Week 2: Better or Worse, Who Really Knows

It is amazing how different it is to be the one in front of the classroom, rather than the one behind the desk. To be honest it is terrifying. Being the one in charge of fifty learners who are watching every move is more pressure than I think I have ever experienced. Even as an athlete all I was ever responsible was my individual performance. If I screwed up coming off the blocks, or had a bad day keeping pace the only one that ever suffered for it was me. When I walk into that class it’s no longer just about me, it’s about the fifty kids looking up at me expectantly. Unfortunately for them I still have no idea what I am doing. Two weeks in and I have broken up two different fights in my class, and watched a 16 year old boy grab a 12 year old by the back of the head and shove his face into a chalkboard all because he lost at a simple math question. I’ve laughed, cried, yelled, and wanted to rip my hair out. There have been good days, and days that I ask what on earth I got myself into, and this is only week two!!!

Every morning, as I wake with the sun and the evil roosters that sit below my windows and crow, I have to remind myself that today I am at least showing up, which is more than a lot of teachers give them. For at least two hours every day I am there and I try to work with them, and that is something. I have a feeling that this job is going to be about the little things, the little victories that happen every day, and for now most of those victories have to do with me making it to my classes and getting through them. I had no idea what it meant to have control of a classroom until I came here. Kids are sneaky and I feel like they are just waiting for me to misstep. They watch my every move and are ready to go wild the minute I make a mistake. Sometimes I look around my room and all I can see is scenes from Lord of the Flies. It is like I am the last adult alive trying to reign them in, and they are just biding their time until I fall and they can take full control. To be honest it probably isn’t really that bad, but that will be my reoccurring nightmare for the next 19 months.

This week I tried to introduce two different activities into my class. I did my first group assignment, and my first game day. I have no idea if my learners learned anything from these lessons, but I learned three valuable lessons.  Lesson 1, the minute students can’t understand what is happening is when they start acting out and disrupting the rest of the class. I have six boys in my class that have obviously been pushed through the system because no one wants to deal with them. They have serious behavior issues, they are older than the rest of my learners by at least two years, and everyone else in the school has completely given up on them. I discovered this week during my group activity that some of them don’t even know how to spell their own names, let alone how to write numbers correctly. While trying to help some of them through the assignment I watched the way other students interacted with them. They all spoke Xhosa when explaining directions, but when it came to starting on the actual numbers they just stopped trying to explain anything. From primary school on up, numbers are only taught in English, because numbers in the home languages are ridiculously hard. 30 translated to Xhosa is amashumi amathathu, and it only gets worse from there. No one uses numbers in home language, but the learners who can hardly speak any English are completely lost still when it comes to the numbers. Somehow these kids made it all the way to 6^th grade and can’t read any numbers bigger than 100. It’s both shocking and heart breaking, and for someone who has never taught in a classroom before it is extremely overwhelming. Especially when you realize that these kids start talking and messing around when they can’t understand what is happening, which is basically all the time. I can’t even really talk to them about it because they can’t understand what I am saying when we sit down one on one. I totally get it too, because I start doodling when I can’t understand what is being said at staff meetings. I understand where they are coming from, but at the same time I don’t have time to start from the beginning with them, or allow them to disrupt the whole class or cause harm to other learners. It is a vicious cycle!

