The Chaos Continues

This morning Montana and LuRue stepped very carefully over the ant tunnels on the way to the kindergarten class. Yesterday LuRue had stopped to watch the little critters at work and inadvertently took some home with her. After a few sharp jabs, she went to her room to literally get rid of the “ants in her pants.”

Today we didn’t have to go all the way to school to be greeted; the little ones ran up the path to escort us and to fight over which ones got to hold our hands. We’re getting pretty good at managing to attach about three to each hand.

When we arrived at the building, the “teacher” (who is a volunteer & not a teacher, we’ve learned) was sweeping out the room. We gathered together all the children & got them into action games, much of which consisted of running around in circles, flapping our arms, or whatever else we could think of to do to keep the kids moving.

The morning was spent jumping from one thing to the next, often with frantic “what next?” looks exchanged between Montana and LuRue. We had some extra books today, but when it takes less than 5 minutes to go through a book, even reading 4 extra books doesn’t take up much time. Some of the children seem to be about 3 years old, so it’s amazing that they sit at their desks shouting out numbers, letters, etc as long as they do. We always make sure to mix in a lot of “dreadful dancing” & jumping activities, along with outdoor activities. “Change” is the name of the game.

At noon we enjoyed a special meal, as it was “farewell” to Morgan, who has been here for 5 weeks, and to Jean, who has been here for 2 weeks. We had all spoken our “words of wisdom”, as Edward called them, last night…now we heard from MamaTony, Mohammed, and from Edward, who emphasized how much it means to the village of Pommern to have the Global Volunteers here. Over the years the little bit we spend in the community has resulted in the creation of new shops, as well as showing the villagers that even though our skin is a different color, we are “people” just like anyone else.

Morgan, Jean, and Mohammed took off in the Global Volunteers van as the rest of us discussed what we would be doing in the afternoon (which included a hot African shower). A couple of team members went to plant seedling pine trees next to plots of older trees now a few feet high. They will be harvested for lumber one day, probably in about 10 years.

Jennifer, Montana, and LuRue went to the secondary school for the usual afternoon session. There were no tables of students waiting on the lawn for us; today we were asked to teach Form 3 students how to write a story. There was the usual mixture of vocal students (mostly a few boys) with the rest of the class smiling shyly, but remaining silent. After a bit of confusion, a story was finally written on the board by Montana, which developed into a story about Montana. Montana decided to add a

sentence to the story in which she was eaten by a lion. There is a “Montana Fan Club” at the secondary school and one of them just happened to be in the class. The student wrote a few sentences about Montana, the professional Alaskan dancer. LuRue saw the story first, and then beckoned to Montana to come over. Montana’s dream of becoming famous is taking form.

Dinner was more quiet than usual without talkative Morgan and Jean, but as Edward said, by tomorrow we will have developed into a new “team”, because the dynamics have changed.