Today was Sabbath.  A year ago, on a day like today, I would get and get ready for church.  I would worry about what I should wear.  What we were going to do later that afternoon. I would be trying to get together the things that I was bringing for the potluck and wondering when my group of friends was going to decide whose house we were eating at and then what adventure we would be having that afternoon. 

Meet Obama. (Yes, that really is his name.)

            Today, however, was a different story.  Today I sat through church with a stranger in my lap.  Today I held a little one through church while he slept peacefully in my lap.  Today, I was not worried about what the person sitting next to me in the pew might be thinking.  Today, I was worried about whose little boy I was holding.  I was wondering if he is getting enough to eat.  I was worried that this little boy has someone to love him.  He was so hungry for attention, always wanting to be held.   I was thinking how can I really be making a difference here?  I held this little boy for a few hours.  I loved him for a few hours.

            Being here at Maxwell it’s sometimes easy to forget that I am living in a third world country.  We have it so nice inside the walls on our little hill overlooking the city.  But step outside the walls and there are children who are malnourished.  There are real people whose homes are being washed away by the rains this spring.  There is real poverty like many people in the states have never seen. 

I have a friend that always quotes to me that. “Life often beings right outside your comfort zone.”  I have found that to be true.  But I have also found that its also joy that begins outside your comfort zone.  Nothing makes me happier than being with these children who have next to nothing, but truly have everything.  They are willing to give so much love to anyone who will pay them any attention.  They find such joy in the simplest things.  Back home, we have it good.  We have it so easy.  But I think that we are missing the point.  What are the things that you are worried about today?  Are they things that really matter in the long run?  Why do we lack the joy that these children have?

I think that there are probably a lot of missionaries that could relate to what I am saying.  We come out to make a difference in peoples’ lives.  But really, the life that we change is our own.  I may only have a few hours with a particular child or, in some cases, a few months.  But it’s enough.  The small moments and the little things are the things that make the biggest difference.  I may not be doing a lot to change the world.  But maybe I can change the world for one child.  I am doing what I can, and in the process I find that I am the one changed.    

6 Weeks

           Its late.  I should be sleeping.  I have classes to teach in the morning.  But I cannot get to sleep.  My mind just keeps spinning.  Six weeks left.  Six weeks and I will be boarding a plane and flying back to the States.  Flying home.  But leaving home.  What is it going to be like when I get back?  I am heading right back to camp.  Camp has been home.  Then I am headed back to Tennessee.  Tennessee has been home.  But what will it be now? 

            I am registered for classes this fall.  I am set up to have an apartment in Southern Village with three other girls.  I am starting to look into lining up a job for the fall.  But how do I go from being the full-time teacher to being the full-time student?  How do I go from being an adult, responsible for so many kids back to being just a college student responsible for only me?   

            My students are so much of my world right now.  I cannot walk anywhere without having at least one of my kids calling out hello to me.  I have girls that will turn around and run back to school if they forgot to give me a hug on their way out the door.  I have kids that bring me flowers on a regular basis.  Almost every time I leave the house, there are some of my students in my guava tree trying to get the fruit that is currently in season.  If I am not in school with my kids, I am grading their papers or working on lesson plans or reading books about how to help them better. 

            In just six weeks, I am leaving everything that has become home to head back to what has always been home.  There are many things that I am so excited about!  But so many things I dread leaving.  I want these last few weeks to go so quickly but at the same time, there is just not enough time.  

April 10, 2013

I’m not sure what second graders talk about in the U.S. but today during art class the conversation I was listening in on was about the different countries my students were born in.  This lead to a discussion in which one second grader was explaining to the other that the U.S. and the U.K. are not the same place.  This is just one of the joys of working at a school with so much diversity!

The weeks have really been flying by, although sometimes days seem to take forever.  I have been staying very busy trying to figure out how to stay on top of all my kids in four different grades.  Every day, I am sure that I learn more than my kids.  Some days go really well!  My lessons flow well and they make sense.  The kids are engaged and they really seem to be getting it.  However, other days I really struggle just to get through with my sanity intact.  The lessons just do not go the way I planned.  The kids are not getting it.  The Internet is down (again) and so I am not able to show the video I planned to show.  My kids are all excited about something and so it is difficult to get them to focus.

