Teacher Boot Camp...Check!

I finished teacher boot camp this week! Woo hoo! This past week, I was in a sixth grade classroom with about 75 students. They were very bright and a lot of fun to teach. My favorite lesson was one where I read a "big book" to them (made on grain sacks) about finding a quiet place. Afterwards, we went outside and they wrote about their own quiet place. Ugandan pupils rarely, if ever, get to do free writing or creative writing, so it was a real treat for them and for me. (Shout out to Monica Murdock who gave me this idea which I adapted!)

I am now making the transition into language training. I will be spending the next month or so learning to speak Lusoga, a Bantu language spoken in the eastern part of Uganda. My language classes are six days a week for about eight hours a day. Pretty intense! It's very early in the process, but I'm enjoying it so far. I absolutely love playing with language, and my brain is crazy-happy to have so much new material to play with. It's also nice to have something, anything, new to learn, since the great majority of what they taught in teacher boot camp I already knew from my experience and education.

In general, everything this week was much better than last week. I took a hard look at how I was feeling and why I was feeling that way and gained some good insight. I also realized that while on the surface I'm experiencing a lot of intense ups and downs, just under the surface I feel pretty steady and calm. Also, there's hot chocolate here! How have I not mentioned this yet? I drank great gallons of it before I left (and I have the hips to prove it!) thinking I was stocking up for two years. Yet, low and behold, I've been able to drink it twice a day! True, it's not my homemade recipe with heavy cream and dark Ghiradelli chocolate (think ganache), but it's still pretty darn good. The little things, people. It's all about the little things.