I taught my first lesson yesterday! It was a 4eme German beginners class. Last class they had learned to say their names and where they lived and how they are feeling. I taught them "Wo wohnst du in Deutschland?" "Ich wohne in Kiel." "Wo ist das?" "In Norddeutschland". The lesson went well. I spoke more French then I would have liked to but the type of learning they are used to is that the teacher says the things in French first and then in German. Next class I told them that I'm only going to speak German with them so we'll see how that goes. The pupils are quite unresponsive when they don't know the answer they don't say they don't know they just look away and refuse even to try and give some sort of an answer like repeat the question back to me. It is like they are scared of making mistakes. 14 students in the class are repeating the year so they are the students which are answering back quickly and they get the work done much, much faster then the others. The lesson I planned only took them and hour and 30 minutes so for the final 30 minutes I gave them some verbs to conjugate in the present singular. All in all the class ran well. I even used some drilling techniques but I need to be more forceful and keep the flow of the lesson going more because they seem to lose interest quickly and started talking amongst themselves while I was working with other students who didn't understand as quickly as the others. It's difficult to teach a class when the level of knowledge is so different. I'll figure it out though.

My parcel arrived yesterday which was exciting, Maoams :D Thanks Mum! It was also Amadou's birthday yesterday so me and Ciara made him a cake and sang Happy Birthday to him. It was really sweet because when the children found out we had made a card for Amadou they wanted to make cards as well. They were embarrassed to give them to him so Mohammed hid his behind his Dad's back and Babo was somehow walking behind me and he tripped over the fan cable. It broke. Amadou cut his cake and then I asked Babo where his card was he said behind the door. Turns out he totally forgot about his card when he fell over the cable. Me and Ciara were laughing our heads off and the rest of the family were laughing too. After a while Amadou turns to us and says we were laughing because Babo forgot about his card when he fell over the cable. That made me and Ciara laugh even more because he thought we hadn't understood why he was laughing.

I've finally gone to the big market here in Joal. It is a little like the market in Kaolack but much smaller and there are less people trying to push pass and less people hassling us to buy things. People in Joal seem more relaxed and easy going then in Dakar and in Kaolack.

We also went to the bridge between Joal and Fadiouth. We went quite late at night so by the time we had walked the bridge we didn't want to go into the actual village. We stopped on the bridge to take pictures and a man came over to tell us that if we wanted a tour of the village we should come and find him because in Fadiouth they have this system where they basically make tourists pay them a little money to have a look around the village. I'm not sure we're going to find him when we do go… It seemed a big dodgy.

My day normally consists of getting up at 6 in the morning to fill up buckets of water because normally during the day there is a watercut and there is no water coming out of the taps. After filling up the buckets I sometimes go back to bed for a half hour or I start cleaning the house. At seven we normally eat breakfast (baguette and chocolat chaud!) Yum! And occasionally I have my bread with last nights dinner. My favourite is when we have a pasta dish with onions and fish. After that I've been bringing Marieme to school. On the way there I normally meet two of the same people. One elderly man who the other day tried to convert me to Islam. He only speaks Wolof to me so I only realized he was trying to get me to start reading the Koran and pray when he made the actions. The other guy I meet, always talks to me in English. He greets me in walking past so the greeting consists of us talking over each other while we are walking. Its good fun though and I've started doing the proper Senegalise greeting now which is talking over each other while we are walking past.

All in all things are going well, I can understand a little more Wolof now but not as much as I'd like… My French is getting better though! I don't really have any problems communicating in French.