29/03/11

Our printer/copy machine broke sometime over the weekend—inconvenient timing because this week is final exam week for the first trimester, so the one and only week during the trimester when we want to print an exam for every single student in every single discipline. Yesterday my pedagogical director kept running back and forth between our school and Erin/Emma’s school on his motorcycle (they are about 5 miles apart) to ask them to print tests, and then having to run back because five minutes before the given exam would start, we would realize we were about 30 tests short. Or situations would happen where we had maybe 400 copies of a given test, but we needed like 450 copies, so the teachers of that discipline would decide to just have the teacher controlling the test write it on the board, rather than using the printed versions since there weren’t enough.
So this morning they decided to suspend tests until next week when our machine will supposedly be back. So tomorrow through Friday we will have normal classes (I am interested to see how many of my students and colleagues actually show up) and on Monday we will resume exams.
Erin’s birthday is on Friday, so we were planning a weekend at wonderful Tsene with some of her closer friends. But just today her group got put on Standfast (where they can’t leave their sites, per Peace Corps orders) because their visa situation is still being resolved. We will still have a wonderful weekend, but I wish she could celebrate it with some of her closer friends.
A student found me after classes and asked me, “what does wherefore art thou Romeo mean?”