The Rest of the Week

11/29/09

So, Patronage on Wednesday and Friday were very similar in structure to Monday, as described earlier. Wednesday's large-group games were quite enjoyable for everyone. They played a version of Marco Polo called Adama-Eva. One kid, Adama, is blindfolded and is trying to find Eva, also blindfolded, who is trying to avoid Adama. The rest of the kids form a circle to guide the blind Adam and Eve whenever they veer towards the edge. It was pretty funny to watch!

During formation, Sr. Charlotte asked me to go supervise the Abapietro group because they are many and the animators are few. So I went in and just sort of stood at the back and would separate children when they started fidgeting with each other, or go stand by these two troublemakers. I felt like my being there was a bit pointless, but I trust that it did some good to keep them paying attention. Really though, the environment in which they learn is not conducive to learning. Kids are entering and exiting the classroom freely. They open the door and come in after a half an hour, they come and squish in a seat with three other kids, they get up and leave randomly, and a few of them have their baby siblings strapped to their backs and need to leave to tend to them and get them to stop crying. But I guess they're just used to this. They did pretty good at learning the song and associated hand motions that was today's goal.

Later during playtime I had a larger group of kids following me around to play "do what she does." It was again very fun telling them to stand up, touch the ground, stand up, touch the ground, faster faster faster, and they giggled a lot a lot a lot. But again, it was tiring. I tried to teach them leap frog too…I chose one girl to help me demonstrate, and motioned for her to come over here. But then the whole group followed her! It was hard to get them to understand that they need to stay there and watch. Fortunately one of the older girls told the littler ones in Kinyarwanda to stay. So me and this girl played leap frog, but she actually just somersaulted over me while laughing hysterically. Hey, whatev. I then told the others to join in, but they didn't really get the whole idea of continuing the line…that once someone jumps over you, you get up and jump over the next person. It ended up being a few people crouched on the ground while everybody else jumped over them….they still had a pretty good time. Then Fabrice joins us with a ball and we play a duck-duck-goose game. Everyone sings this song in Kinyarwanda and one person takes the ball and walks around the outside of the circle. They stealthily put it behind one person, who must get up and chase them around and tag them before they get back to their spot. It was fun, but I can only squat on the ground for so long, so after a few minutes I stood up. And as a result, all the kids stood up too and the game instantly dissolved. Goodness. We walked around a bit with all the kids trying to hold my hands or grab my arms, they really just like to touch. I was pretty tired that day and did not have as much energy to run hither and thither with them. But then it was time to reconvene, phew.

In my English class we corrected the stories that the groups wrote yesterday. Not too much to say about that – they did a decent job of spotting the errors and correcting them. But after class we had an excellent Zumba party! They wanted to do "Chin Chin" without me leading, so that I could watch them and tell them what to fix. So that's what we did! And then we did a few other songs just for fun. Sr. Charlotte captured it on video, but unfortunately the file is too large for our portable modem to handle :  ( I wish you could see it though…they're great!

Thursday I was supposed to go with Sr. Charlotte to Rubavu for Patronage, but she suggested that I stay home and get caught up. I mentioned that I still needed to plan lessons for the Father's and that I still need to figure out what we're doing tomorrow, and a few other random things that I hadn't been able to do. So I had a day of finishing things. I actually typed up a copy of Sunday Mass in English for the priests in this area. I've emailed it to one priest from a different diocese, and I gave a copy to a priest from a different parish who came to visit the Sisters, and I've gone through the script with my two priest students that come regularly for lessons. They were very grateful and eager to get started with saying Mass in English. I don't know when they'll actually start, but I'm glad that I could help get this process going.