A normal weekly schedule

Several folks have asked I give them an idea of what my life is like at the new site since I am not doing all the physical work I used to do for the other ministry.  While I doubt anyone has a set in stone schedule that is never adjusted from week to week, I can say mine follows a regular routine.

 

kids watching the videos.  Dorcia and Dorean the twins on opposite ends.  Gertrude front and center as usual.  Happy looking a little bored.  and Samson already tuned out.  This one was a little long for the baby class.

I love Mary's face in this photo while Nice looks bored.  As usual Thercia is trying to find a gap.

Monday is the day I head into town so I can get on the internet for a couple of hours and buy the food for the week that is only available in town.  So I get up around 6 to 6:30 AM and after a bathroom break I get some of my dirty clothes together in the bucket I use to wash them.  It takes about 30 minutes to wash the clothes in the bucket and hang them up to try.  After that I take my shower and shave, pack up my backpack with any items I need in town like the computer and charging cables.  I also normally charge up the phone while I am washing clothes and showering so it will be close to fully charged when I head into town.  Since my phone is my main source of internet service and acting as a Wi-Fi spot eats up the battery, I like to keep it as charged as possible.  Also since it is likely there will be no power in town, I take an auxiliary battery to charge it with.  The motorcycle arrives around 8 AM and we head to the dalla dalla near the sugar plantation.  I may have to wait as long as half an hour but I cannot remember ever waiting longer for the dalla dalla to arrive fill up and take off.  The trip into town is between one and half hours to two hours.  So I arrive in town normally around 10:30-11 AM

In town it is a race to get everything I need to do done before 1:30 pm so I can eat lunch before my appointed time to call home.  That means shopping for food from three different grocery stores to get everything and the walk between them since they are situated in three different parts of town.   Having a cup of hot chocolate while photos and videos upload to the various online servers.  Videos are the worst since they not only take over an hour to load up a 2 minute video and process it on YouTube.  Then I have to shop for things for the site or do any planning for required trips like my upcoming required trip out of Tanzania required two weekends of work to get hotels booked, travel arranged and apply for my visa to Kenya.  After that is either a trip to the bank or exchange house to get Shillings for the site to pay the contractor or school operating fees (including salaries).  If I am obtaining them via the bank ATM it will take a full month of stops  to obtain the school operating fees for the month.

Hopefully I get all this done by 1 PM so I can start the walk to my favorite restaurant in town.  It normally takes at least 45 minutes to get a burger or a pizza there giving me just enough time to swallow it before my call home.  While waiting is when I get to do the majority of email answering, posting of the blog using the pictures I uploaded earlier.  After eating is my call home to talk to mom and dad.  I normally get back to the dalla dalla stand on the other side of town around 3:30 PM so I arrive back at the house around 6 PM and just before dusk.  I put away the groceries, bring in my clothes for the drying line, give the guard a copy of the paper I hopefully remembered to purchase him and cook dinner.  After that I normally read or watch recorded tv programs.  I normally get to bed around 9:30 to 10 PM.

Tuesday Morning I get up around 7 AM and take my shower and shave.  That gets me to the school around 7:30 AM since the kids arrive between 7:15 and 7:30 with the bus.  They start the morning with devotional time which consists of singing songs, then a story being read from the bible story books I got them early in the year.  Around 8:15 they go outside for morning assembly where they alternate between attention and at-ease.  Then sing the national anthem before having morning speeches by some of the students.  Then it is announcements from teachers and inspecting the students to see who is dirty or has the wrong socks (school uniform socks are simple white).  After that they are released to the toilets and class.  (I find it funny that no matter how many of them go to the toilet that within twenty minutes of class someone will ask to go to the toilet).

On Tuesday, they have a full day of classes meaning there is not afternoon group activity.  However the baby and pre-unity classes do not have scheduled classes but free time which really means they recite what was written on the blackboard during their earlier sessions.  Every day except Friday they have classes from 8:30 until 10 then porridge time and then classes from 11 until 12:30 when they break for lunch.  On Monday and Tuesday they then have afternoon classes from 1:30 until 2:30 when they have afternoon assembly and the bus ride home.

I normally sit in with various classes.  Normally I just go to any of the classes.  However the last couple of weeks it was discovered that I could explain the difference between several of the shapes being taught in Standard I class.  I could also draw the 3-D shapes on the blackboard (all those engineering classes paying off).  For example I was able to explain that a hexagon has six sides, a pentagon has 5 sides, that a tetrahedron has 3 sides opposed to a pyramid that has 4 sides.  It also seemed to be news that a square and cube have the same dimension all the way around.  So I have been teaching the shapes an figures classes which occupy about 1 hour of every day.  I even went so far as to cut up cardboard and make the 3-D shapes or gather common objects that would be examples of those shapes like a tin for a cylinder.

While the students eat porridge I normally go home to eat an apple of banana.  Then at lunch I make a sandwich at the house.  Normally when school lets out at 2:30 the first thing I do is clean the dishes I used for lunch if I did not clean them immediately.  Sometimes I like to get back to lunch break early so I can toss the balls around with some of the students.  The biggest challenge there is getting them to throw the ball to each other.  They all want me to throw it them and likewise throw it to me instead of passing it around in a circle.

