“This Class Will Be Yours”

Well, here I am again, in the internet café, fighting to make this computer work and pounding out another blog post.
It has been an eventful week at school. I’m thankful tomorrow is Friday, to say the least. I’m quickly falling in love with this job of mine. After a little bit of worrying over the weekend about what the year may entail, some things shifted this week and I’m in a much better place closing out this week than I was last week. A minor miracle occurred, as they do.
You see, when school ended last week, I wasn’t sure what my position was going to be for the remainder of the year, I’ve been given very little instruction since arriving to this job, but I kept telling myself that perhaps that was just a piece of the culture I wasn’t used to yet. It turns out, I may just have been right, because on Monday I strolled into school and the head mistress handed the fifth grade class over to me and declared that they would be mine for the remainder of the year. On top of that, after school on Monday, I was asked to report to our site supervisor, and when I met with her she asked me to establish an after school program for some of the younger boys in grades K-3.
It’s such a relief to feel needed and to be given some responsibility. I was beginning to feel the fear of not being useful set in and I’m so glad to know that this won’t be the case for the whole year. After this week, if things remain fairly static, I’m bound to develop a much closer relationship with the four boys in my fifth grade class and then, after six hours of teaching, I’ll transition into an hour of FULL TILT JUNGLE MADNESS as I attempt to get a swarm of five, six and seven year old boys to participate in some sort of organized activity. The women at the orphanage are just hoping for more supervision and to offer the boys a chance to do something more stimulating than throwing rocks at each other. I think it’s going to be a year filled with learning.
After this week, I’m excited for the week ahead. The fifth grade class is one of the more behaved classes in the school and I’m grateful for that. Every time I think I’m having an issue keeping on of the boys in line, I just remember the chaos of the five-boy sixth grade class one chalkboard over from me and I’m thankful for my little group. We’ll see what the year ahead holds, but I’m really looking forward to exploring what kind of love this country and these people have to offer.