This past month has been really eventful. Birthdays, thieves, and accidents all took a part in making it that way.

There are other things that made this month  interesting  like switching up classes at school. Before this past month, I have always been teaching students that knew the alphabet really well and had a decent vocabulary, but this past month we decided that it was time for a change. Micheal had 20-25 students in the morning that were clearly at two different levels. There were some who could read easy words well and carry on simple conversations, and there was also the ones who didn’t know all the alphabet, and almost no English words. I had 4-6 students who could read very well, but struggled a little with conversation. Jody on the other hand had 2-5 students who could read fairly well and did very well with talking what English they knew.

As you can see the classes were very lopsided, because of this we decided to mix things up a bit. We mixed my class with Jody’s, and I took the half of Micheal’s students who didn’t know anything. So for the past month I have been trying to teach ABC’s and work on the students vocabulary. It seems to be going ok, but I guess we’ll see. We also mixed up the afternoon classes a bit, but it wasn’t as drastic a change as it was for the morning class.

In July, two of our family has Birthdays. Forrest turned six on the 1st, and Carissa turned 10 on the 13th. We didn’t do much for their Birthdays, but Heather made them each a cake, and Mom made them whatever they wanted for supper.

One day this month Mom, Carissa, and Forrest were in the kitchen playing dominoes. Forrest went to get something in one of the other rooms, but when he went to open the solid glass door to the kitchen it wouldn’t open. He thought it just needed a bit more of a push, when Crash the whole door came tumbling down around him. One of the pieces hit him in the back of the head making two parallel cuts. It ended up not being all that bad but it scared every body for a bit. We were all very thankful that it wasn’t worse. 

One morning last week, Dad called up the stairs wondering where I had parked the moto the night before. I told him that I had parked it where we always parked it. He called back that it wasn’t there. We boys started looking around and noticed that some small logs that i had put in front of the one gate that we never use were moved around. When we went over and looked, we found the lock laying on the ground below the gate. Apparently they climbed over the gate and broke the lock with a hammer. Later we found out that the one neighbor lady had seen a truck sitting there with two men standing by the gate, but was to scared to yell. Long and short of the matter is, We now have one less Dream (moto) than we used to.

Yesterday as we were coming home from school we had a fender bender accident. We came through the traffic light turning left with 2 seconds left on the green (here they give you a second count down). When we came to the middle of the intersection Michael noticed that there was pedestrians crossing the street we were pulling in to. So we braked to a stop, just when we had good and stopped there was a crash and the car shook a bit. Here a moto had tried to make it through the intersection on yellow to red and didn’t see us stop. Nobody was hurt at all, but the brake light on the Visto is broken a little.

Ryan and Austin also had an accident yesterday. He was driving the moto and a lady pulled out in front of him. He was going around a curve already so he couldn’t swerve to much, but he had seen it coming in time to slow down quite a bit. He hit the ladies back tire just enough to lay his bike over. The lady wobbled a bit, but stayed up. Ryan slid down the road a bit on his backpack, which he was wearing in the front because Austin was riding. Austin stepped off when the bike went down, and ran down the road a bit to slow down. Ryan had a few minor scratches and Austin was perfectly fine. We are very thankful that it wasn’t worse. I am surprised that I don’t see things like this happen more often with the traffic the way it is.

Another thing that has changed in the past month or two is that it switched from dry season to rainy season. While rainy season is not near like I thought it would be when we first came, it still rains a lot. Some of the nicest thing about rainy season is that everything turns from a brownish-red to green, and the actual temperatures are much cooler (in the nineties) even if the real feel with humidity is often in the triple digits. The fields all have grass and the trees have the dust washed off.

Twice this month when it rained it poured. (Did you know that the saying when it rains it pours is a Mortons salt slogan? We really like to use Mortons salt durning rainy season cause the other stuff doesn’t pour.) The first time we had 3.65 inches in around two hours, and the second time it rained 2.5 inches in less than an hour. When it rains that much that fast it causes some flooding on the road in town because the drains can’t keep up. Some of the worst roads have had over a foot of water on them for a while, but it will go down again once the rain slows. 

The disadvantage of the rain for me is that it is really hard to teach English if it rains very hard. The students get very distracted, and it is really hard to hear or be heard, because of the tin roof. The rain also blows into the open sides of the classroom. About the only thing you can do is postpone class until the rain slows down. We are very thankful that this year we have pavers for the floor. Last year we had major problems with the desks sinking.:( While heavy rain does make class more difficult most of the children love playing in the rain. The older ones especially like playing soccer while it is raining. The other thing that isn’t very nice about the rain is driving moto when you forget your rain coat. It makes for some very cold rides:)

And here are a few random pics from the past months.

 

Well that’s all until next time.

Luke for the Helmuths