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!
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