Lesson 2, competition in this country is taken way too seriously. On Fridays I have decided that I want to play an educational game with the learners. It will allow them the chance to win some prizes, which is a very new concept for them at school, and for them to review and practice some basic math skills that they were never really taught correctly. I divided that classes into four teams based on their seating rows. Each row had to come up with a team name, and then we played Around the World with basic addition flashcards, sent to me by my wonderful mother. The game was played where one learner from team one and two would come to the board. I would show them a card and they would have to write the equation and the correct answer on the board. The first person with everything correct would win a point for their team and remain at the board. Then a player from the next team would come up and the process would continue. You would think that at a grade 5 and 6 level this would be fairly simple and would go pretty quick. Unfortunately 90% of my learners still need to count on their fingers things like 4+5 or 10+2. They were also never taught to add down, so that was interesting to watch. I have never heard so much smack talk and insults during a simple math game in my entire life. Kids were mean! It got to the point where in my grade 6 class they are no longer aloud to talk (yell) during game day. They can now only snap their fingers, or do jazz hands to cheer for their team. It got so out of control that the teacher next door came over to check on me to make sure they weren’t rioting in my class. I have never been so embarrassed in my life. One the bright side, the fact that another teacher came over it gave enough of a pause in the chaos to communicate that what they were doing was unacceptable. It was a learning moment for both me and my learners I think. But I guess we won’t really see how much they really understood of that discussion until this Friday when I try again.

Lesson 3, every day is a new day. It doesn’t seem to matter if Monday went awesome, because Tuesday is a new day, and it might go great or it might be horrible. One day my learners might act like the perfect students and not act out at all, and the next day someone’s face might be shoved into the chalkboard. Some learners are easy to predict, while others are like out of control wildfires, you just never know what way they might turn. One day you might think you’re the best teacher in the world, and the next you just want to wander off and die somewhere. Every day is a battle, I just have to keep reminding myself that this is a battle I chose to fight, and even if I don’t see it, every day might be the day I make an impact on one of the kids sitting in my class. Who knows, maybe that day will be tomorrow.

Surviving Week One

I have officially survived my first week of being a teacher. Obviously they will let anyone in the front of a classroom in Africa, because I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. I don’t know why I thought my two science degrees would prepare me to stand in front of the chalkboard with over 50 pairs of beady little eyes watching my every move, but they didn’t. Never the less, last Wednesday I swallowed my fears and stepped foot in my very first class. At this point I still am unsure how the class actually went. My game plan for the first day was to get the classroom organized, establish my class rules, and have the learners make name tags. Both of my classes have right around 50 learners each, and in the previous years they have been allowed to arrange their desks however they seem to feel like it. Half the learners are looking out the broken windows, while the other half are facing away from the chalkboard. When I discussed having the desks set up in rows with the other teachers they all thought that would be a lot of work, which seemed to outweigh the possible benefits of having all the learners actually facing the front. Regardless of the lack of support from the staff, I decided that in my classes rows would be mandatory and that I would just make the learners move their desks every day for my class. Based on what the other teachers had said I was expecting some resistance from the learners, but as I started to wave my arms in the air attempting to demonstrate how to move their desks, they were pretty quick to react. Within no time I could actually walk around the class and when up front I could easily spot the kids turning to watch the dogs and chickens running around the grounds. In my mind I thought this was a small victory, I mean obviously the learners could understand me if they were able to so easily move all their desks the way that I wanted them, right?

Well that victory was short lived, because not one learner said a single word for the next 40 minutes, literally not a single word. Peace Corps told us multiple times that it would be a good idea to make our class rules with our learners, so that they were involved in the process. Great idea, unless the learners are just watching you like deer in headlights. I couldn’t even get them to shake their heads yes or no. to be honest it was kind of freaking me out. I don’t think I could sit still for 40 minutes without saying anything, but these kids did it like pros. The grade 5 class was the exact same way. They moved the desks without a problem, and then sat like statues for the remainder of the time. So in the end I just made the rules. There are only four, so they should be easy to remember, be respectful, be responsible, try, and have fun. I figured that those would basically encompass everything that I wanted in my class, even though it took me a while to go over that be respectful also meant no fighting, listen when I’m talking or other learners are talking, and so on. Whether or not they understood a single thing I said is still uncertain. At that point I decided it was time to do nametags, because at least if they were coloring they would stop looking at me for a little bit. I used colored paper and crayons, courtesy of my amazing friends and family back home, to let them decorate their own nametags. To my disappointment they were a lot less enthusiastic about it than I thought they would be. These kids never get the chance to use art supplies so I thought they would be really excited about the chance to draw, however, I kind of got the impression they only thought it was appropriate to write their names and turn the crayons back in. I tried to convince them that they could draw pictures on the paper as well, but again I’m not sure how much they understood. Fortunately, I was able to drag that out until the periods were over, meaning that I survived day one. It was the quietest first day of school I have ever seen.

