Thursday, February 15, 2007
I Love the Smell of Dried Fish in the Morning!
It’s not exactly Folgers in your Cup, but it does wake you up [actually, it wakes me up, but Paul can sleep through anything!]. We can usually tell what they are cooking at school without having to leave the house. Of course, since they usually cook the same thing every day, it’s not very hard to guess. Everything in Ile is going well, but our housing situation is getting on our nerves. We have actually gotten used to the noise of 250 kids eating in front of our house 3 times a day (it helps that we watch TV on the computer at night while they eat dinner), although the lack of privacy is also getting on our nerves. We also just learned that the director will probably not be leaving to study in another city, but will stay in town and do a learn from a distance program.
Anyways. My classes are going well, and so are Eli’s, for the most part our kids are well behaved. We only have one class that seems difficult, and I blame it on the fact that they don’t have desks and the chalk board is rough like sand paper (large grain) so it’s hard to read anything we write on the board. Eli is just starting to teach her history classes, so it’s too early to tell if she’s overloading herself (although my guess is that with 800 students the answer is yes). On her busiest day she has to teach nine 45 minute classes.
With one of our Mozambican teachers we have created an HIV/AIDS group at school, which so far seems like a good group of kids. We’ve only had one official meeting, but from that they have worked on a theater piece to do at school on Valentine’s Day, as well as making a lot of pictures and poems (with our markers and crayons) advocating abstinence, etc. to put up around school for the 14th. It’s a good start and we hope to do a lot of things with the group. Hopefully we’ll each be able to send students to the boys’ and girls’ conferences like we did last year. I still have a plan to paint a giant world map mural at the school and color code the countries by HIV/AIDS rates (this was one of my plans for Nacala, I’m transferring it to Ile now).
Other interesting news: this Saturday Ile is supposedly getting an American doctor, which will be really interesting for us. On Sunday the missionaries are having a lunch party for her (that’s the plan at least) so we’ll get to know her then. Some of the missionaries have already met her, and one of them thinks she said she was from Michigan, but I suspect that she saw my MSU hat and got Michigan from that. Anyways, it’ll be nice to have another American in town and perhaps she’ll let me do some work with AIDS patients. I am assuming that she’s here to do AIDS work, and I’ll be surprised if she’s not.
Everything is going well and we’re enjoying ourselves. Hope everyone back home is doing well.
Paul and Eli
Anyways. My classes are going well, and so are Eli’s, for the most part our kids are well behaved. We only have one class that seems difficult, and I blame it on the fact that they don’t have desks and the chalk board is rough like sand paper (large grain) so it’s hard to read anything we write on the board. Eli is just starting to teach her history classes, so it’s too early to tell if she’s overloading herself (although my guess is that with 800 students the answer is yes). On her busiest day she has to teach nine 45 minute classes.
With one of our Mozambican teachers we have created an HIV/AIDS group at school, which so far seems like a good group of kids. We’ve only had one official meeting, but from that they have worked on a theater piece to do at school on Valentine’s Day, as well as making a lot of pictures and poems (with our markers and crayons) advocating abstinence, etc. to put up around school for the 14th. It’s a good start and we hope to do a lot of things with the group. Hopefully we’ll each be able to send students to the boys’ and girls’ conferences like we did last year. I still have a plan to paint a giant world map mural at the school and color code the countries by HIV/AIDS rates (this was one of my plans for Nacala, I’m transferring it to Ile now).
Other interesting news: this Saturday Ile is supposedly getting an American doctor, which will be really interesting for us. On Sunday the missionaries are having a lunch party for her (that’s the plan at least) so we’ll get to know her then. Some of the missionaries have already met her, and one of them thinks she said she was from Michigan, but I suspect that she saw my MSU hat and got Michigan from that. Anyways, it’ll be nice to have another American in town and perhaps she’ll let me do some work with AIDS patients. I am assuming that she’s here to do AIDS work, and I’ll be surprised if she’s not.
Everything is going well and we’re enjoying ourselves. Hope everyone back home is doing well.
Paul and Eli
And I just have this kids picture to show that we're not the only people in Ile from Michigan! (Anyways, the kid has a 1986 fiesta bowl [whatever that is] t-shirt).
# posted by Paul and Eli @ 12:02 AM 
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