It's almost over!

I've just finished my last day of teaching. Thursday, between
the safari and the island in Lake Victoria, I'll go in and say hi,
but today was my last full day. Since Wednesday my replacement,
Sarah, has been shadowing/helping me. I've done some cool things
with the kids this week. Yesterday was my HIV/AIDS lesson complete
with a wooden penis to put a condom on. The kids were surprisingly
mature. I did the lesson for P6 and P7 which means ages 11-18 or so,
mostly 12-15, and I was quite angry that despite arranging it with
the headmaster, two thirds of those classes had gone to a sporting
competition. I wish he'd told me about that so I could have done
the lesson last week with all the kids. But Sarah is going to do
a revision/repete of the lesson in a few weeks. I've also done
some writing activities with the P5 and P6. P5 today I had write
a paragraph about themselves, age, where from, favorite foods and
activities and such. Also what they'd do or not do if they could;
surprisingly many of them seemed to enjoy doing clothes washing.
Yesterday I did an excercise with P6 on the board, calling on them
to come up with the who, what, when, and what happens of a story and
then I had them all write the story in their own words. It was
about a mother and her daughter, and the motehr was the daughter's
teacher. Today I had them write a half page to page about what
they would do if they had a day to do anything, what they would eat,
and also what they wouldn't do that they normally do. It was
interesting to see, they said they'd play or go to the zoo or spend
time with family, but they also included their normal chores. Some
didn't understand and just wrote about a normal school day which
was also interesting.

The language here is very interesting. I'd finally fell into the
Liberian and Ghanaian vernacular, adding an O to the end of certain
words (namely "stupido") and saying things like "small small" or
"plenty" or "alight" and other tiny little adjustments to sentence
structure and diction. Here I had to get used to a whole new
accent, where they annunciate such that the ends of words often have
an E added to them, and where vocabulary is again slightly different.

The two new volunteers are really nice, it's been a house full of
girls. We watched Hotel Rwanda last night on Sarah's computer, a
bootleg borrowed from Leslie (prog. director) on a tape that also
includes Franken Fish and other such pieces of garbage. It was
intense to watch it right next door. Esther, the house girl, also
watched, and I was relaying a lot of the dialogue to her because the
sound was bad but I knew what they were saying. it was interesting
to see her reactions to the movie. Also, watching it after 9 weeks
here, I could pick out the little details they got really right or
wrong. For the most part they did an excellent job with the little
things.

Sarah got hit on in the funniest way in Kampala. A man asked if
he could make her his asset.

Now that the vegetarian in the house has gone, the food has been
excellent. Esther really is a good cook but you don't appreciate
that if you are eating the same thing every day. Now we've gotten
incredible chicken and this mince meat spagetti sauce...mmm.

Wow looks like despite the commotion with Manny my Sox are going
good. It's always a relief to be off the internet for 4 days and
return to a headline about an 8 game winning streak and a rather
high number in the games ahead column.

So I've got a week of adventures ahead of me, seeing Uganda, and
then it will be hopping on a plane. I am definately excited to
get home, excited to get to school, and excited for this next week,
and I will be sad both to leave Uganda and Africa. The first wave
hit me as I was leaving school today, even though I've still got
10 days left.