Well it is Thursday and we are back at the cafe because our house internet is down.

We have been at our placement for three days now. It is really fun but also exhausting. We get there at 8 and we sit in one big room and play with the kids until everyone has arrived. After this we stay in the room to sing songs and they also do a chanting thing and then they pray.

The songs they sing are all in English and familiar but they are hilariously reinterpreted by the teachers. For example, "old macka donalda" and "brown cow, brown cow have you any milk? Yes sir yes sir for jack and jill" haha. It makes me laugh.

The chanting I mentioned is sort of like

teacher: "Who is our father"
students:"God is our father"
teacher:"Who is Satan (said saaaaatane)
students: "Saaaatane is bad!"

This goes on for awhile then we pray. During this time the kids are just surrounding and playing with us. Touching our hands, holding our hands, playing with our toys, and hair, and eyes, and nose, and really anything. The teachers started yelling at them and making them move away from us for playing with our hair-I did not care they love playing and touch it but I for some reason we are still unaware of that is very frowned upon at Bridge.

The kids are really sweet, they all wear uniforms and they all love to take a big lick off their hands or wipe their snotty, snotty noses and then hold our hands! This is something I am still getting used to, of course we let them do it but it definitely doesnt settle well in my mind. I have decided showering will commence after we get home from the placements.

The teachers at our placements are sweet and seem happy to have us there but a language barrier is something we are struggling a little bit with. While we can understand what to do to help they sometimes just will say "teacha, teach!" I am assuming that they think because we are volunteering and that CCS put us at a school, and because we are american that we are teachers.

Welllllll little do they no I have NO idea what to do. They always ask me for songs, the only ones Kasey and I have come up with are the baby shark song (and they dont know what sharks are-I drew them for tomorrow art lesson so they can see) and Jesus loves the little children.

I guess I need to clarify. The shchool actually has three rooms-little, medium, and big sized kids as they explained. Kasey has been in the little room where she says the teacher has no clue what to do with the kids but she helps feed them poridge at the approrpriate times and her class plays a lot so she is good at playing soccer wtih them and she has also tried teaching a bit too.

I am in the big classroom. My main job is to walk around during lessons with the eraser and a red pen. The kids will scribble on their page and all at the same time be screaming "teacha arahaba" which is for eraser. I was more stern today about hte scribbling and yelling. I also do one on one with them during this time because they are all actually very intelligent they just sometimes need an extra bit of help.

The two favorites-if I can say that- are in the front row at the table in front of my chair (like my desk haha) Gerald and Sabra. They are the smartest in the class and I love working with them to teach them other ways. For example, the kids add with bottle caps. So if the equation is 5+3 they put aside 5 bottle caps and then 3 bottles caps and then combine them and recount to get the answer. I taught Gerald and Sabra to count on their fingers like that. Small steps!

After our placements we have cultural learning in the afternoons-like when we went to the hospital. Yesterday we went to an orphanage. Heartbreaking. We mostly played with the young ones (under a year) but even then they just seemed so excited to be playing wtih people.

After we had about 10 minutes with the older children. They swarmed us and we played but leaving was hard.

We are both having amazing experiences. I am trying to post more pictures as we speak. We have one of the school room and kids from Bridge, one of our room at the home base and if the third and fourth work or I have time it will be of our Mount Kilimanjaro view (its not always visible they say "the majesty is shy she only shows herself sometimes", the little girl Brenda-the little girl from across the street, and one of Kasey with some of the children from Bridge. She is full of life and always there to play and greet us. Beautiful.

But that is all I have for now. Hopefully the internet will be working at the home base again soon.