A little bit of everything (day 19-22)

On Monday I had a lot of experiences at school which I wrote down in my book so I wouldn't forget them. Here's what I wrote:

       

       Todays events put down in words: Part of our normal rutine is that we wake up at 05.45, get ourselves ready and eat breakfast. We try to catch a taxi at around 07.00 so we can be to school on time (at 07.15).

       This morning our taxi didn't get to the lodge until 07.20. Naturally that meant we were late to school . Luckily no one really seemed to care. 

       The first thing I noticed as we were driving in the gates at school were the kids being punished. There were lots of others gathered around just watching. The pupils being punished were sweeping the school grounds. I don't really know what to make of it. I feel sorry for the pupils being punished, but at the same time I don't. I saw several of them smiling, so I don't know if that means they think it was all a big joke, or what. 

       The next part of our routine is sitting in the staff room waiting/preparing for our next class. While I was sitting there I heard children screaming from the classroom across the hall. I looked and saw the teacher hitting one of the pupils over and over again (either with a branch or a belt). I didn't know how to react. I was stunned and frozen in place, even though I had heard we might see something like that while we were here.

On Tuesday we went to the Royal Livingstone for a massage, manicure and pedicure. I had felt like crap ever since Friday (because of my class behaving badly), so I welcomed it with open arms. I'm almost certain the malaria medicine I'm taking had something to do with my mood. But my class has been misbehaving all week. I'm "lucky" in that way. I always seem to be given the difficult classes. I tried having a chat with my class to try to see if things could get better by talking about it. That didn't help at all. I asked them if they cared, and they all replied "no!". It doesn't exactly make me want to be in their class anymore....

On Wednesday we went to DALICE because we were told we were supposed to attend a "very important" orientation meeting. We arrived and were again left to our own devices. We should have expected as much. We were asked what lectures we wanted to attend, and thought we would have the meeting after all the students from Trondheim and Belfast had come. We were wrong. No meeting. We did however learn how to play netball (the predecessor to basketball). It was really fun, so I'm glad we went if only just for that.

The African Cup is happening right now, and Zambia played agianst Ghana on Wednesday. We decided we wanted to watch the match at Jolly Boys. We had bought Zambian shirts to show our support and showed up with our shirts on. We had dinner and were almost afraid the game would end in a tie. Zambia scored with 15 minutes left to go! So they're in the finals on Saturday. We went to see all the celebrations on the main road. It was really cool. The Zambians acted as if they had already won the cup. They did flips in the middle of the road, blew whistles and vuzulas, jumped on the trucks that drove by, ran up and down the streets and congratulated each other. We ended up going to Waterfront with some of the guys who had also been watching the game at Jolly boys. There we celebrated further and didn't end up coming home until around 2 in the morning. We had never been out that late before, so to our dismay we saw the gates were closed and locked. Therefore we had to climb over the gates at 2 in the morning. We must have been a bit of a sight.

Today we woke up and were totally tired. We hadn't gotten enough sleep and really didn't feel like going to school. Often times we have to do things we don't want to do though. So we went to school and I'm glad we did. I had my first class in home economics and it went very well. I had been given a lot of help from the h.e. teacher, so things went very well. I was relieved, because english hasn't exactly been going well since I started. I was beginning to wonder if maybe it was me. If maybe the idea of becoming a teacher was totally stupid. After todays' lesson, perhaps not so.

Before my lesson I helped another teacher out by making a poster with drawings of a lot of grooming supplies. It turned out ok, but she was pleased, so I was happy as well. I was glad to have something to occupy my mind before my lesson.

I split the class in four groups and gave them questions to answer. I thought the answer for the first one was funny. Out of all the parts of the body they choose these.

After the lesson my "house" (the zambezi house) had athletics tryouts. So we went out on the field and watched them run. I took pictures, and as soon as the kids saw my camera they all started shouting "take a picture of me/us". 

Notice that their "track" is a field.

I'm surprised Zambians don't get better results in gymnastics because it seemed like all the kids could do flips as easlily as they live and breath.

Now I'm sitting by the pool as per usual trying to catch up on the days I didn't post. Other than that, we'll be going out for dinner and then going to sleep. I'm already looking forward to it (the sleep part that is).