Day two was a different story. Apparently the newness of me being in the front of the classroom had already worn off before school started on the second day. The day started with eight of the 18 teachers at my school being absent. This was a pretty common occurrence during the three months I was observing at the school, but I expected that it would take a few weeks of the new school year before teachers just stopped coming. Obviously I can’t assume anything here in Africa, and by the second day the school was back to mad chaos. If teachers don’t come to school that means that their class period is just unsupervised and most of the time the learners are running around like wild animals. When the majority of the windows are broken in the classrooms it makes it pretty hard to hear anything, let alone control your own class when there are at least 100 learners right outside. So on top of dealing with the huge amount of distractions, I also had to teach the grade 6 class for two hours in a row. According to the new curriculum math and home language are to be taught for six hours each week. This means that once a week I have the same class for two hours. Since I was given the responsibility of creating this year’s timetable, I was able to schedule the classes so that on those days I had an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. Unfortunately this past Thursday did not work out that way. My HOD needed to leave early for some reason, so she asked to change periods with me. This forced it so that I would have two hours with grade 6 back to back with a 10 minute break in between. Bring on the chaos.

My first period with the grade 5 class went great. I had to use candy to bribe them to participate, but once they started talking and realized I wouldn’t yell at them if they got the wrong answer (common at my school) they seemed excited to at least try. After that I had a lot more optimism going into my two hours with grade 6. I planned to teach for the first hour, and have them do an activity during the second hour that pertained to the lesson. Everything was going fine until the beginning of the second hour. Right after all the learners came back in from break three boys in the back decided to start throwing punches over possibly the ugliest hat I have ever seen. One kid took the hat, the other threw a punch, and then a friend jumped in on the action. All three of these boys are at least the same size I am, if not bigger. It is very common in South African schools to have learners in their late teens still in elementary grades. All three of these boys are 16 and are still in grade 6. They might not understand how to do multiplication, but they sure know how to fight, and to be honest I was not very excited about trying to jump in there and break it up. Luckily, I apparently have a pretty intimidating mean voice (thanks dad) and once the rest of the class realized I was super pissed off, some of the other boys helped me pull them apart. Based on how everyone else in the class was watching me, I think they were waiting for me to go get the discipline stick from the staffroom. Fortunately for them that is not how I handle issues, but rather spent the next 10 minutes making it as clear as I possibly could that this is my classroom and that I will not tolerate fighting of any kind. I’m not really sure how that talk went, but after two other boys got called out for making snide comments in the back, no one said anything else for the remainder of the day. While the class was completing their worksheet about multiple digit numbers, I pulled all five boys out and informed them they owed me their lunch period the next day. I highly doubted that they would actually come, but in an attempt to not let them walk all over me, I decided I would give it a try.

The next day I was pleasantly surprised to find all five boys in the class with their heads hanging in shame. I decided that rather than make them spend the whole lunch period with me, I would just talk to them for a few minutes. I have never heard people say yes ma’am so many times. We had a nice little chat about the consequences for fighting, and how I had saved three of them from getting suspended for a week, which is what the HOD wanted to do. I convinced the principal that having them miss a whole week was pretty severe for their first offence, and would also put them pretty far behind right from the beginning. At that point the boys seemed to be a little more receptive of what I was saying. It is common for parents to come to my school when their child has gotten in trouble, and the parents will then beat them for it on school grounds. I would guess that being suspended the first week of school for fighting, especially in my class, would have earned them a pretty severe beating, and they all knew it. That was when the yes ma’am’s started, and everyone was very cooperative from that point on.

