Thursday, August 11th 2005

            My lessons were great today.  The kids are good and excited to be in the classroom. It seemed like they understood the whole lesson and one girl had gone home and diligently practiced “Peter Piper” and she was able to recite the whole thing in class.  Except she kept saying “pipers” instead of “peppers.”  But that’s okay. Progress is progress and I was impressed.  I put stickers in each student’s exercise books if he or she had successfully completed their classwork.  They were so excited when they flipped through the pages and found the shiny prizes.

            The Head Teacher seemed really impressed with the drawings of a bicycle and a car that I had made to use as teaching aids.  The teaching aids really help (as long as they are not too distracting).  The kids made it seem like they had never seen anything like a bicycle drawn on a piece of big paper.  Maybe they haven’t, I don’t know. But for my lesson tomorrow I drew a big postcard as an example and then turned little index cards into postcards so that tomorrow the kids will be able to make their own. I also received notes from different children asking me to come to their homes and telling me all about their families.  They were really cute.

            We actually had a free afternoon today and I was planning to sleep but ended up going to St. Lucia (a nursing home for HIV/AIDS patients) with two other volunteers (Melissa and Monika) and playing with the orphans. Most of the time they were running around and screaming but sometimes they were crying or just falling asleep.  A boy, Nikko, had been continuously crying for at least 10-15 minutes – until I picked him up and held him. As I started singing to him, he just kept grabbing me tighter and tighter and his breathing started to slow down.  And then, once he felt better he jumped out of my arms and started running around again and wrestling with the other kids. 

St. Lucia is a humbling place. It was originally built with enough beds for eight to ten patients and then five children were anonymously dropped off at their front gate.  So there are anywhere between eight to fifteen people there at one time.  Additionally, they made daily home visits to about 60 patients in the community to deliver medicine and make check ups.  One of their current patients suffered brain damage after not receiving enough oxygen during a caesarian section.  As we were playing with the kids out on the lawn, I couldn’t stop hearing the woman’s constant moan in the background.  It was an interesting contrast.