Happy Birthday

Today is my 26^th birthday and it has been a great day. For reasons I cannot quite place yet 26 feels great! I am sore from playing ultimate Frisbee yesterday and had a harder time getting up today after going to sleep at 11 PM. I often forget some of the simple things (Leah will attest to that) but 26 feels great! I think it has become that turning point year for me where I have a full time job I am with the woman of my dreams and taking advantage of great life experiences.

I never dreamed that I would be teaching in Africa or have done as much travel as I have so far. I am blessed with a great family and friends. Out of all of things I have experienced I believe that the most rewarding things in life are the relationships that we develop with one another. I talk to a lot of other teachers here and everyone is here for their own reasons, but it is very fulfilling to Leah and I to know how blessed we are with the family and friends we have at home and how we look forward to being back in less than two months.

This past weekend was a very busy and fun one. Leah and I went with two other teachers Friday night to a Spanish festival at the Hilton hotel. We watched a Flamenco dance show which was great! Then afterwards they had free food and drink which was even better. Saturday Leah and I volunteered for a charity cultural food fair and it was great! They had music and food from all over the world. I have a brat and a half because Leah had a hard time with the spice. Some French fries, German cheese cake, Canadian beaver tail (a flat pastry with some chocolate topping), and some Israeli chocolate. All in all a great time. We were able to meet some new people and talk to some of the acquaintances we have already met. We have been talking to this Aussie family who are just a delight to be around. They are always so happy and excited every time we see them. They have reminded me of a good life lesson, no matter where you are, you can have fun and enjoy life. I have been enjoying myself, but this weekend was a bit of a turning point in really getting out a bit and meeting new people.

On Sunday one of the other teachers and I went and shot archery at a German Compound which was great because I had just talked to Kare about hunting and he was heading out to hunt last Saturday. The German guys we very interested in what I hunt back home. They even let me take a few shots and I hit 2-3 bulls eyes which was a sigh of relief because I didn’t lose anyone’s arrows. They had a Fletcher release which is the same one I have back home and they shot Hoyte bows which are some great American made bows.

After Archery Leah and I went swimming, then we met up with some other teachers and played some ultimate Frisbee at the school and it was awesome. I have been swimming quite a bit and running a fair amount but playing ultimate showed me how out of shape I am!! Hopefully it will come around though. Then we had a get together at our apartment which was a lot of fun we had about 25-30 people over and we had made some homemade pizza, pop corn, and carrot cake. It was great! We had barrowed a projector from our upstairs neighbors and I played some slide shows of different pictures of family, friends, and trips I had taken. They really enjoyed them and a few said they were going to go fishing with Kare and I. I had some of Kare’s musky pictures and everyone was quite impressed. They also liked the kayaking video from the summer and of course all of the nieces, nephews, and parents.

This week has like the rest been a busy week! We had four days of school and now parent teacher conferences, which Leah is in right now, but as many know not too many parents care to talk to the PE teacher so I am using this time to work on curriculum, lessons, assessments, and cue sheets. It is really nice to just have some time to work on these items that I haven’t really had time to work on prior.

This Saturday the school is having a Halloween carnival for the students so Leah and I are volunteering to work the scavenger hunt. It should be a good time. The German camp where I shot archery is supposed to have something called human kicker this weekend which is human fools’ ball on a tennis court. It sounded like something you have to see. I hope we get a chance to watch a game or two. Well I don’t want to bore everyone anymore so I’ll stop here and when something else exciting happens I will post again. Take care until then.

Matt and Leah

Check out this scaffolding!

This is the secondary school at the orphanage- no chairs and s0 small!

1st Quarter is officially DONE!!

