More time with the kids

Before I start with today, I have a few quick items to cover that occurred yesterday after I had done the blog

1. I have won the award for Most Likely To Get Malaria. I am up to 37 bites. You're probably telling me to put on bugspray and wear pants. I actually have been wearing bug spray every night. I don't havr any pants here. And they really just love my blood. I'm just praying the malaria meds are strong!

2. Carl arrived last night. James and especially Cam had been waiting anxiously for him to get here. We're not sure what his role with us will be this year, but it's nice to have his sense if humour with us.

3. I had a cockroach scare in my room last night. I made a trip to our bathroom, and while I was in there a cockroach crawled over the door and then under it into our room. I chased it for a bit before it crawled under my bed. I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep with it there, so I called Poppy to kill it, and she called Carl who did kill it.

But I digress, onto the work site!

We were doing the same tasks as yesterday, although I think everyone made more of an effort to switch tasks, to give better variety. Many of today's highlights actually came from the children who are always (and I mean always) around to visit.

The first highlight came at the children's first break, when Cameron, James and I broke out the skipping ropes Roger had thought to bring. They flocked to the ropes, all trying to show us their stuff. Cam and I even jumped into the middle to show them a couple Western rhymes, and Roger jumped in...well, not to show them any skill, but they had fun watching him. ;)

An hour later Poppy, Roger, and I got permission from the principal to go inside the school and take a few pictures. I felt very disruptive, but when we got to the younger classes in the old building Poppy was interacting with the teachers, and it felt a little more natural. All in all, it was a cool experience.

Then at lunch Poppy had asked all the students to come out so we could take a group picture. The students are much better listeners than back home, because I couldn't picture our students standing in the blinding sun for about 15 minutes, posing for us to take their picture. When the picture was done, some students were told they could come back for 3pm when we'd be doing crafts and soccer.

I like the fact that I'm helping with the site, but I couldn't wait for 3pm to come around. When it finally did, it wasn't quite what I expected. We started with about 10 kids, which quickly multiplied to about 62 by the end. They loved the coloured paper, markers and stickers. Some of them had never even seen markers or stickers before, so that was cool. But I found both that I wouldn't be able to run crafts by myself because of the language barrier, and Poppy and I wouldn't be able to do any of the more complicated crafts due to the staggered nature of the children's arrival. So that was a little disappointing, but it was still fun to watch.

The only other item of note once we got back "home" was that Bruce had a run in with a cockroach as well. He was in the shower when he noticed it, and we all heard a good scream fron where we were inside. In my defense, when I found the cockroach in our washroom, I didn't scream. ;) sorry this was so late, I was TIRED last night! More later!