A Quick Look at My Day-to-Day

The view of the Pearl River from my balcony at sunset - not bad!

Sorry for the delay, folks. Going to start getting into a better blogging habit, as I (foolishly, it seems) promised before I left for China.

It's hard to believe that this is my three-month mark. There's no way I've been in Guangzhou for three months already! No way that it's been even longer than that since I was last in Tampa! But the date is probably more reliable than my perception of time, so I'll trust it.

I certainly feel settled now, and have some semblance of a routine. My days off are Tuesday and Wednesday, for those looking for the best times to Skype with me, although I try to fill my days off with adventures around the city or much needed errands.

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.

A Day of Firsts

Today featured eventful transports to and from my center. On the way there, Fernando was somehow designated as the one to figure out change on the minibus, which I think I found funnier than he did. Then, we watched a mule pulling a cart cut in front of a car and win, which was really funny as we were watching it but doesn't sound funny as I describe it here.

At the center, we had a less-than-engaging guest speaker come talk to our kids about services provided by the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross/Crescent) which help refugees find lost family members. He came into our center and the first thing he asked was where the computer or projector was - Fernando and I just laughed. We'd planned for the talk to be a lot longer, so we had to wing a lesson afterward, but I think the kids understand parts of speech at least a little bit better now.

On the way back, we bought grilled corn for the first time from some old ladies along the street in the market we pass through. All throughout Cairo, you'll find people sitting in front of these little coal grills on the street, grilling corn. It was good, but a little chewy, and could've used some butter. As we were sitting on this low wall eating our corn, some random man walked by, whipped out his camera, and took a picture of us. It was the first time some stranger had taken a picture of me, so that was interesting. Well, first time I'd noticed, I guess. Then, the train went by, and since our wall was right next to the train tracks if some guy hadn't told us to move we probably would've had our legs crushed by the train.

Tomorrow, we're supposed to bring our students on an outing somewhere, but our plans may fall through - we wanted to bring them to the Egyptian museum, but that may be too expensive/closed. Then, on Thursday we're heading to Alexandria for a brief vacation, so we're all excited about that. Woo!

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.