Regardless of cleaning dishes I normally clean the house every afternoon after school.  After that I normally go for a walk between 1 and 3 hours long.  Often I will stop at the village shops to get my bananas and some other items they may sell locally that I need.    When I get back in the evening it is normally around 5 PM.  I typically read some or work on the computer until time to cook dinner.  I keep my meals simple so they can be cooked in around 30 minutes on the gas stove.  I like to watch some recorded TV program while I eat.  After that I normally wash the dishes and cookware since you can't leave anything like food out for attracting ants.  I read or work on the computer until bedtime.

Wednesday is much the same as Tuesday except the afternoon of the school is scheduled for sports and play time where they are supposed to be working on understanding teamwork in sports.  This is the time we intermingle our stories on videos that have been going so well.  Or as I like to refer to it "Storytime with Barnabas Bear."  The kids cycle in  small groups from the sports activities to watch the story on video or have me read to them.  In the coming weeks I am going to try having the Standard I kids read a book to the younger kids.  Please pray for me on this endeavor.

This last week the story was read by Vanessa Marano and Katie Leclerc called Chester's Way.  I liked the discussion we had about the fact they also read the book in American Sign Language and how people can communicate using their hands and fingers if they are deaf.  That was new to the kids.

Thursday morning I normally get up around 6:30 AM again to wash clothes. Thursday the afternoon activity is Debate class.  Here the students come up to the front of the class (all the classes combined) and give a speech which is normally they introduce themselves and then recite something they learned in class.  The most popular lists to recite are:    animals, what items you use to wash your face or brush your teeth.  This is followed by them being asked to spell something on the board.

Thursday after school the teachers stay and we work on their English.  In reality they have a good understanding of English but their pronunciation is often very difficult because they normally learned from someone who was not a native English speaker and therefore their pronunciation was off.  Me teaching math, I understand that.  Me teaching English has really thrown me out of balance in my world of numbers and logic.  Right now I am bought all of them an English newspaper (all 4 the same date of same paper) so they can follow along and read them aloud together.  After that we play hangman which I really think they are enjoying.  Last week they wanted to come up with their own words for me to guess.  I did not stand a chance when they chose a non-communicable disease in Kiswahili for me to try and guess at.  I also spend the week in classes listening to words they may be having trouble with.  For example I heard everyone here pronouncing chest as "ches--t'"  In fact all words ending in "t" were pronounced as the "t" was a separate syllable on an island. I am proud to say they are no longer doing that.

Friday is a short day at school with classes between morning assembly and porridge time.  But the next session of classes are taken by the Religion class which involves 20 minutes of praise singing, 20 minutes of worship singing, 20 minutes of instruction (either reading a story from the bible story book or covering things like the 10 commandments or fruits of the spirit) followed by 20 minutes of choir.  They then eat lunch and play until the bus arrives at 1:30 to take them home.

Saturday is a day of deep cleaning on the house starting with laundry and normally washing towels and bedsheets.  I spend about 3 hours pulling everything out and cleaning it, cleaning the bathroom, washing walls, sweeping the ceiling, and mopping the floors.  After that I normally eat lunch and spend some time crocheting in the afternoon or sewing if I have torn holes in my clothes.  Soon I will need to hem up my curtains, but I keep putting it off.  I really don't enjoying sewing by hand.  I read a good bit in the afternoon and go on 2-3 hour walks often to the side with very few people.  However on my way back I normally travel through areas with people I know so I can visit with them for a couple of minutes and stop at the local shop to inquire if they have a coke zero (they never do but I always ask and I buy them in town and keep a few on hand at the house). I normally watch a movie on Saturday night using the computer.

Sunday, I normally sleep in until about 8 AM then take my shower.  Church does not start until 10 AM (really it starts about 10:30 but they always tell me it starts earlier).  Church normally lasts until 12 noon/12:30/1 PM depending on how much funds they need to raise for one event or another.  They typically do not budget for those items so always have to do a special fundraiser for them.  It can be anything from they need a new song book to Pastor Stephano is traveling somewhere and needs money for lodging and food.

Sunday afternoons are typically very lazy with the only chores being burning my trash and cooking my meals.  I like to make chapati on Sunday's though it normally comes out more like pancakes since the evangelists left me some packets of sugar free syrup. 

I sometimes watch my recorded tv programs but always do a good bit of reading and crochet.

So what am I always reading all the time.  I continue to cycle through the Bible on a regular basis so that I go start to finish once every 9 months or so.  I have also found that Amazon has many of the classic books on kindle for free.  So I have been reading my old favorites like Zane Grey where I found several books of his I never knew existed and have loved reading them.  I have also gotten back into reading Mark Twain (short stories and novels), Charles Dickens and some of the classics like Iliad.

Much of the computer work has to do with planning the future of the site and budgeting/accounting for the school and myself which never seems to end. 

So that is pretty much the normal week.  The first weekend of every month is an overnight trip to town since I need to convey all the work I do on the computer via the internet back to the states and it takes too long to get done in a couple of hours.  In September the school has a two week break and I will use one of them to get my 90 day visa trip out of the way.  (This is the trip I have to take every 90 days to leave the country and come back in).