When I first came to Africa I envisioned being everyone’s best friend. I wanted all my students to love me and be super excited for my class. After dealing with the fight on Thursday I was pretty discouraged because it was only the second day of school! How on earth was I going to handle a year 198 more days of this craziness. After email venting with my dad and a few others I was reminded that in the beginning you sometimes have to lay down the law before you can be the nice teacher. So maybe it’s good that I have a “scary mean voice” in order to keep kids in line while I try to figure out what the hell I am doing!

Durban 2012 Photos

In-Service Training

 At the end of November we were finally able to leave site and head back into society for two weeks of in-service training. You better believe that all I wanted to do was take about a million showers and eat some food that I didn’t have to cook on my two burner hot plate. While that did happen, I also had to attend about eight hours of training each day, which was not all that exciting at times. A large part of the training was focused toward our school and community counterparts that were to accompany us for specific parts of the training sessions. The first few days were to be spent with our principals, then a few days with a teacher, then a few days with our HIV/AIDS education counterpart, and finally a few days with just our fellow volunteers.

Of course all of my counterparts had been informed weeks in advance about the dates and times that they needed to be at the different venues, but here it is apparently socially acceptable to have a change of plans the day before a prepaid event. Like my Thanksgiving experience, my principal decided the day before we were to leave for the principal’s workshop that he “just didn’t want to go”. Not only was I now out of a ride to the hotel that was two hours away, but the whole point of the workshop was to have the volunteers and the principals together to discuss issues the volunteers were having, and to sit down and plan the first term of school. However, that obviously wasn’t high on my principal’s priority list, so he had made arrangements earlier in the week to send the head of the department instead. Of course no one could tell me this until the day before, so I spent most of the time I was supposed to be packing on the phone with Peace Corps staff trying to figure out how to change reservations. To say I was pissed would be a huge understatement!

My mood drastically increased when we finally made it to the hotel the next day and I realized we were basically staying on the beach in the nicest three bedroom flats that I had ever seen, and we were right next to a real coffee shop. Score!!! Three vanilla lattes later, I was prepared to hang out with people who spoke fluent English, and who understood the struggles of transitioning to a village life. The stories that first night were epic. In some villages people were being stabbed, other schools had teachers that would leave in the middle of the day and never come back. Basically we decided that nothing in South Africa made any sense, and all of us were dealing with the same crap in a different village. Surprisingly this made me feel a lot better, and a lot less alone. However, I did learn that I was the only one at the workshop who didn’t have their principal, which made me feel a little awkward. Fortunately we all spent as little time with our supervisors as possible, so that worked in my favor.

After day one it became very apparent that our counterparts were not used to nine hour work days. We were usually in sessions starting at 8am and went until 3pm or 4pm with an hour break for lunch. There were also two 30 minute tea breaks throughout the day, so compared to an American work schedule it wasn’t that bad. However, you could slowly see the teachers start to fall asleep around 10am. Once the majority of the counterparts were asleep it was lunch time, and after lunch many of them seemed to disappear altogether. It was crazy. You could tell that many of them saw this as an opportunity to go to a nice hotel for a few days and enjoy some free food and place to stay. Unfortunately this made both the volunteers and the session leaders extremely angry, but what are you going to do?

For the most part the sessions were about different projects that we can do in our villages. We had sessions on Grassroot Soccer that combines soccer skills with HIV education, which I am planning on doing in my village. We also had sessions that pertained to the areas that we will be teaching in less than a month. Since I am focusing on teaching math I was able to attend sessions on things like how to teach fractions (something that kids here really struggle with), how to start mathletes, and how to use soccer (Africa’s favorite sport) to teach basic math skills. Those sessions were all very helpful and a valuable use of our time. Then there were the sessions on harassment and corporal punishment. These sessions were extremely stressful to sit through with our counterparts. For the most part they would just laugh at us when we talked about why sexual harassment and corporal punishment bothered us. When we discussed different ways to discipline kids the teachers would just shake their heads and act like they weren’t listening. When the female volunteers, including myself, talked about the issues we are having with sexual harassment even in our schools counterparts would make comments about how we just needed to deal with it, and that there was nothing they could do to help us. These sessions seemed to just make everyone mad and extremely annoyed, which seemed to make for good conversation once the volunteers were alone without the counterparts.

