Stage 2 of Culture Shock= Irritability

So before we arrived we were given a lot of information about culture shock and let me tell you I am officially full blown stage 2-irritability. Good news is stage 3 is much better and cant be far away...

I arrived at the school at 930am this morning and got to teach grade 8 about landing on the moon. We had a great time and learned alot of new vocab words. One of which was "overcome" With 5 minutes left in class all the students begged for me to dance... no clue what the obsession with me dancing is here but I get asked constantly. For those of you who have ever seen me dance its not great in fact it is absolutely embarrassingly terrible. However, I told the students what it meant to be shy and said that I was too shy to dance in front of them. One student raised his hand and said "teacher, you must overcome your fear in order to achieve your goals" proudly using his new vocab word. With that I had no option and terrible dancing was next.

After class we had a break and I played volleyball with the kids. My team lost both times which was sad but what can you do. What happened next made me absolutely positive that I never want to go into teaching. I was given nearly 70 children and told to go teach them to play a futbol in the courtyard. 1 ball, 2 goals, no other equipment. No amount of Smith education can prepare me for this situation as I sat there absolutely dumbfounded at how I would control the kids. To make matters worse the boys all played futbol while the girls sat in the shade. Needless to say I failed miserably at teaching and got very little accomplished in the next 90 minutes except for extreme frustration and a lost voice.

Finally the period ended. I went in and helped make some lunch, ate some delicious ugali (mmmmm) and some greens and two small chunks of meet (mmmm meat... never tasted so good before). We then walked back through the farms to get more vegetables for one of the teachers. I was again taken into a home of another teacher who was with me which was very interesting to see, similar set up four massive tin sheets with a couple couches, tv, and a radio. Outside was a car, their 2 cows and a dirt yard.

We got abck to the school, called it a day around 4pm and headed back to do some laundry. It is now pouring rain but hey its the weekend! This weekend I will go see "the slums" which are very densly populated areas where the poorest of the poor in the country live. After on Sunday morning I will go to a church service (which will be in Swahili) then with one of the teachers and her brother to some markets... Should be exciting.

Would love to upload photos soon but I have to get to an internet cafe to do so...

1 more week at the school and then 5 days in a mud hut with the Maasai then HOME on August 10... Hope all is well!