Today was great! :) After all that medicine I took the past two days I finally feel soooo much better! I mean my stomach felt just a little funny and I just had a mild back ache but other than that I felt good. I also got a full night’s sleep thanks to this medicine Carly gave me and I could finally eat. I had a nice breakfast because I finally figured out what I did like and what I didn’t like which helped a lot after trying everything these past few days. I also got to try this pinkish fruit juice whish was so good.
As always when I got to school it was tea time, but today it was better because they had these little coconut cookies that were way better than the tough bread rolls they always have.
Today was also my big day to teach a lesson. I started off teaching about the 7 continents and then on to the oceans. There was only one student who is from Zimbabwe who already knew most of the material; he is constantly showing me how much ahead of the rest of the class he is and how good his English is as well. Well, anyways, I continued to talk about some of the countries found in the continents and then I explained the journey that my group has traveled to reach Zomba. I also went further to explain to them that people from America are all not white. So I explained how America is mixed with many, many cultures and how we ended up being called the things we are called like Hispanic, African American, Native American, etc. At this point they were very interested. I also showed them where my family was from which Puerto Rico. Gift, the teacher I’m working with, encouraged me to keep talking so I went further to talk about the differences in their culture, the culture in the United States, and some of the things I knew about Puerto Rico. What I learned was that in Malawi the staple food there is maize which they make into nsima (this is a white food that tastes like mashed up rice that is stuck together), monkeys are the equivalent to our squirrels, special birthday celebrations are from the ages 12- 18, and common careers for females to look forward to are nursing, teaching, secretary work or managing companies. I also got the teacher Gift to participate by teaching him and the class basic Spanish. So he and I did a short basic conversation in Spanish, but I had to keep telling him what to say and how to say it which the kids loved because they kept laughing at how he kept messing up. It was a really good class period. I enjoyed the whole thing and I found out some of the students never even heard of Spanish before so I was glad to expose them to something new.
The second half of my school day was spent with Dr. Barber and the Literacy in Mother Tongue project. I did finish helping the blind teacher translate his book. I also got to Chipo find supplies for the book she was making. Gift ended up finding me again and he gave me a whole lesson on Chichewa. He used the book he translated from English to Chichewa for his students on me except he did it backwards so I was asked to read the book in Chichewa and then he went back and quizzed me on what words in Chichewa were the English words so it was sort of like matching. I had a lot of fun doing that and I could tell that he is going to do great teaching children English using these books.
This was the library Dr. Barber starded in this school.
Later on I had a very good dinner. I order the four season’s pizza and I must say it was delicious. I can tell you right now it is not like American pizza, but it was good judging from where we were. Don’t get me wrong I still reminisce about the last American meal I had which was a BK Double Stackerfrom Burger King, but today that pizza did its job. It was so big I had to save half of it for tomorrow so I’m excited for that.
This was in our room before we went to sleep.
Some chips I brought which had some weird flavors.
And these are all the bottle caps I have been collecting for the kid's abacuses that they make.
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