Overall it was just nice to be able to have some time with Americans, and to complain to people that could really understand what we are going through in our villages and school. To be honest we spent most of the time bitching about things that we have no control over, but that make our service harder. After three months at site it was very therapeutic to have a two week bitch fest!  

An African Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving in Africa, not exactly the same as it is at home, but it was a fun experience. This year my area leader, Chad, decided that it would be fun to invite all of our principals to his site for a traditional American Thanksgiving feast. Being away from home during the holidays can be tough, so all of the volunteers were excited to be able to have a little taste of home, and to spend some quality time with people that actually spoke fluent English. Inviting our principals to experience an American holiday was a nice idea, but really it was just a ruse to get our principals to drive us all out to Chad’s site so we wouldn’t have to navigate the taxi situation. Chad’s site is in a beautiful mountain location, but from my site you have to take three different taxis to get there, which becomes a serious problem when you are traveling after school. So the principals were invited to share our turkey extravaganza, and then were expected to head home so that the Americans could hang out and head to the beach the next day for the Kwa-Zulu Natal Provincial Conference put on by the Volunteer Support Network. In theory it was a great plan, but this is Africa, and nothing here seems to go the way that you want it to.

The first blunder on my way to African Thanksgiving was that my principal didn’t really want to go. This has been a reoccurring problem for me, but we will talk more about that issue later. So the Wednesday before Thanksgiving I was called into his office to discuss the logistics of making the hour car ride to the dinner. It took some time, but finally I convinced him that I needed him to take me because I probably wouldn’t make it before the taxis stopped running, and that it would look bad because he would be the only principal not there. This last part was of course a lie, but appearances here mean everything, so he couldn’t have it look like he doesn’t care about his volunteer. The next day I was packed and ready to go see some other white people, but of course we had to make a little stop in town at the local gas station. Little did I know we were picking up more than a full tank of gas. Turns out that my principal decided to invite a friend to our little dinner party so that he “wouldn’t have to drive back alone”. The already awkward car ride just got a whole lot weirder since I had to try and explain what Thanksgiving was to a complete stranger while at the same time texting my fellow volunteers to let them know there would be a random guest at dinner. Once we got to dinner I was hoping things would be a little less awkward, but they weren’t. My principal and his friend sat in the parking lot for the majority of the time they were there talking and smoking while I went inside to escape. They did finally make it inside right before dinner was being served, because no one in Africa would ever pass up a free meal.

Things got a little weird again when it came time to serve the food. In order to make sure that there was enough food for everyone, the volunteers served their guests. In South Africa men are always served first, and the women do not sit down until everyone else is eating. Being a female and having two male guests it seemed like I was playing right into the gender roles that are common here, and the ‘friend’ decided that since I served him once, that meant I was his personal server for the rest of the night. When he wanted more meat he told me, when he wanted pie he told me, when he wanted a drink he told me, and by the end of the night I was not having it anymore. Of course since I had no idea who this random person was I didn’t not feel that I was in any position to tell him no, so eventually I just stopped coming back to the table. Luckily for me they decided to leave right after they had finished all of their food, so I was finally able to relax and enjoy some delicious American food with friends. It still wasn’t the same as spending the holiday with my family, but for Africa it was more than I expected. 

