Mimi siongei Kiswahili

This week we've started to find a rythym in our days. On Monday we started teaching so we now follow a school schedule. Every morning at about 5:30 we're woken up by the sound of a herd of girls running by our window. We still don't know what exactly they're doing. We get out of bed around 7:30 and eat a breakfast of usually bananas with peanut butter. Once the girls are done with morning prayer, we meet the oldest girls (classes 3, 5 and 6- ages 8 to 14) in classroom 5 to teach a "creative arts" class. This is for the first two or three hours of the morning. We find it so different from American school with such a set schedule because the teachers can just replace a science class with our creative arts class-it's so flexible. Often when we're not teaching, we'll wander into a classroom and see the girls just working in their text books with no teacher in sight. We'll ask them where the teacher is and they'll say, "i don't know". But even when the teacher's not there, they'll still do their work because they're so eager to learn and really value education. During the creative arts class we've been teaching them American songs with a guitar and coloring the song books that we brought for them. On Monday we'll start a new project where we'll paint a mural on a large wall in the dining hall. Today we bought all the paint materials for under 40 U.S. dollars. After this class we have a free period in which we either run or go to the market. Every day it gets easier to run because we're starting to figure out a routine (we time it so that we run while the girls are in class so they don't follow us). Our runs usually consist of us running circles around the compound. There hasn't been a day when no less than three people have come out of their houses and curiously laughed at us. In the afternoon we both teach a seperate english class. By the last ten minutes it's often them teaching us Swahili. Today we learned how to say "I don't speak swahili"-"mimi siongei kiswahili". In preperation for our trip to the market, we learned how to say "I want two bananas please". When we were trying to remember it, we kept saying "nabaka ndizi billi tafadhali". All the girls kept laughing at us and when we asked why, they explained that we were "nabaka"-"rape", instead of "nataka"-"want". We really love spending time with these older girls because we can communicate really well with them and have real conversations. We feel like we've already gotten to know them so well and have learned many of their stories.
Last night we brought down the guitar and taught the girls the MTA song. Even though it's fast and wordy, a lot of the older girls caught on quickly and were able to sing the whole song by the end of the night.