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…