In second grade right now we are working on writing descriptions.  Last week, I brought in some apples.  We made charts talking about what we saw, felt, smelled, felt, and tasted as we cut up the apples and ate them.  While we were doing this, the comment from one of my second graders was that I am a very strange teacher, but that they liked it.  After we were finished, the kids took their charts and wrote a paragraph description of their apple. 

This week for science we are talking about fossils.  So I made some clay and brought it with me to class. We took some leaves and pressed them into the clay making our own “fossils” and then talked about how fossils are made.  Later, one of the kids came up to me and told me that she was going to bury her plant.  I was a little confused what she was talking about at first.  It took a minute for the light bulb to turn on.  I asked if she was trying to make a fossil and she said yes.

At one point today one of my girls was reading in the loft.  She comes down and starts pointing to a word in the book that she was reading.  By the time I was able to get her to hold the book still so that I could read the word we were both laughing. She was excited because it was a word that she has found in the dictionary that morning as part of her vocabulary.  I think that one of the most exciting things about teaching is seeing my kids take the things that they are learning and apply them to their lives.

One last story.  As I am sitting here writing this there are four of my students outside playing in the playhouse.  I keep hearing my name as they are out their and so I go out to see what is going on.  They are playing that they are school teachers.  One of the girls is Melissa and the other is Katie (the other elementary teacher here).  The other girls are their students.  

So much has gone on since the last time that I posted that I am not really sure where to start.  Some of the big news would be that we climbed Mt. Kenya!  The last weekend in February we took twelve of the high school students and climbed Mt. Kenya.  The trip was a total of five days.  On Sunday we drove to the Mt. Kenya National Park and hiked in to the first camp.  We stayed there for the night and the next day had an acclimatization hike and then hike back down to base camp. 

Tuesday morning we hiked up to the next camp, at 14.200 ft altitude.  We stayed here for a few hours to eat and sleep a little before leaving at 2 am to climb to the summit.  We made it there just in time to see the sunrise around 7:30 am. The early morning climb to reach the summit was freezing!  Literally.  The water in my water bottle was frozen.  Out of the twelve kids that we brought with us, nine of the kids made it to the top.  After reaching the summit we only stayed at the top about ten minutes because it was so cold!  We then turned around and hiked back all the way to base camp.  That was a long day.  Thursday morning we hiked from base camp out to the bus again. 

All in all it was a great trip.  I really enjoyed all the hiking and the sunrise at the top of the mountain was amazing!  The hiking itself was not as difficult as I had anticipated it to be.  The most difficult part of the trip was how cold it was. 

I got home from Mt. Kenya Thursday early evening and waiting here at Maxwell was our new principal and girls dean.  I know the family from working at camp and was very excited to see them again!  The following morning I picked Chett up from the airport and the rest of his family came in that evening. 

Over the next week we went on several safaris.  We went to the Nakuru, Massai Mara, and Amboselli National parks. These trips were amazing!  I had not had the opportunity to go to any of these places yet and I truly enjoyed every moment.

The following week was Week of Prayer here at Maxwell followed up by a spiritual retreat at Brakenhurst.  We had the chaplain from Union here and he was the speaker for the whole week.  I really enjoyed all of his talks and I think that the kids did as well.  For the retreat we loaded up three buses of kids Friday morning and spent the weekend off campus.

It has been a very busy couple of weeks.  I also have two new students and I am now teaching grades 1 through 4.  I cannot believe how quickly the time is going.  In just about two months I will be heading back to the U.S. and up to camp for the summer.

Teaching

Teaching has got to be the most frustrating and rewarding things that I have ever done.  I love it and sometimes I hate it.  Sometimes I look around my classroom and wonder when I became and adult and responsible for so many little ones.  There is so much diversity in my little classroom.  Not only are my kids from several different countries – but also they all have such different approaches to absolutely everything.

I have one that struggles a little with school.  He has a difficult time focusing and schoolwork is a little difficult for him.  So what does he do?  He tries to be funny.  All the time.  I have to admit, he is really pretty hilarious sometimes.  However, he seems to think that distracting the teacher with his humor is going to get him out of his work.    

Then I have one that is very smart and does her work so well!  However, when things start to become a little difficult she hits a wall.  She just gives up.  She starts to cry and I am yet to find a way to help her learn to push past that frustration and figure out how to solve the problem. 

I have another one that is a lot smarter than she thinks she is.  She often looks at me like she does not have a clue what I am talking about and hands in assignments that it is near impossible to understand.  However, with a little affirmation and encouraging, she can and often does do so much better.  One the opposite end of that spectrum I have one that thinks he knows everything.  He does not listen when being given instructions because he thinks he already knows what to do.

