Teaching Practicum, Eating Dog, and Festivals - June 20th 2012

June 20th, 2012 - Teaching Practicum, Eating Dog, and Festivals

            I have had two days of teaching actual classes in the classroom. It's hard. Seventy minutes is a long time to keep a bunch of teenager's attention, especially when I am trying to make something like vectors exciting.... because they're not. The language barrier is another issue. Math is hard enough to understand, but when it's in a foreign language that you barely know it is much harder.... and next week I'm supposed to teach science.

            I am starting to feel at home with my home stay family. It is weird how after only a little over a week I feel comforted and at home when the taxi turns the corner into my town or when I see my house down the path. My family likes to look at all of my pictures over and over again so they have started to memorize a lot of people's names. I have learned that my home stay mother worked in the cocoa factory for 30 years, and now she owns two stores: one sells provisions and the other cells cement. I have grown to really enjoy banku and ground nut soup. They also made me chicken for the first time yesterday. I've had ice cream and rice water (cream of rice) and okra stew (which is like snot). Today when I was leaving the house this morning they were roasting a dog over the fire. Needless to say I panicked a little bit. I couldn't decide if I would just try it at least once for the experience, but I quickly decided I didn't want to. When I came back home I told my mother I did not want to eat dog and she said that was OK and she doesn't eat dog either. We went to the Ohoum festival today. They hold this festival twice a year and it originated in Old Tafo. I'm not exactly sure what the festival is for, but all of the students go to the chief's palace and they bring firewood.

            Other notes: I ended up killing that huge spider that was in my room after I tracked it down for about 30 minutes. I did laundry this weekend and they helped me because they said I was doing it wrong. I also went to church with my mother and they made us all introduce ourselves. After teaching a group of us usually meets up at a bar in town that is owned by one of the other volunteer's home stay mothers. It is nice to be able to sit, relax, laugh, and vent with some people going through the same experiences.