Literacy class, lunch, and more concrete mixing by Ethan

Every morning, I wake up feeling refreshed and ready to go, but I, for some reason, am hardly hungry.  My day started with me force-feeding myself, just for when we get to doing construction I’m not completely exhausted.  After breakfast, we got ready to head to Chan Chen Government School.  I brought eight soccer balls along, distributed amongst everybody, to leave here in Belize for the school.  All of the balls ended up in the van, but we haven’t left any yet as we plan on using them for activities throughout the week with the children and we don’t want to lose the all beforehand.  The balls are being used in the physical education class, to play soccer, as well as by the “kidtainment” group, to keep the children entertained so they don’t get in the way of construction.

Today was also the first day of teaching various classes, such as physical education, literacy, healthy lifestyles, and arts and crafts.  Sammi and I teach the literacy class, which went really well even though it didn’t go as planned.  Initially, we had planned on having about thirty students in each class, these numbers ended up being sixteen and four.  The principal, Carlos, explained to us that the children tend to not show up when cold fronts pass through as it’s such a sudden change from the previous day.  Parents tend to keep their kids home due to illness being common when the weather switches that quickly.  Honestly, it felt amazing today.  It was overcast and there was a pleasant breeze that helped keep us cool, however none of that helped stop people from getting sunburns.

Not only was our first class smaller than expected, we also got children younger than we expected.  This caused us to have to change our lesson plan for the day, which originally involved going to the computer lab, to playing Pictionary.  Pictionary took a little bit for the students to understand, but after a little bit they got the hang of it.  We did have difficulty getting the children to come to the board to draw, until I started offering stickers to each person who came up to draw a picture.  Our second class was a lot smaller than we planned for; four people instead of the expected thirty, and our lesson plan for this class also involved going to the computer lab.  We ended up having to change our plans for this class as well, due to the computer lab being locked and the principal was out helping get construction supplies.  We did poetry instead and thankfully Beth was able to make copies of the poems we wanted to go over.  The older kids were harder to deal with than the younger kids, they paid attention a lot better, but they were not nearly as interactive and it took a lot of prodding to get them to start talking and answering our questions.  All in all, we were able to adapt spectacularly and we did a great job given our setbacks.

Ethan & Samantha teaching

After our classes, we all ate lunch and by then I was finally getting hungry.  We all ate pretty quickly and our leftover food we gave to the children whose parents can’t afford to feed their children enough food and as a result are on the school lunch program.  They ate like vacuums.  After lunch, we all were ready to get started on the construction, but having a nurse along with us, we aren’t allowed to do physical activity for at least thirty minutes after eating.  Instead, we played with the kids and took impromptu Spanish lessons from them.

Once construction started, we were skeptical if we would be able to do all that we planned to do given that during the previous day it took us about twice as long as time we had to do the same amount of work.  But, we finished all of that work as well as more.  Yesterday, we got about half of the concrete done in about seven hours.  Today, we got the other half of the concrete done in three hours. We used a total of seventeen bags of cement, mixing it all by hand.  We also got all of the siding painted, albeit not very well as the children did the majority of the painting, so some of us will be going back over that tomorrow.  The framing for the lunchroom also got finished today.  We all are extremely proud of the progress we have made, even if blisters are actually a real medical concern for us now.

Ethan helps out a new friend

 Concrete must be mixed properly - these guys are now experts!

Final finishing touches of the flooring today