Wed 13th Feb
So
now we have stopped offering people drinks and they seem much happier! It is the same the other way though as when
we are visiting people no-one offers us any food or drink either so we have to
be prepared and have water in the car!
We are finding that we are becoming more hardy and can now go hours on
end with nothing to eat or drink without getting headaches or feeling faint,
which would have been unheard of a few months ago! We actually realise we ate and drank far too much in the UK which
is probably now helping our decreasing waistlines!!
As
far as eating together is concerned, it seems that no-one invites anyone else
into their homes to eat. Occasionally
there is food at church events but there doesn’t seem to be any socialising
just for fun. We have noticed that when
people eat together at church events they don’t actually make conversation with
each other but just keep their heads down and eat the food quietly. Often there is very loud music playing so
you can’t hear someone even if they do speak to you! We also heard that one of the churches here hosts an annual
barbeque and invite local people to come along – I suggested that we could do
some children’s activities but the people told me the children don’t come as
the parents leave them at home while they come along, collect their food and
take it home again!
So
it seems this is not going to be the culture where I host a lot of dinner
parties!
Ups and downs of children’s work
Yesterday I took my reading classes with my 39 year 4s and
28 year 6s (the groups seem to get bigger each week!). I am not sure how much good I am doing as I
am having to go right back to the very basics of reading – just currently
learning letter sounds and even that is too hard for some of them. If you are a teacher in England reading this
– HELP! I did have a laugh though as we
were looking at the letters ‘a’ and ‘s’ and I tried to get them to sound out
the word ‘as’. I asked them if they
could think of a sentence with the word ‘as’ in it and had some hilarious
responses – one child said ‘I as a new dress’ and another said ‘I as the
teacher a question’. The difference in
accent and dialect is another hurdle to cross!! I have agreed to take some training sessions for the staff to
teach them to teach reading – again…HELP!
After this we took the lunchtime Bible club at Gibson and came away feeling very discouraged – there were well over 100 children there which is great, BUT there is so much noise going on and the children are often chatting to each other so it is extremely hard to make ourselves heard and it felt that we had wasted our time as no-one heard what we had said. Then today we had a really encouraging morning to make up for it!
We
took an Ash Wednesday service in Mahaicony and had invited children from the
local primary and secondary school – we had about 100 children and teachers
there (they gave all the children the option of coming if they wanted to). They all listened well and joined in
enthusiastically with all the action songs!
Nettie made her Guyana debut and a lot of the children looked very
bemused by her!! We’ll persevere with
that one!
After
that we took the bible club at Helena and the children listened well and had a
great time doing the action songs which are becoming more familiar to them
now! While they were colouring we had
chance to go round and chat to them and I had a try at saying silly things to
make them laugh! Most of them just
stared at me as though I was crazy but a few had a giggle – probably at me
rather than with me but at least they were smiling!
Update on phone
Zilch,
zip, zero! STILL waiting for someone to
do something!
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