Sunday brought an onslaught of belated Valentine's Day cards. I had four learners stop by at different times of the day to bring by cards that they didn't finish in time to include in the gift-giving festivities of the night before. I much prefer the hand-delivered method. When I wasn't answering they door I was sweeping the house, drinking instant coffee and doing four tub-loads of laundry (bedding, towels, cloths, clothes) and hanging it all to dry on the chain-link fence between my house and the school. I have to be careful when placing clothes on and taking them off of the fence so that they don't snag on the rough wire and so that they're not hanging into the ant hills below. Also, hanging everything inside out is a necessity so as to prevent sun-bleaching..all tricks of the trade that I am proud to say I'm becoming quite good at! Sunday is also my day of weekly lesson planning. I try to get as much done for the week as possible so that if things come up at the last minute (which is the only time things ever come up around here) I'm not scrambling frantically for something to occupy my classes with. I'm still getting used to the lesson planning, but it is starting to come easier to me. I am a little bit more at ease with my classes and with improv. Improvisation and flexibility are everything. Preparation, intelligence, training...are of no use to me here without the flair of flexibility and a dash of improvisation on the side. Paired with a hearty helping of humour. Most of the time I'm laughing at myself so that I won't cry. I get too attached to my lessons; I'll think that I have the best lesson ever planned..and get so excited for the kids to love it and learn and have a great time, and instead I find myself staring into a room-full of blank expressions. The severity of the language barrier continues to surprise me and catch me off guard, but every few classes I see a few more learners open up...classes catch on to instructions quicker...participation go up... All of these things seem so inconsequential at the time, but these steps, these small improvements, are the successes I cling to. My ego depends on it. I feel like a failure at least a dozen times a day, so every little "aha" moment, every question answered correctly in close-to-perfect, or even marginally coherent, English is like a shot of insulin that keeps me going until my next hit. I am a small-success junkie.

I have my two grade 9 classes doing journal entries for me as part of their continuous assessment mark in the class. Every Monday I collect them and they must have at least one entry from the past week. I made the mistake of telling them that so long as they are writing the minimum of one page per week I didn't care what they wrote about. I get a lot of "Today I woke up...washed my body...had breakfast...went to school...had lunch...." I also get a lot of hard-to-read stories. There are far too many young children burying their parents and loved ones, or struggling to get by in overcrowded single-parent households. Even harder are the learners who themselves are the heads of the household with young dependant siblings. There are some entries where I can't even bring myself to correct the grammar because the message is devastating enough without being smeared in red pen. Some of these kids have the cards stacked so heavily against them it's incomprehensible. At risk of sounding melodramatically like a World Vision commercial, the thought of one of your 14-year-old, 4'6", 90-lb. learners caring for her four younger siblings and herself makes all of your problems seem pretty affable.

...On a lighter note...this weekend I'm going camping with some of my fellow volunteers to Ruacana Falls, just south of the Angolan boarder in the Kunene region. It's been an especially wet rainy season so far, with some very severe flooding occurring already. It is still early in the rainy season, which tends to stretch into April. Last year flooding was very severe-property damage, crop and livestock loss, and fatalities throughout the northern regions. Many of the locals are saying that the outlook is worse for this year, so we will just have to wait and see. Some of my fellow volunteers' sites are already struggling to stay above water. Not exactly ideal weather for camping...but we're going to give it a shot. If anything it will make for a great blog. On Monday I have my first teaching observation-my principal will be sitting in one of my lectures and doing an assessment. Hopefully the weather doesn't prevent me from being able to make it back to school on Monday... :)