully checked out of our hostel in time and had a major to-do list to complete before arriving at the airport by 4:30. Our first stop was Harrods, the world’s largest department store. This sucker has 7 levels! We just walked through and it was pretty neat, complete with themed rooms, like the Egyptian room. Our next stop was the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare’s plays were/are performed. And St. Paul’s Cathedral. Next we hopped back on the Tube for Tottenham Court Road. Harry Potter enthusiasts should note that Platform 9 and ¾ was under construction at King’s Cross, and since they mentioned TCR in the most recent movie/book, I thought it was fitting to get some food here and say we did something Harry Potter-like. We then moved on to the infamous Abbey Road and posed for a picture while crossing the street like the Beatles. Grabbing our bags back at our hostel, we made our last stop at Big Ben. It was Superbowl Sunday, so J and I made sure we got a picture in our Packer jerseys in front of Big Ben, just for kicks. A few frustrating struggles with the local Tube later, we arrived at the airport in time for our ten hour flight to Lusaka, Zambia. We watched “The Social Network,” enjoyed a roast beef dinner and wine, finished The Outsiders J, and took a nap before awaking a beautiful sunrise while flying over Africa. We are now 8 hours ahead of you in time.

February 5 "Platform Nine and Three Quarters"

London. London. London! Today was go, go, go as we wanted to see all the sights! Our day began at Buckingham Palace where we saw the Changing of the Guard—you know, those guys in the furry hats! We slithered through the HUGE crowd and got some pretty decent, and crowded, standing space for the spectacle. Next on our agenda was the famous Sherlock Holmes’ pub for a traditional meal of fish n chips, since Sherlock Holmes is sooooo English. Our next stop was Camden Town, which is famous for all of their markets and shops. I purchased some pretty cool souvenirs. J It was a BIG area, much bigger than Chinatown in New York, and comparable to the market I saw in Thailand last year. Following this, we tried to see Platform 9 and ¾ at King’s Cross Station, as every true Harry Potter fan knows that wizards aboard the train for Hogwarts. We found platforms 9 and 10, but the surrounding area was under construction, so they had this particular platform closed off. L J had to dash off for the night then to watch a rugby match, so T and I headed back to Leicester Square (pronounced Lester) for some touristy things—souvenir shops, discount play tickets (they were sold out), and some delicious caramel chicken at a local Chinese joint. And Ben and Jerry’s of course. We took a short break at the hostel to figure out the rest of the evening, and then ventured out around 7:45to see London Bridge and the Tower Bridge, two well known spectacles in London. Our walk around the River Thames was breezy and a bit chilly, but we kept reminding ourselves that it was the beginning of February and it was about 50 degrees and there was no snow. Our late night walk also included seeing the Tower of London and reading about the lions they kept at the gate as a kind of second moat and other random facts in its 1000 year history. As we walked across Tower Bridge to head back to the Tube, we kind of lost our way and took a slighty sketchy walk back to our original station. Let’s just say T and I were happy to find the Tube again after some of the shadiness we saw in those awkward twenty minutes. A quick jaunt at St. Paul’s Cathedral to see its grandeur at night was the final stop before heading back to the hostel for Mexican night at the bar, where we had fake moustaches drawn and I had a Guiness, per Dean Kolander’s request. J

February 4 "Abby in the Abbey"

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Shakespeare reminds me of London, and this phrase best describes how the past two days had gone. We arrived in London at 6:45 am, and were scheduled to meet my friend J at Westminster Abbey at noon. This is what we (successfully) accomplished in those short 5 hours and 15 minutes: got off the plane, got luggage, made it through customs/immigration, found a bus to Heathrow (as we now came into the wrong airport), paid for tickets on the bus with a debit card that I hadn’t registered yet in London, took an hour bus ride, found the place we could keep our luggage at Heathrow, checked our bags in there, tried to inquire about our tickets out of Heathrow on Sunday, freshened up/changed clothes, changed money, bought Tube (the subway) tickets, figured out which Tubes to take to our hostel, made it to our hostel, checked into our hostel, found a place for the hostel to store our carry-ons, made it back on the Tube, found the way to Westminster, and met my friend. And it all magically happened by 12:05. This morning made me feel so adulty. With J now joining the Abby and T duo, we now were a trio for the next two and a half days. We heard if you went to a service at Westminster Abbey, you didn’t have to pay the 15 pounds (about 28 dollars) to get inside for the tour. So we did. There were about 15 other people there and they tried to get us to do Communion, which didn’t work out so well, but we got blessed instead. We were able to see about 75% of the Abbey by going through this way, but we missed the Poet’s Corner where a lot of Englishy authors are buried. We walked around for awhile after this as Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament are very near this. It was so cool to see such an old city. I’ve been out of the country twice before, but never to a touristy place, so it was interesting from that aspect, too, to see these famous things like many others. We continued our walk across the Thames to see the London Eye (giant Ferris Wheel). It was all so much to take in! The city was gorgeous and although it was overcast and windy (our entire stay actually), it was nothing compared to the three feet of snow and zero degree temperatures we left behind! Numerous photo ops were taken advantage of with all the sights, and with the classic telephone booths and double decker busses. We also checked out Trafalgar Square, where the National Gallery is located. We went into the National Portrait Gallery to see famous paintings, many of whom I recognized from my Brit Lit course in high school. We also gallivanted through Piccadilly Circus (kind of looks like Times Square with the Jumbotrons, but smaller), and Leicester Square. Leicester Square has lots of small shops and eateries, and discount play tickets, but we decided not to jump on that band wagon. After wandering around for a long time and taking in all the sights, we were mislead by a sign that said “Fish N Chips” as the name of the store, but it ended up being an Arabian restaurant. Nonetheless, I had lamb kebobs and pita bread, and we failed at finding a traditional English pub to eat at because they were all chocked full with people watching rugby at that time of night. We made it back to our hostel (like a dorm) to explore and use the Internet and make a game plan for time and SLEEP to get over the jet lag, as we were now 6 hours ahead of Milwaukee time.

February 3 "No more Snow!"

Bright and early and snowy was how the day began. We awoke at 3 am at T’s house to get ready and set off on our adventure, and leave this land of the snow. We made it to the airport to get our tickets and reticket our flights by 4:30 for a flight which was supposed to leave at 5:42. With a few decisions on travel by myself and T—my traveling partner—we decided to leave sooner rather than later and avoid hitting the blizzard again in Philly. By 7:45, we were finally out of Milwaukee, and we made it to Charlotte, NC by 11:30. We enjoyed our 8 hour layover by taking silly pictures, rocking on rocking chairs in the airport, goofing off, and using our last of high speed Internet and US cell phones. Soon enough we were aboard our flight for London. And thanks to the storm that grounded us yesterday, we had AWESOME tail speed over the Atlantic Ocean and arrived in London after a quick six and a half hour flight on which I read The Outsiders, watched “Easy A,” and took a nap. J