Day By Day

Well, the internet is back to its old self. Slow. Yet, I can’t complain too much when out in the middle of the bush.

The second week of school went well. I feel the kids are picking up on the material I am teaching them. I hope it continues to go this way for the rest of the term. I am actually having a lot of fun teaching biology and am finding that I know more than I thought. That’s always a nice feeling.

I am in the middle of my homeostasis unit and so I gave a quiz to my students on Thursday. It was a five question assessment that reviewed and glazed over the major points I have been getting at the past two weeks. I was able to check some of them before class let out and was very happy at what I was seeing. Most of the kids were getting all of them right or four out of the five. Woooo this is great. 

When teaching I make a point of walking around the class. I feel this is good because it keeps the students attentive and focused. I also tend to ask a lot of questions so they are always involved in what I am teaching. It seems to be working well. Finally, getting them out of their seat and up to the board seems to be a great way to get the class to pay attention and to be involved. The hardest part can be asking questions and not getting an answer for a bit. There’s always a delay because no one wants to get the question wrong, but in the end usually someone ends up raising their hand.

Not a picture of Isaac's farm, but it shows furrow irrigation well. Also,
I think this a really cool shot. I took it after my morning run.

Furthermore, when I walk into the class all of the students stand up. This is a sign of respect for the teacher. I quickly have them sit because I feel funny having them do that for me considering I am only a few years older, but it is nice nonetheless. They also call me sir all the time. “Sir, can you explain this to me,” Sir, why is this organ such an important part of homeostasis,” Thank you for explaining this, sir.” It’s always sir. They know my name, but after so many years of schooling they are accustomed to calling their teachers sir or ma’am. So, the same goes for Zack and me.   

Working in the clinic yesterday and today went well. It was quite a slow day yesterday, but I will take it. Usually it’s none stop which can be extremely exhausting. Yesterday, I was able to hang up posters, sweep the room, organize the file, fix the broken drawers on the desk and gather more supplies for the clinic. It was great. I love cleaning and organizing. Not really sure why, but it’s just in my genes. I have always been like that. My friends use to come into my dorm room in college and be like “Dude, why is your room so clean all the time?” ha I just have to have things clean. I also work better when I know where everything is. To say the least, my future wife is going to love me haha.

Now that we are busy working we don’t feel like such freeloaders anymore. Personally, I never felt like this considering I have been working at the clinic since getting here, but having the monks know we are busy with teaching is nice. We have a purpose and a job and we’re getting it done.

One of Isaac's tomato plants.

A few days ago our friend Isaac took us to his farm. We use to tutor Isaac in biology and physics, but since he has taken his exams in both subjects we just hang around with him now. His family owns some farm land not too far from the monastery so we went to check it out. He is in the middle of growing tomatoes so I told him about how my Mom likes to grow some tomatoes. He thought that was cool. However, his tomato field was humongous. He had tons of tomato plants all over the place. I’ve never seen so many. Tomatoes are a major crop here and so they are grown and sold a lot.

Something I learned from viewing his farm was furrow irrigation. They don’t have sprinklers here – shocker – so they use furrows instead. This is a brilliant idea and I think it’s very cool to see. I hope I can do something like this when farming in Tanzania. Furrow irrigation is when you build a small ditch from the stream to (and through) the farm land. It allows for the ground to become saturated with water. In addition, farmers are able to grab water from the furrow (trough) and water their crops by hand. The water continuously flows so they always have plenty of water to use. I enjoyed learning about this. The picture up and to the right is of one of the monastery farms where they use furrow irrigation as well.

In other news…

Every morning we eat the homemade bread the monks make. Making bread is just something monks do and, man, they do it well. I have always and will always love Johnnie bread which is made by the monks at the Saint John’s Abbey; however I have to say the Katibunga bread actually might be a little bit better. As a Johnnie alum this might be some sort of treason, but I can’t lie. This stuff is great! I’m a big fan.

We finally heard from Br. Paul whether or not Fr. Nick Kleespie would be making a visit to Africa. The BVC usually always sends someone to each site every year to make a checkup visit.  We have been notified that Fr. Nick will be coming to Katibunga in late December, directly after Christmas actually. He will stay with us for our final days in Zambia and then accompany us to Hanga, Tanzania. Fr. Nick actually volunteered in Hanga back when he was fresh out of college so I’m sure it will be nice for him to visit again.

It’s pretty wild to see September coming to an end here very soon. October is fast approaching. Unlike the fall weather in Minnesota things are just beginning to heat up here. I think that is one thing I do miss; seasons. Seasons are nice and you (or at least I) don’t notice how nice they are until they are gone. I’m actually a fan of winter so it will be interesting to have such a long summer stretch with no cold. Oh well, though, I’ll get them back next year. Until then I’ll just be over here working on my ‘sweat diet’ ha.

Well, better get to midday prayer.

Thanks for reading!