14/03/11

Down in Xai-Xai for REDES work this past weekend, Anna and I saw a kid walking around wearing an Peace Corps English Theater t-shirt!
One of the shop owners from town gave me a ride back out to the mission today and Dire Straits’ “Solid Rock” was playing in the car.
The good news is that I finally got class lists so I could enter the grades from and return the three tests/exercises I have had for about a month. Bad news, I still can’t get a schedule for my morning classes I will pick up, which means I still can’t schedule my other English Clubs, to the dismay of the students who ask me on an almost daily basis. My mom has sent me a number of children’s books in English, so I thought it might be fun to read some of them with my English Club. The first one I chose was "The Story of Jumping Mouse," a Caldecott award book that I remembered as one of my favorites from my childhood. And it was still a powerfully beautiful book…but with all the colorful writing, metaphors, and deeper meanings, I think my participants got just completely overwhelmed and lost. After struggling through it for almost two weeks, we finally finished today and began "Nate the Great and the Missing Key." They love this one. They can read the short sentences and relate to a young kid who is afraid of a dog.
They hadn’t heard about the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan, so we talked about that today. It’s hard to imagine something when you have absolutely no basis for it (a Mozambican saw a video of skating once and remarked “that doesn’t look too hard”). I have never been in an earthquake, but I have grown up seeing hundreds of videos newsreels, movies, and pictures of earthquakes, so I have some idea of what it must be like. But I think I finally got through to them a little when I described the waves that were taller than houses and that came inland further than Inharrime is inland. They seemed pretty horrified by this thought.