Observations from the Staff Room

As a child I always wondered what it would be like if life was like a musical. Wouldn’t it be great if people just randomly broke out into songs that everyone around them somehow knew? Everyone in Disney movies always looks like they are having so much fun as they run around town singing and dancing their cheery little songs. What Disney failed to show were all the people standing on the streets that had to listen to them singing for hours on end while all they wanted to do was get some work done. My staff room is like a musical sometimes, and it makes me want to bash my head against the table until I can’t hear the singing any more. When I first arrived at site I thought it was so cool when they stared singing, mostly because I thought they were doing it for me to show some of their culture. Now I realize that it is their way of putting off their paperwork for a few…hours. You can’t grade papers when you are singing and dancing around the room. While I am still impressed that everyone in the room, besides me, knows the words to every song that someone starts, and the same dance moves, I have realized that 15 people singing at the top of their lungs in a room just big enough to seat said 15 people my ears want to burst after the first song. This past week my school started their end of the year exams. They do it a little different than we do back in the US, and it turns out that here they end up having a lot of down time, that is therefore filled by song and dance. Each day the learners take one exam between 9am and 11am. After that they are free to go while the teachers remain at school until the end of the day. Apparently as long as the teachers are at school for the full day, it still counts as a full day of school even though the learners aren’t there. So the hours between 11am and 2:35pm have turned from a time to grade papers to a time to sing until you can’t sing anymore. To say I am a bit annoyed would be putting it lightly. As much as I love a good Glee episode, I will probably kill someone if I come home to find that it is now appropriate to break out in song and dance back in the US.

In my endless hours hanging out in the staff room over the last few weeks I have also discovered that we have a very different view of food in the United States than here is South Africa. I cannot count the number of times that I have been told I don’t eat enough. On Thursday I brought a container of scrambled eggs with mushrooms, onions, and zucchini, as well as two apples for lunch. I usually eat an apple around 10am, my main lunch at 11:30am, and another apple close to 2pm. After being told the previous day that I need to eat more, I tried to take note of what the other teachers are throughout the day. This is what I observed of one teacher, but the others were all pretty similar. 8:30am, tea (with 3 HUGE spoons of sugar!) with 8 slices of bread with butter. No joke, she ate 8 slices of white bread like it was nothing. 10am, a serving size bowl of rice topped with a mystery meat stew with a side of creamed spinach. The schools make lunch for all the learners every day, and most of the teachers end up eating a serving that is about triple the size of what the learners get. Noon: more tea with lots of sugar and 4 fat cakes. Fat cakes are a favorite of the teachers at my school, and are basically deep fried dough balls. They are about the size of my fist and are pretty similar to elephant ears but without the sugar and cinnamon. 2pm: more tea and sugar and one apple. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I had noticed that people here ate way more than I did, but I never realized exactly how much more, and how much of what they were eating was carbs until I really watched. I now see how they thing my egg scramble and two apples isn’t very much food, but watching someone eat basically the whole loaf of bread in one sitting makes me want to throw up rather than eat more.

For the most part, the staff room is where people go to either eat, or sing, sometimes eat and sing at the same time. There are a few teachers that seem to use their free periods to actually grade homework and exams, but they are few and far between. This week I offered to help grade the math exams that the learners just took so that I could get an idea of where they were at before I start teaching in January. I graded what I could while at school and trying to focus over the Congo line that was taking place around the table, and then I took what I didn’t finish home. The next day teachers were shocked that I not only took work home with me, but that I had finished grading 54 exams by the next day (to be honest it wasn’t that hard seeing as the majority of every exam was blank, but it still took a few hours). When I explained that in the US it is very common for people to take work home with them, one of my teachers asked me if we ever sleep. Apparently it is unheard of for someone to grade their exams by the next day, and no one seemed all that pleased that I was able to complete the impossible. My first reaction was to make a snarky comment about how they would be amazed how much you can get done when you shut up and focus, but luckily I was able to hold my tongue. I have noticed that my sarcastic sense of humor isn’t understood here so I am betting that my snarky comments would just get me in trouble. As much as I really like most of the staff here, I have a feeling over the next two years I am going to become really good at smiling but tuning people out at the same time.  

