long. day.

Gilberto and Brendan saw through some rebar


Songbirds, Jen and Claire


Richard's giant jar of mayonnaise, which we have been putting on everything from Ritz crackers to eggs

Today was fairly productive. We did our usually morning shift, broke for lunch, then went BACK to the site for another round of digging before our 5 pm class.

However, the director threw another wrench into English classes today and announced that we can no longer use the school for lessons. They are just too worried about swine flu here and don't want to be held responsible for someone catching it on school grounds. This is kind of understandable but also presented a problem because it left us with nowhere to teach...except for the community center. The community center is one big open room and very echo-y. Not so good when you have four classes running at once, ranging in ages from 5-17. Oy.

The lesson plan for today was to review what we had learned last time and start building upon that. But when we got to the center, we had a whole new group of students and had to try and start from square one. Maren and I took our group outside to play ball and another round of "my name is" with an added "how are you". We managed to keep the kids busy for a while, but it was freezing out, so we had to go back into the center with the other three groups. Massive amounts of noise, you could barely hear yourself think. Luckily the 1.5 hour lesson was almost up, so we spent some time quickly reviewing days of the week, months, numbers, basically any lists I could think of. :-)

When class wrapped, all of the volunteers were quite ready for a drink, so we stopped at the store for beer on the way home. We drank before, during, and after the meal, and when we ran out of beer we broke into the wine Claire had bought over the weekend. The stress of the day behind us, we called it a pretty early night but not before Claire and I treated everyone in our room to a special song, "I Touch Myself" by the Divinyls. However, we changed the words to "I Scratch Myself" in honor of one of the boys who announced he woke in the night scratching himself recently. He meant he was scratching his bug bites but we made it into a dirty joke. Super mature, we are.


The fruits of our labor