Update

It has been a busy few weeks and so I haven't written in a while. Midterms have come and gone (for me at least). I wrote 2 tests, which is harder than it sounds, gave 3 exams, and have since graded all 83 of them. In other news at the school, the teachers at the primary school played us, the teachers of the secondary school in volleyball this past Friday annnnnd.... we lost all 3 games. We at the secondary school combined with some of the students and so I played in the first game with 2 other teachers and 3 of the students. We actually played pretty well, but the primary school teachers had one guy who was really good at serving and he just wracked up the points at the end so we lost 20 to 25. The experience was pretty incredible though. The primary school teachers came over to our court chanting and cheering and full of energy (to be fair, they were younger than many of us secondary school teachers) and then, not too long into the game, a bunch of the primary school students came over and they lined half the court to cheer and so the secondary school kids lined the other half of the court to cheer louder and it was noisy! It was very cool to be on the court playing at that time though. The students started getting competitive with one another. Every time the the primary school teachers scored a point they celebrated together by stomping their feet if and yelling something that sounded like "mi shabo" (though at is probably spelled wrong) which means something about " a lesson" which I interpreted to be the Kinyarwanda equivalent  of "you just got schooled" and the little kids started picking it up and chanting it and dancing to it when their teachers had a good play. The older kids retaliate by booing and coming up with chants of their own in response. It was a lot of fun. The final game, the teachers fielded a full team of just themselves and it honestly wasn't really pretty, we went down faster than I would like to admit, but agin it was a lot of fun. School in General is coming along a little better. It is still hard to be a first year teacher, but I am able to lesson plan faster than before and I am a little bit better (though not much) at thinking on my feet. I attempted to have one of my classes play a version of catch phrase Friday because I taught the last 2 periods of the day and the kids were wrapping up a long week a tests, so I figured hey wouldn't pay attention to much but a game. It got out of control rather quickly. Not to say it wasn't pretty fun, it was just really loud. The kids were all shouting words, at one point a chant of "China China China" broke out amongst several of the teams with dance moves and all the while the teachers who were not teaching at the moment were sitting in the staff room right next door listening to the noise and trying to peek into the classroom to see what it was all about. I feel like I am slowly getting to know the students a little bit better, which I enjoy, but it is also hard because there are definite lines between students and teachers here. Teachers are professionals. You hear things like "stand up, show the teacher some respect" when you walk into a classroom and when you aren't in the classroom teaching it is expected that you are in the staff room usually; that way, teachers and students don't have to mingle. I am breaking down the wall a little bit, some with the students and some with the people who work for the school cleaning and doing yard work, as well as with some of the construction workers hired to build the rest of the school. When it is nice out I sometimes grab my grading and sit outside on the steps correcting the work which is rather scandalous because here no one sits on the ground, no one, and my American sensibilities just don't really care, the ground is probably as clean as anything else, probably cleaner considering how thoroughly they clean (recently some of the workers have spent their day scraping dirt off the bricks of the school building - something I still haven't found a reason for. I suppose to make the bricks shine more or so they will look more defined? Who knows.) Anyway, my willingness to sit on the ground is a big statement and puts me a step closer to the workers and those doing manual labor. There was also the time that one of the workers was cutting the grass with a machete and I wanted to try, so I asked, and despite the fact that we don't speak the same language, he got the idea and handed the machete over to me. For the record, it is way harder than it looks to cut grass that way. The worker can do it one armed, but I really had to use 2 like a golf club to get the blade steady enough and I could not get my cut close enough to the ground. The grass that had taken me 5 minutes to cut, the worker went back over to fix up in 2 swings. It's the little things that count though.