Random Learning Experiences

Random things I have learned in South Africa.

11.      Cockroaches might possibly be the creepiest bugs on the planet. They are huge for a bug, they are ridiculously fast, they can crawl up walls, and it is basically impossible to kill them. I sprayed on with Doom (the most powerful bug spray I have ever seen) and then smashed it with my flip flop and the next morning it was trying to escape the trash bag! I never understood why people always said cockroaches will be the only things to survive nuclear war, but now I get it.

22.      Doing laundry by hand totally sucks. One, it takes forever. Two, how are your clothes ever supposed to dry when it rains for three weeks straight? It doesn't matter if you hang them randomly all over your room, when it is cold they start smelling like mildew before they ever dry and then you just have to wash them all over again. Three, it hurts. By the time you are done scrubbing all your clothes in a bucket you have no skin left on your knuckles. By the time I leave in two years I am going to have super scary old lady looking hands, and the only way to prevent it is to wear dirty clothes for two years.

Random side note: the first time I did laundry in my rural village my host mom told me that it was not appropriate for me to wash my underwear all at once. Apparently I’m supposed to wash each pair every morning after my bucket bath. I’m not gonna lie, I am way too lazy to do that seeing as I already wake up at 5:30 am to take my bucket bath, so I now have to wash all my underwear in my room in secret, which makes me feel strangely scandalous.

33.      Public transportation in a 3^rd world country is the scariest thing I have ever experienced. The cars that we are crammed in are so old that I’m worried they will fall apart if we hit a bump. Even if there are seat belts  there are so many people shoved into one seat that you wouldn't possible be able to use them, and all the gogos (grandmothers) would look at you like you are crazy. On my last taxi ride I was stuffed in the back between two very very large women, who were both enjoying a meal of fried chicken and fries while we were waiting for the taxi to fill. By the time they driver got enough people in the back to be satisfied I was basically buried between peoples bags and the arms of the ladies next to me. Honestly riding on these taxis makes me want to go on a serious diet, because maybe if I was thinner I would have a little more breathing room. Then when I really think about it, it probably wouldn't help, because the gogos here are sadly extremely overweight, and even if I lost 20lbs I would still come out of the taxi feeling like I had been crushed.

44.      Being able to saw is an extremely useful skill. Hand washing clothes is not a gentle process, and eventually they start to fall apart at the seams. Luckily, if you had an amazing mom growing up who taught you the basics of sawing (thanks mom!!!) you don’t have to spend your small Peace Corps allowance on new clothes! I ripped my favorite pair of yoga pants my fist week at site and almost started crying. Then I remembered I had black thread in my little sawing kit and I stitched those yoga pants right up. I only brought one pair, so I would have not been a happy camper if they were ruined.

55.      Fridays will forever be renamed Fat Fridays in my book. Fridays are the only day that I get to go into town and go grocery shopping. It is also the only day that I am able to meet up with the closest volunteer to me. When you only go to the store once a week, and you have to be able to carry all of your groceries back home on the taxis, you really narrow down what you buy. This basically means that I have gotten really good at buying only the essentials, and forgo the snack foods I used to buy back home. I have my weekly shopping list, and I never buy anything that is not on that list. For someone who loves having snack foods, this has made for a rough transition during the week. So my friend Krista and I have decided that when we meet in town every Friday we are going to indulge on the things we don’t have during the week before we get all of our groceries. This has translated into going to KFC (the only restaurant in town) and getting milkshakes and fries, and then getting a bar of chocolate at the store. I think that if we are pretty much eating rice, oats, and vegetables 6 days a week, going all out one day won’t kill us. We have also become friends with the people working at the local KFC, and they always seem very excited to see us, so we wouldn't want to disappoint our new friends by eliminating Fat Friday.