Sometimes it is so confusing trying to stay on top of what is due for what class for each of my kids.  Did all my second graders turn in their phonics?  Did all of my 3^rd graders finish their learning logs?  Did I check them all?  5^th grade math.  6^th grade math.  English.  Science. I get so confused sometimes on all of the different assignments I have do for each of my different classes.  Am I making sure that these kids are turning in all their work and talking to each of them to find out where the missing work is for each class?  Then I have the kids who correct me the minute I say something that is wrong or who like to inform me if my handwriting on the board (which is always sloping downhill) is a little crooked.  These kids drive me nuts and it is so overwhelming sometimes!

However, then I get invited to “lunch” of leaf salad and sand biscuits with the second graders and I cannot help but smile.  Or one of my 5^th graders that has been struggling with math calls me over to help him with a math problem.  I come over to see that he has already circled all of the important information and underlined what he is trying to find (this is something that we have been working on all year).  He tells me that he knows how to do the math.  He just needs a little help figuring out exactly what the problem is asking.  I was so excited!  Instead of looking at the problem and immediately calling for help, he has tried to solve it.  He then has identified where he is getting stuck and tells me specifically where he needs help.  This is progress!

Last week, I gave one of the 6^th graders detention for hitting her brother.  She proceeds to cry through the remainder of recess.  I explained to her that it is O.K. to make mistakes, but we do still have to pay the consequences.  It is time to come in from recess and get started with class and she is still crying.  Now I tell her that she has a choice.  She can choose to sit there and cry about the fact that she made a mistake and miss out on math class then have to make up the work later or she can pull herself together and join the class.  She joined class!  I was so proud of her!  This is the same girl who a few months earlier cried through my entire math class about a misunderstanding between herself and one of the other 6^th graders.  There again I told her she had a choice.  That she could choose to believe that her friend did not mean to hurt her and move on or she could choose to be miserable. 

We really are making progress!  I have had tears of frustrations from little ones several times this year.  At first, it really bothered me.  However, I am learning that these tears are not such a bad thing.  These kids need to be pushed.  There is also a lot of laughter in my classroom.  There are high fives and victory dances.  Earlier this week the 5^th and 6^th graders and I took five minutes out of our Social Studies class to gather around a giant spider on the floor in my classroom and check him out.  (I should not write about stuff like that though.  My boss reads this and she might just start looking for another teacher!) 

Last week, there was one crazy day for me.  It was just before and during recess and I had one kid after another coming to me with problems.  The 7^th and 8^th graders were in the downstairs classroom with a teacher that fills in for a few minutes before recess.  I had two of the girls come up and talk to me in that time.  One was needing help with something and another was not feeling good.  Then during recess I had an 8^th grader wanting a little help with some homework and another wanting to talk to me about how worried she was about her recent test.  Then I had a second grader come to me in tears about some bullying going on on the playground.  Then I had a 5^th grader bringing me another issue.  All this in the span of less than twenty minutes.  I was bouncing from one thing to another and feeling a little bombarded.  There were two other teachers around.  Why were all these issues being brought to me?  Then I started thinking it’s not really an inconvenience that these kids are coming to me.  It is a privilege.  They are trusting me with their problems. They feel comfortable coming to me when there is something that they need because I am willing to listen and because I do try to help.

I think that every day I spend with these kids I learn so much more than they do.  Hopefully, I am learning enough to stay one step ahead of them.  Often I feel like I am juggling too many things at one time.  Sometimes one of the balls gets dropped.  But when that happens, the only option I have is to pick it up, hope that I did not do too much damage, and keep going.  

Back to School!

    Well the first week back at school flew by!  I am so incredibly happy to have all my kids back. Monday afternoon three of my students came by the classroom and helped me get the last few things ready before classes started Tuesday morning.  On Tuesday they all came in and I got to talk to each one about what they did over the break.  For most of them the answer was, “I went to my country.”  Most of my students are the children of either ADRA workers or people that work for the division and so they are from all over and do a lot of traveling.

    We had a really fun week!  After having a whole month off of school, we had to review just about everything.  We spent the first bit of class time going over our classroom procedures and what is and is not appropriate.  For example, I let my kids stand up at their desk most of the time if they choose to do so.  So one of the things that we had to review was what is and is not ok while they are standing up at their desks.  They enjoyed demonstrating for each other different things that are and are not acceptable.

