Thursday, August 26, 2010

Lucy left today : ( I saw her off after our dive this morning. Hopefully I’ll find her in Angleterre sometime within the next year. I showed another volunteer, Clare, the program for teaching in the Republic of Georgia and she has traveled literally everywhere, over 100 countries, and she said it looked like a great opportunity and she even knew someone who lived in Georgia for a year and loved it. So plans for that are formulating in my head… I’ll leave that for now.

Anyway, I had my first Kids’ Club today with just me and Christina. It was great. They made the little mini-poubelles (I think I mentioned before) out of 4 halves of giant water bottles tied around a stick and stapled to each other. Then the little ones traced and colored more of the sharp object stencils we made and they decorated the trash baskets with those. Making the example was even difficult for me- I guess my motor skills are lacking- but the kids did really great. They all share so well and work together, it’s refreshing to see. Nowhere near like the States where kids scream if they have to wait one turn to play a video game.

Another part of the Gasy culture that is really amazing is how communal it still is and how integrated the families are with all age groups and members of extended family. Kids run around and play with knives and babies climb unsupervised up piles of bricks (these are two examples we saw the other day) but they don’t get reprimanded and somehow they also don’t get hurt. Kids and parents and grandparents all sit around and eat together in a circle. Four year old babies hold one year old babies on their hips. The older kids at kids club tend to their toddler siblings and cousins and are just so good with them. Kids are acknowledged by the rest of the community just as much as adults are, it’s beautiful. Westerners could learn a lot from people like the Malagas.

Tomorrow is my first English without Lucy as well. I think it’ll be okay though. One of the younger boys who has been to the last two Englishes, Pala, came to kids club today and was so sweet and smiling the whole time that I can’t help but look forward to it. One of the girls that comes, Coereia (pronounced sor-ay-uh) was on the 40 person taxi-brousse yesterday morning as well, just looking at me for the entire 2 hour ride, but smiling when I’d notice and smile. I wish I could communicate more, but smiles go a long way I think.

Alex