Andy Me! Andy Me! Bell, watch!

Well, it stands to say that Maria's schedule is different (and more rigorous, timewise) than mine. We make breakfast and ship our house's kids off to school and then we split up. I am a tutor for four young boys along with Garner, a fellow volunteer. Of the four boys, there is a natural ring leader, Boaz. He is a year older than the other boys and is testing his limits with authority. We have adversarial days and good days. His mood dictates how much fun tutoring is for everyone. After that I just play and babysit until lunch: make sure that the kids are corralled and safe. I imagine that Cheaper By the Dozen starring Steve Martin may cause me to have PTSD by the time that I'm done here.

After lunch, I have until 2:00 as a break, I can sometimes squeeze a 15 minute nap in. Then English Confidence Class (ECC) where the students are so afraid of answering wrong that they just don't answer at all. It is a hard shell to break through. Even when they have the correct answer written down, they are reticent to speak. I've warmed up the last two classes with some Swahili to English translations, (easy stuff) which has seemed to make a bit of a difference. At 4:30 I head to my house to play hacky sak with some of the boys of the house and help with egg and bread.

I am supposed to be a part of science club on Fridays, so last friday was my first Science club at Gyeteghi school. I thought that I would just be sitting in on an established thing. I was wrong.

I brought a dead and pinned swallowtail butterfly to show and tell for a few minutes as class warmed up. It bears mentioning that at the school, everyone knows your name, and they crowd around you like a celebrity. So before club started, I was showing the butterfly (kipepio) off, and I asked (what I thought was) a student to take the pinned butterfly around to the students who couldn't see it. Zoom! This student ran straight out the door. A different student brought back my pin a half hour later. I have no idea what happened to that butterfly.

No teacher showed up until 4:00. And all he did was ask me to teach some more...Off of the top of my head. I bored the shit out of those poor students. I'll do much better this week...once I think of a lesson plan.