    During English class I think my second graders had ants in their pants.  They could not sit still!  So we all stood up for our review game.   I would say a word and if it was a verb they had to stand up on their chairs.  If it was a noun they had to sit down.  They were all giggles at that point and for the rest of the day two of them walked around telling me what words were verbs and what words were nouns in every sentence they spoke.

    We are doing a little project over the next month.  Each of my kids had to set a goal and we are monitoring their progress.  Each week they report to me if they feel they have made any steps toward accomplishing their goal.  If yes, they get a sticker.  If they have not made any progress, they have to tell me in writing how they intend to fix that in the coming week.  Some of them are really excited and have already asked if we can keep going after this month.  Others however, are still needing a little motivation.

    In less than a month we will be taking the high school and climbing Mt. Kenya.  Today was the first of four prep hikes intended to get these kids ready for the four day backpacking trip.  We left the school at 7:30 am to head to Mt. Longonot.  The hike was about 13 k and the highest point was somewhere around 10.000 ft.  It ended up taking us 6 hours. 

    I was asked to bring up the rear for our little excursion.  The back of the line is a really interesting place to be.  When I go hiking, I tend to end up in the front of the line and depending on the pace of the group I may be quite a ways ahead.  The back of the line moves a lot slower.  Many of our kids are not used to things like this and they are not really in the best shape physically, and so today was quite a challenge.

    Less than one hour into the hike, we had girls trying to sit down every five minutes.  Telling them that stopping only makes you more tired did nothing to keep them going.  I literally held the hands of different girls on several occasions and half dragged them up the hills.  I had a few sit down and tell me that they were done, that they would not go any farther.  They would say, “Ms. I cant do anymore.  I am not going to do this.”  My response was, “I know that your tired and I know that it hurts.  I am sorry but there is no longer an option here.  You have to keep going.”

We did end up making it to the top.  Seeing how excited they were and hearing them say, “Thank you Ms. Melissa.  I could not have done it without you” was pretty great.  Today, those girls learned that you can do hard things and that sometimes you just have to keep on putting one foot in front of the other.  I strongly believe that we do not put enough value on physical and outdoor education.  In things like climbing a mountain, there are so many life lessons.  I think that we all need to get outside more and we need to do things that push our limits.  We need to do the hard things.  The view from the top is absolutely worth it.

Success!  The hardest part is over.

Recent Happenings and Upcoming Events

Some of the kids from a Sabbath afternoon program.

It has been a while since I have written anything.  I am amazed at how fast the time is going.  Classes will be starting again this Tuesday and kids are coming in starting tomorrow.  The break has really been wonderful!  I spent hours working on lesson plans and reading books about teaching and classroom management.  I cooked a lot and I don’t think my house has ever been so clean.  I did some sewing and crocheting.  I went on a safari and saw a lion, giraffes, zebra, and a number of other animals.  Some of the other SMs had their families here and so we were able to go on various adventures with them. One of which involved us getting the school van stuck in the mud and having several men come and push us out.  For the last week of break I went to Capricho with several of the families from the school and the other SMs.  It is a resort on the Indian Ocean.  While we were there we did a lot of snorkeling.  I really enjoyed that!  We also had monkeys break into our house on several occasions and steal food out of our kitchen.  They may be cute, but they sure do cause a lot of trouble.  For the last few days on the coast we met the rest of the school staff in Mombasa.  This was a lot of fun!  I had the opportunity to go snorkeling again.  I also got to ride a camel and I got bitten by a giraffe when I was feeding it.  Overall break was pretty great and just what I needed to get ready for second semester. 

A little update on my classroom.  They have been doing some construction work on the elementary and when I left for Mombasa there was a huge hole in the front of my classroom, I had no whiteboard, and there were several inches of dust covering everything.  I have yet to make it down to the school to see the current state of affairs.  But I am optimistic that it will be better and I can get my classroom ready for my kids again!  This semester is going to be crazy!  In just about a month we will be climbing Mt. Kenya.  The new principal and girls dean will be coming at the end of February and I will be getting two new students and adding a grade so that I will be teaching first through fourth grade. In the beginning of March some really good friends are coming to visit and we will be doing some traveling.  I am very excited about all the events coming up!  I cannot believe how fast the time is going.  I am over half way finished with my time here in Kenya and before I know it I will be on a plane headed back to the U.S. and then back up to camp for anther summer of kids and horses.

Mombasa