Week One

After a false start monday when the bus driver showed up to find that the schoolbus battery was in fact dead, cancelling school for yet another day, things finally got underway on tuesday and school began- very exciting! I almost didn't realize how much I was craving having a set schedule and a place that I'm supposed to be and things I'm supposed to be doing after being a vagabond for the past two months (although I promise I did my best to enjoy the time, knowing I'd look back longingly at my extended vacation once I was fully entrenched in work). It's been a bit of a slow start, as I'm told is par for the course- we had thirteen students show up this week, but it's still a start. The school attendance is quite small to begin with but there are definitely at least a handful of students that were around last year that are still in the process of easing their way back into the school year and hopefully will show up next week. The kids at my school are great- they're so much fun and so friendly and welcoming. From day one I had kids walking around with me holding my hand and blowing me kisses. My favorite part of the day is when everyone (students and teachers) piles into the bus to go home and I stand there and they all wave to me and shout goodbye out the windows as the bus pulls away. Every day one of the girls asks me if I'm going to come on the bus with them and I explain to her that I live at the school so I don't need a ride home :) Friday was dedicated to cleaning the school which is a process here that the kids are involved with, so they all come sans uniform, don a straw hat and start hacking away at plants and weeding and scrubbing desks down. It's definitely something to get used to having built into the schedule but the kids seem to really enjoy it and get value out of the experience and it's certainly a useful and practical skill for them to have (far be it for me to deny the opportunity for hygeine), so it seems like it works pretty well. I've also introduced the practice of having one of the classes each day spend their morning cooking the lunch for the school, since cooking is an important component of a functional skills curriculum, and it's been going great- the kids seem to really enjoy being part of the process and are very proud to share with their peers the food that they themselves cooked. For a while it's mostly going to be getting settled in and getting to know the students and the teachers and feeling out what direction seems best to guide things in, but it's really great to finally be on that track and officially working.

**You may have noticed that I haven't been posting photos recently. My camera has decided that it is charging the flash all the time and therefore won't let me take pictures. So it survives in a state of limbo where it's not quite dead but not in the least functional for the purpose of actually taking photos. It still does a great job of eating batteries, but that's about it. The deterioration of this final gadget completes the systematic destruction of my entire catalog of electronic items brought to this country by humidity. It really is quite impressive what a little extra water in the air can do. Anyways, I will hopefully have a working camera at some point down the road but until then you're just going to have to do with using your imagination... my apologies