Update & the beginning of teaching!

Hi all!

Wow, I can't believe it's already January 30th.  The month of January has simultaneously flown by but also many days have felt never-ending!

The school year started up mid-January, though the beginning of the school year moves a bit slower than what I’m used to from an American perspective. For example, the first day of school for the learners, it still wasn’t clear what grades I would be teaching. So, I just sat in the staff room (enjoying the air con) and read a book! By the end of the day, it was decided that I would be teaching grades 6 & 7 English. I taught for the remaining two days of week one and was just trying to get my bearings. There may or may not have been two occasions where I walked into the wrong classroom and greeted the class “Good morning 7A!” (or 6B) and they responded by corrected me with “7B. Good morning, miss!” and I then had to make a quick and sly exit to find the right classroom. Oops!

The timing was unfortunate, but during the first three days of the second week of school, I attended a permagardening workshop put on by Peace Corps in Rundu in the Kavango region, about 6 hours east of my site. It was really cool seeing a new (and very green) region of Namibia. The Kavango river marks the northern border of Namibia with Angola in the region and it was beautiful to see the river and cool to be looking over into Angola! I decided to go a day early with some other volunteers from the region and visit one of our friends in his village. There tend to be elephants there (which we wanted to see, of course), but we didn’t have luck in that regard! We still had a fun night hanging out with other volunteers, though. Then, we headed into Rundu for the workshop! We learned lots of techniques about permagardening (i.e., permanent gardens that are not just during rainy season) here in Namibia. We also started a small garden at another PCV’s site. The big takeaway message was that it’s damn hard to garden in this sand! We’ll need compost, compost, and more compost to enhance the soil. My principal wants the school to start a garden to supplement the school feeding program, so it was good to go to the workshop and gain these skills. Though, it was a big bummer to have to miss three days of the first full week of school.

Here’s a picture of the O-land volunteers traveling back together! I'm sitting between Linnea and Ben, two other volunteers in my region. We were thrilled that there were nearly enough of us to fill a combi (mini-bus), so we didn’t have to deal with the standard 4ish hour wait at the bus stop for the bus to fill.

I came back to a desk full of assignments to be marked (graded) from the activities I left while I was gone. The past week and a half of school have been busy busy! I don’t feel like I have a good routine established yet for lesson planning, filling out the required daily paperwork, marking, etc. So, I’ve been staying at school late and doing my best to get things done! I’m having a lot of fun in the classroom. This past week, I feel like I hit my teaching stride, which is fantastic. I feel like myself in the classroom and have a good balance of having fun (I give high fives for excellent answers) and also being a very serious and strict Miss Christy to show the kids that they can’t mess around in my class. It’s going well! I’m going to introduce a detention system next week, so stay tuned for the results of that! It’s a totally new concept here, so I’ll have to explain what “detention” is!

On Monday of the second full week of classes, I unfortunately had to miss school again! I co-facilitated a workshop with Linnea, the closest PCV to me, at our school circuit (like school district) office in Outapi about how to use our timetable making software. We almost cancelled the workshop on Saturday because of expected low attendance and us not wanting to miss school, but we went through with it and it was a good thing we did! 16 schools were in attendance who needed help creating their 2016 timetables (schedules)—meaning that 16 schools in our circuit still didn’t have timetables for the new school year that started 1.5 weeks prior! (Admittedly, my school was one of them!) A lot of people were really appreciative and said how much our workshop helped them and their schools. It felt good to be able to assist so many schools at once! Linnea has been here for a year longer than I have and she told me that she felt like it was one of the most successful things she’s done since being here and that she was really proud of it. I was honored to assist in such a great endeavor!

On a personal note, I’m feeling really good here. Just this week, I really felt like I’ve settled into the school a lot. I feel very at home with the staff and feel like I’m developing some good friendships! I went on two walks this week with colleagues after work (to de-stress from the crazy week!) and have been doing a lot of yoga. One of the teachers brought me a bunch of mahangu flour to school  yesterday, which was so sweet! I’m going to bake some mahangu banana bread and cookies this weekend!

Oh, and Christmas arrived in Namibia this week! I received care packages from my parents, my old coworkers at Corboy & Demetrio, my Aunt Mary, and one from my friends Leah, Lindsey, Nikki, Liz, and Emily. I am so thankful for all of you for the time, effort, money, and love that you sent my way! I’ve been enjoying a taste of home and it was so great to see your handwriting and imagine you saying what was in the letters :) I will write you all back soon! My apologies in advance for the fact that it’ll be on notebook paper and not pretty cards or stationary as you all sent! There isn’t a stationary store in Outapi, but I’m making a special trip soon to another town to get some!

A sweaty selfie with one of the care packages!

I think that’s all for now! The wind is starting to blow with a big rainstorm rolling in (thank God-- it means a reprieve to this high 90s heat!) but it also means that the cell network and electricity are about to go, so I better post this quickly! I'lI leave you with two quick photos of my life here:

I went out to add one more thing to my garbage fire and found a bunch of cows with bells around their necks walking by. It was so funny and gave me one of the all-too-common “LOL I live in Africa and this is my life” moments!

I finally figured out a way to set up my hammock hanging from some of the support beams of my house. The whole run-in with a tree snake has kept me from wanting to set it up in the trees!

Hope you’re all well! To my family and friends—I love you to the moon and back! Thank you for being with me on this crazy journey that is living and teaching in Namibia through the Peace Corps. I’m so happy and lucky to be here and even luckier to have your support.

Oh, and if anyone wants to visit… open invite for May! Tickets are cheap!