For not being very busy, I haven’t been finding much spare time. Yesterday was one of those days where you blink and it’s over. Pretty normal morning; woke up with some stretching and a news podcast, then a nice breakfast. Abby (a school teacher taken in and living with Lucas) and I were quite late arriving to school for the bus route. Abby has been my route companion for the past few weeks, taking me along in the morning and the two after school routes, but I think it’s beneficial for her because if she doesn’t want to go she can take the day off because I’ll be there. Our purpose is to make sure the kids are safe getting on, inside and getting off the bus, but in reality we are just doormen, opening and closing and ushering.
We got to school a bit after 8:15 (15 minutes past the start time of 8:00) but classes don’t tend to begin until 8:30ish anyways so we were fine. Every morning the kids have porridge for breakfast and it’s funny because I used to join them and only this morning I noticed that I hadn’t been taking any. There is this one young boy, maybe 4 or 5, who either has some cognitive issue or is extremely malnourished and it was about the point when I started escorting him from the bus to porridge then to class that I stopped drinking it myself. But anyways, my new buddy is super cute, maybe today I’ll get a picture of/with him.
I started my day off waiting to meet with the head teacher so he could give me my daily schedule. The waiting took a while and when I finally saw him he didn’t have anything for me to do. I was glad of this; I had to organize the computer rooms for Riveting Results because we were splitting the 70 kid class into two 35 kid classes (a new room had finished being equipped with power and desks). I spent about 2 hours doing that before breakfast. I’m really enjoying the morning black tea and a few slices of plain bread that we have every morning. After break the head teacher, Pius, found me and said he needed me to teach his English class because he had some meetings he wanted to do. I read some poems and asked some questions and the kids did a lot of copying notes. At lunch I learned that the school time table (class schedule) had been altered in the morning—as it tends to do—and all my time organizing for the days RR program was for not.
The most important event of the day was organizing these 5 kids to introduce them to Global Story Bridge (GSB)—the program Maggie and Sarah introduced to hope two weeks back. What was intriguing to me is that these kids were picked because they are in relatively unfortunate circumstances; they either suffer from poor grades or their families aren’t well-off or both. And this is interesting to me because the program will require the parents to pay a bit more in school fees for them to attend GSB on Saturdays and so when we asked the parents later in the evening about having their kids join, many (as I had expected) were reluctant and said no. So now we have to find some more kids, but this will be good. We need more than 5 anyways.
The two evening routes were great. They went quicker than normal because some kids were out sick and a few parents had come to pick up their kids directly from school. In between the two routes I was able to play some guitar in the music room. It’s been a while since I’ve had time to practice and I missed it quite a bit. Yesterday when we finished the evening remedial route, Abby, Praygood (the driver) and I got some ice cream on the way home. I think it’s going to become a bit of a routine, but I don’t know how I feel about it; I’ve been eating so healthy here and I don’t want to ruin those habits with a daily ice cream bar. At home Jovin and Rebecca were “doing homework” which consists of looking at their books for 30 seconds then getting distracted for 15 minutes with something else. I went to get ready for bed pretty early but didn’t fall asleep until 10:30 or 11:00 because I was so addicted to my book.