Typical Day (:

I never knew playing could be so much work!  The children here are constantly running around and never seem to lose there energy until it is time for them to go home. I just spent about an hour and a half looking for gold with the children.  It is something that they see their parents/people in the village doing all of the time.  We were smashing rocks and looking through the dirt.  I must say I’m very dirty now but I don’t think I have had this much fun playing in the dirt in a long time!  I did manage to crush my finger in between the rocks a few times, which hurt so bad!  Every time I let out a little yelp Lydia would start saying “sorry sorry” right away.  After a long day of looking for gold it is not very common that people actually find any.  Emily was telling me that once she went to go look for gold starting at 2am all the way until 5pm the next day without finding any gold at all.  She said that it is a lot of hard work and most people go without any food for that long period of time.  I don’t think I could ever do it!  After playtime the children all go running up to the kitchen as fast as they are yelling line while they are pushing and shoving to get to the front.  It can get very hectic!  They are all served hot cereal every morning around 10 or so.  Their caretakers are the ones who come and cook for the kids.  Two different ladies come everyday so they probably only have to come about once or twice a month to do cooking.  It helps with the cost of having to pay for a cook.  Plus I don’t think that the caretakers mind coming for they get to see what their child is up to then during the day.  The hot cereal is normally drunken very quickly for the kids normally don’t get breakfast before they come to the center and many of the also don’t always get dinner at night.  Well the kids are already running out of the classroom ready to start playing again so I better get back to playing in the hot African sun!  Oh boy it sure is hot out today!  The children don’t have many toys to play with outside so we were playing with a flat soccer ball.  We have to communicate through a lot of hand motions since they know only very few English words so I was surprised that we were able to make up a little game.  After I couldn’t take the sun anymore we went and found a very small piece of shade and all huddled up to try to escape from the sun a bit.  My hair was still down at the time so the children took full advantage of playing with it.  Thank goodness they are all very gentle with it so it very rarely gets pulled.  They all love the smell of my shampoo because it is something different for them!  A lot of time they just come to rub my hair and start smelling their hands.  At first I had no idea what the heck was going on and I was scared that my hair smelled bad but Emily asked one of the kids what he was doing and he explained that my hair smelled so good to him.  Most of the time it is already up in a wad though by the time I make it to the center because it is so hot.  It is really fun getting some individual time with the kids because they like to share with me everything they know.  I don’t think I have ever gone through my numbers or letters so many times.  I think I kind of have an idea of what it must be like to be a kindergarten teacher.  Since supplies are limited we have to write everything out in the dirt with either a stick or rock when we practice.  Most of my afternoon was spent playing my ukulele for the kids.  They seem to really enjoy it and the best thing this they don’t realize that I suck at playing it haha.  Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is one of their favorite songs to sing along with as well as Frere Jacques!  They actually have a lot of different songs they sing that go along with the same musical pattern as Frere Jacques, which is really helpful since that is one of the only songs I know how to play.  I spent most of my night up at the center hanging out with Wilfred and a few little kids that came to play around for a bit.  We went to the shopping center as well to go and pick up a few things that we needed to make dinner.  I got to talk with my friend Cherisse as well which I was beyond excited to get to hear a familiar voice!  My phone call didn’t last long though because I needed to add minutes to my ghetto cell phone.  Wilfred and I then made our way back up to the center to cook me some spaghetti :D (my stove is still broken here and they have been telling it would get fixed for the past two weeks) It was interesting to see the way he has to cook using fire.  I don’t think I would be able to do that haha I thought the house was going to burn down but thank goodness it didn’t.  It was very dark by the time he was done cooking so he had to walk me back to my house due to security reasons.  After tripping over many rocks in the dark and probably stepping in a lot of nasty stuff I don’t even want to think of we made it back to my kitchen and had a lot of cleaning to do.  The owners had turned off my fridge for about 3 days because they wanted to get something out of the freezer that was stuck in there but it turns out they never came back to get it so it just ended up making my food go bad in the fridge.  Thankfully Wilfred stayed to help me clean out the mess it made in my fridge and throw away any of the rotting stuff.  Once we got things some what cleaned up I was off to go and joy my wonderful plate of spaghetti and watch me some DC cupcakes then I was off to bed.