Wow, it is so crazy to think that we have been here for so long. The time has gone so fast, and yet it feels like we have been here forever. We have finally adjusted to most parts of living here. We have invested in more stabilizers so we can plug our lap tops in, in 2 rooms now! Before we hade to lug this huge box around. We also have gotten used to most of the streets, and don’t rely on the map as much! Still so many differences from small town Wisconsin. We are looking forward to restocking on all of our favorite foods when we get back in December. There so many things that are hard to find here or are really expensive!- tortilla chips! Many thanks as well to those that sent us pictures of fall…really helped! We printed off some and hung them up in our living room J

School has been keeping us really busy for the most part. We are going through accredidation, grades, and Matt is redoing the PE curriculum. Parent teacher conferences are next week so there always seems to be something. We have discovered the movie theater in the area. They have a discount night - on Wednesdays, so it is our new favorite thing to do after staff meetings.( last week was the first week but I think it will become a ritual) We have also been swimming a lot as the wet season is ending and it is getting very hot! We are so busy, but are also trying to find some time to do fun things. We bought a Norway puzzle and that has been taking up a lot of our time lately! Matt has become a victim of the " I will just put in 1 more piece " syndrom. Its quite hilarious.

We have also continued to go to the orphanage and it has been such an amazing experience. We feel like we are getting to know the kids there better, and we hope that we are filling there Saturday afternoons with love. It is so hard sometimes living here because we know how much more we have then those around us. We can’t help them all either…. We often pray that we are making a difference in the children that we teach. Many of them will be the future leaders of Nigeria, and we hope that they can make a bigger change than we can.

We will put some pictures up of a recent visit to the school electricians house, as well as from the orphanage!

Tomorrow will mark 2 months sense Matt and I left to come and live here. It has gone so fast, but it also seems like so long ago. In many ways we both have changed and grown so much as people and teachers that it has been truly amazing. I also find myself growing more and more homesick as the days continue on.

The dry season is rolling in and with that it is becoming SO hot. We have a pool at our compound, and without that I am not sure that I would get much exercise at all. Matt will sometimes teach outside, but the weather makes that difficult as well. I am spoiled in my classroom with two air conditioners. And then I think of back home, with the fall colors and the cool air. Matt and I made chili the other night to remind us of back home. But the meat here tastes a lot different, so we made Chicken Chili and it was definitely not the same!

Last Friday was Nigerian Day, they are celebrating 50 years of Independence so it was a pretty big deal. For a town that is usually filled with litter, they started cleaning up about a week before the big event. They even patched some LARGE pot holes in front of our compound and painted the sides of the curbs throughout town. We were told to generally stay away from the celebrations on the actual day because of the large crowds. We tend to stick out, and this could cause a scene because we are seen as rich. The advice was fortunate for us because there were bomb threats and bombs that actually detonated in the area of celebration. It is scary to think of something like that happening so close to where we live, it is a little surreal. In most respects, we don’t feel afraid while we are here because we live in a secure compound with a guard. And security at school is very extreme. They even search our car every time we come to school. Danger just feels closer now that something has actually happened in the city.

On Sunday we travelled to our school electrician’s house. It was a little ways outside of the city near one of the large rocks in the area. The landforms here are so amazing to look at. There rocks are hundreds of feet tall, and flat all of the way up. It is so different when we get outside of the city. People live in conditions that we would deem uninhabitable in the U.S. The man that we came to visit is working to build a house. Right now his family lives in two small tin shanties. There toilet consists of the bottom part of a toilet and a piece of tin roof that you place around yourself when you go. To flush they pour a bucket of water down. The power supply in the city is so sporadic and people go days and sometimes weeks without power if they even have it at all. The 4 hours that we were there, they had power for about 10 minutes and that was impressive. Pretty ironic for the electrician to not have electricity! The generosity of the people here is so amazing. Even though they have so little here, this man went way out of his way to see that we enjoyed our visit. He bought us garden eggs (they are like cucumbers) and oranges, and peanut sauce. His wife cooked us an amazing meal, and they even sent us home with leftovers. We felt so blessed to be there in the company of such giving people.

Today was one of my hardest days of teaching yet. My students have French class two or three times a week in the classroom, and this teacher died in a car accident this past weekend. It was with sadness that I needed to inform my students of this tragic event. This is something that I had never prepared myself to face as a teacher. After a long morning of crying a grieving, the students put together a memorial outside the classrooms. This teacher was a light in our school. He was always positive and went out of his way to greet you each day. As a staff we mourned his loss, and vowed to keep his positive energy alive in the school.

As we move through the weeks, they all seem so busy and packed together. I am hoping this is just the combination of living in Nigeria, and a first year teacher. Even now I have way more free time than in the beginning of the year. Next week marks the end of quarter 1! ¼ of my way into my first year of teaching!