The Long Version

(written on October 1)

The kids have been home all week and I have survived almost three whole days of it! Gold star for me. Honestly, it has been tons of fun. The preschool is still running so all of the kids go in (including the older ones) in the morning and sing songs and stay for the bible story and prayer, then they are handed over to me. Sheesh. It has been a challenge tutoring 10 kids of varying grades and ability levels. At the same time. By myself. A couple of our first graders cannot recognize numbers beyond 5, so that has been my main focus. They can only handle about one new number a day. I cannot do anything with them in the same room as the other first graders because they will tell them the answers, and I cannot leave the two alone to work with the others because they will cause problems wherever they are (think fire extinguisher going off in the van). I usually end up sending all of the older kids to read and the rest of the first graders to do a worksheet somewhere (which I know they all copy the answers off of one of the girls). When I’m done with the two crazies I try to read or go over other math stuff with the rest of the first graders but they are hard to handle as a group and it is hard to fight with the babies crawling around the house, the mamas cooking and cleaning and the rest of the craziness in the house for their attention. We are making progress, and we will get there. It will be so amazing to have more volunteers here because the kids all really have specific areas they need help in, and need individual attention. Speaking of more volunteers something happened with the new volunteers passport (something=she does not have it). I’m not quite sure what is up, but she was supposed to be here tomorrow and will now not be here for another 5 days. It’s good that she will still be able to make it, but sad because tomorrow was going to be a fun day. Since the kids are home from school we were going to take a couple of them into East London with us to pick her up, go out to lunch and then Rita was going to have to drop us off at the shore so she could go to a court hearing for some old case related to the home. My life here is never boring or predictable, but it can get a little monotonous, and trust me those things can all exist together. Anyway I was super excited for tomorrow. Rita will probably still have to go into East London tomorrow, but I will most likely not go with her.
Sometimes life can get a little bit lonely here, even though I am constantly surrounded by no less than 30 people and way too much love, everyone I talk to does not speak English or is 2 years old. I haven’t really been homesick at all, the only thing I really miss is having normal/brilliant/hilarious conversations with lovely people who generally understand what I am trying to say the first time around. Also I got to talk to some of my LOVELY friends on Sunday(ish) and it was great and I love y’all.
On a similar note, some of the younger kids still do not understand that I do not know Xhosa. There are a few who come up to me and say such passionate things in a language I do not understand. You can tell that they really want me to understand what they are saying, and cannot comprehend that I might not have a clue. One of them is a little boy named Lisa. He is a manly man and loves to kick and hit and run and jump and mostly hates school. His favorite color is probably pink, because that is the crayon he always chooses, and he sings gospel songs in Xhosa and repeats the line ‘we are going to heaven’ over and over again. That was a tangent, but he is beautiful and constantly tries to say things to me that I do not understand.
And lastly…everything is broken here. No really. We did not have power/water for at least 24 hours. I was talking to Rita when she was trying to get everything fixed and she said ‘It’s always something’ to which I responded ‘…or…everything’. We have been trying to get municipal water for about…a year? And they finally have the pumps all fixed up and everything working. We were super excited and when we started to run the pumps we got…no…water. Because, naturally, the city had run out of water and failed to inform us of this before we drained our reservoir to bring in the municipal water. Naturally. So the pumps were working so hard that they tripped the power and brought us no water all at the same time. Disaster. Anyway the city brought in a truck of water to us yesterday. We might have to start doing things like flushing the toilets once a day and washing dishes twice a day and other such conservation efforts. Oh and once the power came back on the phone lines went out and then Rita’s cell ran out of minutes. Also we found out that someone had shimmied up one of the telephone poles, cut the line and pulled some wires out. Most likely to sell the copper. Naturally. Always something…or everything.

Kb

p.s. Happy birthday Furman, Sarah and Furman, Liz. I was hoping I could at least send you Happy Birthday e-mails, but even the wireless internet has been out the last few days.
p.p.s. I’m going to try and get into some sort of routine where I put up like three posts once a week or one post three times a week. I haven’t decided. Big decisions, big decisions. Also I think I might start writing whole blogs about just one child, because that sounds fun and they are GREAT.