Hi everyone!
We are getting ready to go meet some friends, after a very busy day. This morning I met Sister Marie, the principal, and got my schedule of classes to teach. I am to teach ESL on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. And they wanted me to start today!
So Jeff and I taught together. We did numbers with 4th, 5th, and 6th grade. We played ‘More or Less?’ the numbers guessing game. It was a nice start. The fourth grade has over 50 kids in it; the sixth and 7th grades are much smaller.
Then from 2:00 to 3:00 we had science class. This class I will teach every day with Wyteline, their Haitian science teacher. They are learning about the properties of water right now. So we talked about ice, liquid and gas. We pretended to be water molecules and stood close to each other for ice and moved apart for liquid, and then further apart for the gas. It was fun.
Tonight we went to the Foun’s. Foun and his wife Maggie are Haitians who came home after living in the U.S. for several years. They have a beautiful restaurant around the corner from the school. I did not have coffee since Wednesday morning in the airport- and when I asked about it, Mrs. Foun sent up a pot of Haitian coffee, and milk, and raw Haitian sugar (the tan, crunchy kind). In her silver coffee pot and cream and sugar bowl from her house. It was sooo good. We still have not been to the store to buy groceries for the kitchen, so there won’t be coffee again tomorrow morning.
It is midnight now, and the dogs are barking again. They get very active at night. The electricity is off- it went off about 10PM tonight, and at Foun’s it was off maybe a minute and they started their generator, so it was on again and I forgot about it being off in the town. When we walked home (it’s only a block away from the school) the street was pitch black and quiet for once. Not one motor scooter to be seen or heard. Normally, all day long there is a buzz, like bees, and these scooters are everywhere zinging up and down the street, their drivers looking for riders, like taxi cabs. It was so nice to be out walking and not see any of them. The town goes to bed earlier if the electricity goes off.
It was so dark I went onto the balcony to look at the stars. The Milky Way is visible, and the stars all seem to glimmer.
I’ll try to post this before I go to bed.
It was about a year and a half ago, the fall of 2007, that I saw Dr. Mortel at Panera Bread in Hershey, and we talked a little bit. (I in my very bad French, always trying to practice.) I said, "Some day I will come to your school and teach." He said, "So what are you waiting for? What's wrong with now?" I thought about it, and he was right; so here I am, a year and a half later, about to set off for St. Marc and les Bons Samaritains.
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