Wow! I cannot believe that I am already almost half way through my time here, it has gone by way too fast. This past month of March I have been so busy, but I have sooo enjoyed every minute of it. Things have been going really great teaching at the Deaf school! They have school Sunday through Thursday from 10:00 - 4:00, and then Friday from 10:00-1:00, and I have been teaching all six of those days. I usually start out with the first and second grade class, then go to the fifth and seventh grade classes, and then to the third and fourth grade class. Then they have a short lunch break. After the lunch break I start out in the first/second grade class, go to the fifth/seventh grade class, and then end the day in the third/fourth grade class. In the first/second grade class I usually help the Deaf teacher come up with an activity for the students, he will write it on the board, and then when the students complete the activity I will check their work. We also sometimes do like a competition game with the students, where the teacher will fingerspell a word in ASL fingerspelling and the students have to give the sign, or he will sign the word and the students have to fingerspell it, and whoever has the most correct answers at the end wins. The students really enjoy that, so it's always lots of fun! In the third/fourth grade class, and the fifth/seventh grade class, I usually will go through the lessons in the school books with the students, or sometimes the teacher will write the new vocab on the blackboard and go over it with the students, and then I'll go over it with them again. I really enjoy teaching now, and look forward to it. I also now will usually hangout with the students after school gets out, and we will go on walks or go up to the soccer field and watch the boys play soccer or cricket. They also love to take pictures and videos, and dance, so it's always lots of fun hanging out with them. I sometimes go over to the school on Saturdays too to hangout. We watch tv, or play ping-pong, or a board game. The students also love to do magic tricks, so sometimes they will teach me what they know. Or sometimes we will just hangout, and "talk" about Nepali and American culture, including the different religions and what they believe, and they are very curious to know what I believe. I love getting to hangout and spend time with them. At the beginning of this month we took the whole day off to go on a picnic and do some sightseeing, which was really fun. We took a bus to the place where we did sightseeing and had the picnic; it was a 48 passenger bus, and we had 72 people on it. That was definitely an interesting ride! They also celebrated one of their holidays this month here, it's called holi and it is the festival of color. I do not know what the meaning behind it is, but I got to celebrate it with the Deaf students and basically we just rubbed powdered color all over each other's faces, and had a water balloon fight. It was really fun! Some of the students have been sick with chickenpox though and have had to take a break from school and go home, hopefully they will get better soon. This past month has also been a little difficult for my teammate and I with water and electric problems at our house, and also both of us have been sick with colds for a few days. The electricity and water are not like they are in America: the electricity is always going on and off throughout the day, but luckily we have an inverter in our house (like a battery) that will run the electric plugs and fans when the electricity is off. Unfortunately the electricity has been going on and off more often this month, and our inverter is dying before it comes back on. Also, the water gets pumped up to a tank on our roof, and because it's been so dry we ran out of water in our tank at one point this month and had to move back up to stay with our supervisors for a week. Thankfully we did get a little rain and were able to move back to our house, but even so the water pressure has not been that great, so we've had to keep an eye on the tank to make sure it is filling up and not running out of water, and occasionally we have had to fill up buckets of water in the morning from the spicket in the yard so that we can have water to wash dishes and such and not use all the water in our tank. So it has definitely been an adventure for us, but it's so worth it. Besides hanging out at the schools, my teammate and I have also gotten to know and spend time with some medical students from Europe who are doing their internships at the local hospital here, so that has also been a lot of fun! Please pray for the students who have chickenpox to get better soon, please also pray that me and my teammate would stay healthy, and that we would not run out of water again.
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