15/01/10

Yesterday Ann, Emma, and I attempted to make our own peanut butter for the first time as some of our colleagues here have done in the past. Peanut butter is quite expensive here so I thought it could be a fun way to be thrifty during the next two years. Here’s how we were instructed: roast the peanuts in sand, then remove all the skins, then shake all the skins out, then crush/mash the peanuts with vegetable oil, salt, and sugar. And my conclusion is that it’s not worth all the work for what just tastes like crushed peanuts, and not quite peanut butter. Maybe I’ll try one more time.
This morning at school the kids came and cleaned around the school grounds for a little while, but left by 10am. I asked two of my colleagues if they knew yet what they were teaching and they said “no, nobody knows yet, it is the suffering of all of us.” It made me feel slightly better that nobody knew, although it’s a little different for me as the only new faculty member and the only person who has never taught before and will be teaching in a language she just learned. I asked if we would find out today what we were teaching. One colleague said “yes this afternoon” but the other said “supposedly, but I don’t have faith in that.” So all day while the homeroom classes were being put together there was nothing for the teachers to do but just sit around and wait. I read for a while and then, seeing my other colleagues doing it, I put my head down on the table and slept for a while. At 12:30pm we were still waiting, so one of my colleagues told me to go eat lunch and come back after. At 3pm we were finally given the homeroom lists to work on and at 4pm I was finally told I will be teaching 8th grade mathematics.
The good news is that I have always liked math and it has always made a fair amount of sense to me. The bad news is that biology textbook, chemistry textbook, teaching science book, and molecular model set that I lugged over here as part of my Peace Corps allotted 80lbs will be of very little use now.