Ryan vs. Jetlag

Sunday, July 27

On Sunday, we met in the dining hall for church with the kids and staff at NV. The staff led a few songs and the kids performed a couple of skits and songs. We led four songs and then split into small groups by age to lead the days devotion. This week we're focusing on the parables of Jesus. We introduced parables by performing a retelling of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." Since the children weren't familiar with this story, we reworked it to be "The Boy Who Cried Lion." The kids have a better contextual understanding of lions, so we dropped the wolf. We also taught our first parable, the parable of the hidden treasure. We talked about how God is what is most valuable, and as people who naturally desire what is most valuable, God should be most desirable to His children. We then broke into groups of two and three to guide discussion further. It was fun sitting with John, John, and Brian and talking about things that have value to them like food, gold, silver (or 'sivlia' as John pronounces it), and uncles and aunties. Then making the connection that God is more valuable than all of these and should be most desired.

The remainder of the day was really relaxing. We didn't have any responsibilities other than making dinner for the kids and cleaning up, so I got a good nap in.

Monday, July 28
We began the day by visiting a local cafe with the Cornerstone teachers. This was an opportunity for us to get to know each other before we dove into our training sessions. The cafe was called Cafe Ubuntu and is a project associated with Comfort the Children, an Austin-based ministry. We played a few get to know you games in a garden behind the cafe. With 21 members of our team and eight teachers, our name game took quite a while.

We returned around lunch to begin training. The training on Monday focused on classroom managment. I was subbing in the grade three class. They have eight students in the grade three class which doesn't sound like many, but the classroom is maybe 10' x 15'.

The third graders here are great. They have interesting class dynamics because the classes aren't divided by age, but ability level. As Naomi's Village gets new children, many haven't ever been in a classroom. So in the ECD class (Kindergarten), there are children who just turned four and children who are almost eight.
We played soccer with the kids until 4:00 and then I crashed until about 9:00. Jetlag mixed with a stomach bug wiped me out. All was good after a solid night's sleep, though.

Tuesday, July 30
Training continued with ESL and Special Ed sessions. I was in grade three again. At the beginning of the day the Cornerstone teachers allowed us to observe them teach their classes for an hour. I learned a lot about the class and Teacher David's instruction style. I was really impressed with how he handled his class with such a small classroom and limited teaching resources. The students used white boards to review addition with regrouping in the thousands place and adding weeks and days.

During soccer today, I took a minute to stop and just look at the mountains. It's truly beautiful here. It's easy to forget that I'm on a different continent on the other side of the equator. Guys, Kenya is like 1000x more beautiful than Texas. Oh, and it hasn't gotten above 75 degrees yet. So, there's that.

Tomorrow we're visiting Ngeya Primary School, a local public school. We had the opportunity to visit last year, and it was an eye-opening experience.