The Beginning of the End

A lot has happened in the past week that I have failed to blog about - sorry! An unfortunate side effect of doing all these things is that I haven't had much time. So I'm gonna do 2 blog posts in rapid succession- this one on our recent work with St. Andrews', than one later on about our vacation to Sharm el-Sheikh.

So last week was, in some respects, our last week of normal class. Tonight and the next two days are going to be review and wrap-up and a celebration of our last day, so we won't be teaching anything new. But last week's outing was really fun: we met our kids at the Sadat metro station and walked them down along the Nile to where we could take a faluka ride. 16 of our kids showed up, which was amazing - we did not expect so many of them to transport themselves all the way to Garden City just to go on a boat with us. 

Juweria, Zaynab, Ifrah and Samira

Diving Into History

This week was an exciting week at our St. Andrew's center, where we teach. On Monday, we taught prepositions and connected them to talking about directions. BPS people may remember the song Mrs. Geraghty taught us that was just various prepositions - well, on Monday all of my students learned the same song. Unfortunately for my dignity, Fernando has a video of it which I'm sure he'll be posting somewhere public in the near future.

After a brief introduction to AMERA (African and Middle Eastern Refugee Assistance) and the ways it could help our students, Tuesday continued the preposition theme, with a brief geography lesson. We brought in (poorly done) copies of the world map and the map of the United States (the African map, unfortunately, was forgotten by the copier and thus was not passed around), and talked about the world using prepositions to describe the placement of countries and continents. Parts of that lesson most likely went over some of the students' heads, but it was fun regardless.

The Initial Introduction, The First Class

So yesterday was a milestone for us DukeEngagers - the first day at our St. Andrew's sites. Let me sum up my Monday: I left for Ana al-Misri at 8:30 in the morning, and, besides the 1 hour break between Ana al-Misri and my St. Andrew's site, did not return until 9 at night. Ana al-Misri was much less stressful than that first day, but was still draining. And, it's about an hour drive from here, past the pyramids (yeah, that never gets old). But I was in art again, and most of my time was spent with only a few younger kids who taught me the colors in amiya and took turns picking colors for me to use as I was drawing. I'm going to really enjoy my time there, I think!

But on to the new stuff. The first day was... exciting and intimidating and absolutely rad. We had twenty students come to register, some of whom were not on our list (which was expected), and which was many more than went to the other sites. Fernando and I had not planned a lesson, since we had no idea to expect, so we just chilled in our classroom, did some brief introductions, let them ask us questions, and explained our expectations for the class and how it was gonna work. We came back that night very tired, but super excited.