That music I thought was just a party going on next door actually goes on every night. At least it's fairly good music. Not my choice for bedtime music, but not bad. Stuff like the Beetles or Kelly Clarkson usually. Not much heavier than that. I'm used to listening to music as I try to fall asleep, so that's actually helpful since it's not bad music. (My definition of bad music is music in which the lyrics consist of mostly swear words or derogatory terms/ideas). Unfortunately, the volunteers usually stay out later, so I hear them come in at all hours, meaning I don't get to sleep until the wee hours of the morning. Then, I'm up at 05:30-06:00 because the sun wakes up then, and I wake up with the sun. I'm a little tired of being tired.
At least I was productive, though. Since we're still waiting on the letters for us to go into Busua schools and teach, I read a book or two, and started on that series, The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo. I've never read it before, but someone had donated all three of them to TOB, so I started reading them. I found them when I decided to organize the bookshelf upstairs. (There's a bookshelf upstairs for the people in the house and one downstairs for the after school program). The one upstairs was in disarray - books laying sideways, no real order to the piles, different sizes all mixed up together, and it was nearly impossible to tell what books they had or didn't have. It bothered me, so I fixed it.
Apparently, organizing the shelf was Anthony's job. All the kids in the house have their own project to work on, and Anthony's was the bookshelves upstairs and downstairs. Anyway, I had the books organized by genre, then alphabetical by two different sizes, due to the shelves being only tall enough on one shelf for the smaller books. It looked pretty by the time I was done, I thought. That was how I found the trilogy to read, since I hadn't noticed it before. Anthony didn't mind I organized the shelf, but Aankit told me to make sure if I did anything else around the house to be sure to do it with one of the sponsored kids. Volunteers are there for the kids, so we should try to include them in as much as possible. Makes sense, and I tried to do that the rest of the time I was there.
Getting ready for after school, I started to get scared about teaching Monday. I didn't really have much experience teaching young kids, and I'd figured out by now that English was not a strong language for most of the people in the town. I didn't know how I was supposed to approach the class, what I was supposed to say, or anything about what to do. Kathryn and I started chatting, and she's scared too. We sort of decided we'd try to write songs on the board and teach the kids them, starting with the alphabet, since Aankit told us to focus on letters and their sounds for the KG classrooms. I think we both felt better knowing that not even Aankit knew exactly what to do.
After school on Fridays is a big game for everyone. The Busua schools don't do much on Fridays. It's generally physical education, music, and games all day, so the kids are used to Fridays not being academic. Apparently, TOB hasn't challenged that in the after school program, so we had out coloring books, board games, building blocks, and puzzles for the kids to play with in the afternoon. I tried to make the group I was playing with play something that would be educational, and I succeeded for about 10 minutes, but then they went off. At first, they had this bag of 18 dice, 9 colors, 2 of each color. There were 6 of them at my table, so I had them all count the dice, and the people, then split up the dice so each had the same number of dice. (Division, sort of). After that, I asked them to add the numbers on the faces that showed when they rolled them. Some of the kids seemed to like this game, but most of them walked away as soon as I asked them to do math. It was disappointing, but I recognized that they're not used to Friday being a learning day. Eventually, I lost all my kids to football games or drawing. So, I started building with Legos with a couple of boys who came over with a bag of them. It was fun, and I think they're learning balance/center of gravity for building a tall tower, so I felt it was successful. It's draining though. I felt like I could sleep forever when we were done.
I went for a legitimate swim afterward, and that was my first time swimming in the ocean that I remember. I'd gone in it yesterday, but didn't swim. The water is nice, not too cold, but definitely refreshing. It's strong though. Like really strong. The waves are, on average, about 6 feet tall, and the undertow is almost as strong as the waves themselves are. You don't realize how big the waves are really until you actually get into the water and try to stand in them as they're coming at you. There's a little rocky island about a mile away from the beach, and I want to swim to it. After the waves, about an eighth of the way to the island, the water looks calm and manageable. I'm not guessing there are sharks or completely dangerous animals, since people kayak out to the island quite a bit, apparently. After I got back, I asked Aankit if he knew whether it was safe to swim out to the island or not. He told me I should take someone with me, just in case, but it should be safe.
I showered, which is a light trickle of water coming down from the pipe sticking out of the wall, and got cleaned up. Kathryn and Emmanuel were heading out into Busua for something, so I went with them. I saw this cool little kiosk that was selling bags and hand purses. I hadn't brought a purse, and I was figuring out that if I wanted to carry anything, I would need a small bag. So, I found a purse and got it. My first experience haggling by myself in Ghana. It was actually kind of fun. :) Then, it was time to head back for News Hour. On the way back, Kathryn saw a kid catch a chicken for dinner and walk back toward his house with it. She started whining and making little squealing noises and feeling sorry for the chicken. I told her if she had a problem with it, she should just not eat the meat. She can see all the animals before they die around in the streets. She said no, she just didn't want to see it get killed.
I still can't understand much during News Hour because of the British accent, but the discussion centered around various economies around the world, so I'm guessing that was a focus of the news tonight. Then, Anthony and I worked on catologuing the bookshelf I'd organized. We needed to write down all the titles and authors for the house records. We got through the non-fiction, short stories, and poetry books, which consists of the first shelf. Then, we were both tired. I went in to the bedroom to relax and chill before bed. I ended up thinking about how the children here are different from the kids back in the US. Like in what ways they're different. And, noticing that they're more similar than different. Cool how that works, isn't it?
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