10 Months!

This week marks my tenth month in Kenya.  Some days when I look back it seems like the time just flew by, but other days it feels like I have been here for a long time.  Its been worth it though and I’m looking forward to another 17 months.  Now onto a recap of the first full week of term 3.

Most of the students arrived earlier than I expected.  I think this is a result of the severe drought that Kenya is currently enduring.  Parents are eager to get their kids off to school since there is little food at home.  I must admit that I wasn’t feeling motivated at all when I sat down and starting planning for the term but that all changed when the students started arriving.  I was pretty happy to see them and I like to think they were happy to see me.

We started going over the rules again and my reward system.  Basically, if you’re good, you get a star for the star and once you accumulate five stars you get a reward.  Furthermore, one student received a star everyday last term.  So I gave him a Cadbury’s Chocolate bar.  And man, has behavior been excellent so far.  Monday there were only about seven out of twelve students in attendance.  I wanted each of them to tell a story about their break to the class.  Each basically had the same story: “I help my family wash, clean, and cook.”

I did not introduce any new material this week, we only reviewed content from the last term.  The majority of the week consisted of doing classroom activities so that they can help each other remember the things we worked on previously.  I was impressed that many of them remembered a lot of the material.

Our first art project of the term was to create folders for organizing homework.  I had them write their name and “homework” on the front of their folder and they were free to decorate and color whatever else they wanted.

I am going to make them worksheets on my own this term.  I did a little bit of this before and it worked out well.  Unfortunately, the nice Epson printer that the previous volunteer donated doesn’t work so instead I email myself the worksheet and print it off in town.  One worksheet I created was a wordsearch which they all loved except for the fact that I mistakenly didn’t include some of the words I listed.  Oops.  But it was great to sit down, relax and watch their minds at work. 

Another highlight of the week was when I finally convinced the teachers if we could change the menu at lunch.  Previously, we were eating githeri (maize and beans) every day.  I just couldn’t take it anymore.  Githeri maybe once or twice a week I can handle, but having to eat it everyday was hell.  Its disgusting.  I hate it.  Everyday I stare at it, wishing it was something else, anything.  The teachers have even made the remark that I look like I’m praying for it to change.  But now we will only eat githeri twice a week. Thank GOD.  The other meals will consist of a combination of green grams, rice, ugali, and meat.  Ugali sucks too but I’ll eat it if it means one less meal of githeri a week.

On Friday a group of special education students from the university in Meru came into my classroom.  Some of these college students will eventually be teaching in Deaf schools.  I was asked by the deputy head teacher if I wanted to say anything.  I took the opportunity to emphasize the importance of good signing skills.  If you are going to teach Deaf, you MUST know KSL because it is their language.  I said English is a foreign language to them, just like Kiswahili is a foreign language to me.  A few gentlemen stayed in my classroom once the rest of the group left to ask me a few questions.  They didn’t know sign language, how depressing.

Today I went to one of the local tea factories with some new friends that are working at the hospital.  They are medical students from Denmark.  There wasn’t much going on at the factory because of the current drought, but it was nice to learn more about one of Kenya’s biggest cash crops and to share some conversations with other mzungus my age.