10 Days (well actually now 4) til Xmas…Part II

What can I say…it gets difficult to update this thing all the time.  Let’s see…since Thanksgiving lots of things have been going on.  We had some intense Kinyarwanda training followed by starting up model school.  Now, you don’t know language training until you’ve had 4 hours a day, for 5 days straight of a language which has 16, yes 16, noun classes (in case you didn’t know, English has a grand total of 2).  So that was fun and I felt like I could kind of speak the language after that…until I went out in public and realized, nope, I still have no idea what anyone is saying or how to say anything meaningful besides “I’m a volunteer!”

Ah, such is life.  But then we started up model school.  And model school is 3 weeks of teaching students who are voluntarily coming to school during their summer break.  It gives us a chance to lesson plan and actually try to teach.  We’re teaching in teams of five, each one with a different name of an animal in Rwanda.  My group, Gorillas.  It’s been a good experience to get to practice teaching, seeing what sorts of things fail and what actually works.  Definitely better than just being thrown into the whole teaching game.  That’s been going on for 2 weeks and we just started our 3rd week (and final) week.  That’s model school in a nutshell.

5 Days until Christmas…there’s snow all over the USA and guess what…it “snowed” in Rwanda too!  Yes, that’s right.  Yesterday we went on a nice (but long) field trip to Nyungwe National Park which is a rainforest.  We got to go on a nice little hike of the rainforest, which was beautiful, and then it started raining.  Yeah, it started raining in the Rainforest…go figure. But, we saw monkeys and trees and it was really very enjoyable.  Pictures to come soon.

Next post: Care-Package wishlist.  Full of all sorts of goodies.  I expect to receive random, wonderful packages from many people!