Sanitation Saturday

Today is Sanitation Saturday. The last Saturday of every month they close the entire city down for cleaning from 7-10. If you are caught outside you will get ticketed from the police. One of the students in my class told me that his driver was out once on Sanitation Saturday, the police then took his car and he had to walk home. He got the car back later with a fee. You are expected to be in your house cleaning during this fiasco…. We have a community pot luck breakfast instead!

It was one of my students birthday’s this week. Apparently Birthdays used to be a big deal. Parents would all want to outdo each other and create a bigger celebration. The parties would last all day including huge meals, gift bags for all of the other students, gifts for all the teachers, and hired entertainers. In the spirit of education they have stopped all that. Parents are now told that a small treat is acceptable. My student brought in a huge box on cupcakes, and a HUGE cake. With only 21 students in my class, I invited the other 4^th grade class over to eat with us because of the amount of food. Later I was talking with another teacher about the crazy mess in my classroom. She informed me that it is custom for Nigerian parents to buy a treat for the students, but give a cake to the teacher! Who would have thought!

We visited the tailor yesterday to get our very first Nigerian outfits made! It is a custom that every Friday many people wear the traditional Nigerian dress or caftan. Nigerian Day is coming up, and it is their 50th year celebration so it will be HUGE! We need our outfits for then. We went to the market to barter for our fabric last weekend, which was an adventure as well!

Overall, we really enjoy life here! There are so many differences that we have become accustomed to. Matt and I went shopping last night and the power went out, no one even bats an eye. It happens ALL the time while I am teaching… I go right on teaching. The driving here is crazy, but it almost seems normal now. I don’t drive though- Matt does! It will torrential down pour for 20 minutes and then go right back to being crazy humid.

We are making muffins for breakfast so I’m off to bake… hope everyone is doing well!

First Week of Teaching!

The first week of school went by so fast, we were crazy busy everyday trying to make lesson plans and get used to the schedule and learn our students! The diversity in this school is so intense. I feel that we learned so much about diversity in school, but I never really experienced it until now. The majority of my students are bi-lingual and are learning French at the school! I sent home a parental information form and many of the parents indicated that the students visited 20+ countries. I really love my class and we have been having so much fun. Sometimes is it is hard to believe that I am a real teacher already!

Life here has been an easy transition. We have been so busy that sometime we even forget that we are in Nigeria. We have been very creative with our cooking and we make dinner with 3 other teachers every night. This week we made banana oatmeal cinnamon pancakes…boy they were good! J It is a lot of fun. We have also made an effort to swim on a regular basis in our compound for exercise. We even had our very first lizard in the apartment this week!

Every Friday there is a TGIF party at one of the staff member’s houses. It was in our compound so we partied there and swam for a while. Then Saturday we went to an open air market and bought some Nigerian print fabric. We will go to a tailor sometime this week to make our very first Nigerian wear! We also spent a long time working on more lesson plans, and had dinner and a movie with some friends. Sunday was our adventurous day! One of our coworkers took us out to a dam bright and early in the morning. It was a little ways out of Abuja, and boy was it BEAUTIFUL. We saw so many trees and plants it was amazing. It was really nice to get out of the business of the city. There were men that used hollowed out trees as canoes and we met a young man that said they fished for perch there.

Later then in the afternoon we visited a local farm. Another teacher took us to meet him. He was so kind and giving, he does not sell his crop because he believes that you shouldn’t have to buy food, it is for everyone. Instead they create art and music in which they sell. He takes his crop to many local hospitals and provides it for the patients there as the hospitals here do not have food in them. While we were there they were filming a music video. We got to be part of it singing the course! We have only been here 2 weeks put we are already famous…lol. It was very ironic because this man lives in a small 1 room hut, but has a cell phone and wireless internet.

We miss you all so much and hope that everything back home is going well! We think and pray for you often!

First week of School

Hello Everyone,

Well Leah and I had our First, First day of school as teachers!! How exciting it was. The whole day was quite surreal for me in many ways. I`m sure a lot of other teachers or friends can relate to starting a new job and having a great first day and thinking this is just surreal, I`m getting paid to do this. We arrived early to school with a different couple. How early you might ask well how about 6:10AM early. Now you are wondering what time does school start? 8:00 AM. Talk about being early. For all of you who think I can’t be early for anything, eat it!! HAHAHA. Leah went to her room I went to my office and tried working on different things. I had already transferred the equipment I was going to use to the gym and was excited to get in there and set everything up. One catch, the gym is not just a gym and I have no key for the gym so I had to wait until 7:30 to get into the gym. Good thing I was early right. My first class was a bomb. First grade- they showed up 10-12 minutes late and one boy was crying his eyes out. I tried doing a name game with the students, but they were all so shy I couldn’t hear anything they said. Being a reflective person, I decided maybe I’ll do a fun activity with them that will loosen them up. I tried doing the name game bopiddty bop bop. Again the bombs fell. I can’t tell you how happy I was for the first class to be done. My second class was a third grade class with many returning students and they were a ball of energy. I had a lot of fun with them and was thankful that something I planned went decent. I have a short 20 minute break then another two classes. My 5^th grade class was really chatty and didn’t want to listen to each other. They have the reputation of being that group that all of the teachers cringe at. I made it through that class without any major problems. The next class was Leah’s 4^th grade class and what a delight they were. Really the type of kids where you can give them a challenge and they will work together to complete it and there are a couple of kids in there that understand how to sacrifice something so the group can succeed. They were my last class and a wonderful way to end my teaching for my first day. After teaching I have back to back recess duties which can be a little crazy. I ref the 5^th and 4^th grade boys soccer on the first recess and then teach first and second graders different tag games they can play. They really enjoy chasing me! I then get lunch around 12:35 and do prep stuff for the rest of the day. I really like my schedule, at least so far. Well I got to go, but I’ll make another post soon.

Abuja, Nigeria

Hi Everyone!

We're here! We made it into Abuja on Friday evening and spent the night unpacking in our 3 bedroom apartment! It is huge! They are all marble floors, which we had lots of fun mopping! We need to buy some rugs. On Saturday we went shopping at a local store called Grand Central, they had a lot of groceries, electronics, and household things. Most items are a lot more expensive here, but we are learning the cheaper stores to go to! As an example a box of granola bars was about $7. Good thing Matt brought 20 boxes worth!

The weather here has been beautiful. Many days were actually cooler than back home, but it is humid here. It rained for the first time last night, and it has been rainy of and on all day. Not to bad for the rainy season!

The people from the school have been amazing to us and we have made some new friends already there are about 5 of us that are new or only have two years of teachign experience. So we have all bonded well. There are some really cool features of the city, but you can really tell that it is still being developed. There is construction all over the place. There are a lot of american items here, but like Leah said you ahve to pay for them. Like we found a Wii the other day and it was only $500.00 dollars or so.

We hae been in meetings all day today and are getting more information that will be the nuts and bolts of how the school functions. There is a lot fo good PE equipment here, but during the rains I'm not sure where I will teach or what I will be able to teach because there is only on e little classroom for me to use and one multipurpose gym to use between three PE teachers. It's really crazy because the high school has about 10 students and there are 400 students here. So I figure that I will have at least 300 students to teach which is kind of overwhelming. The names are not the easiest to remember here. I miss hearing the name John for every guy you meet and emily or sarah for every girl! It is fun though. We are working on getting our internet so as soon as we do we will be skyping people and adding pictures to our post.