"It's Go Time"

I think I'll start counting "the real" Korr experience from this past week, because this is when the car got cruising/the corn got poppin'/the game started getting good...

School started on Tuesday, as I noted in my last blog, and has progressively gotten more and more exciting! My students are the sweetest, most energetic, and HAPPY kids I've ever met. They think the world of my fellow short-termers, Alicia and Jamie, who have been here the past 3 months teaching them and it was quite precious to watch them get all excited about Jamie flying back into Korr and greeting her after she hopped off the plane. (They also thought it was enough of an excuse to get out of classes for the afternoon. Sorry buddies, no way.) They love to tell how to correctly pronounce Rendille words and how they are somehow related to you (with adoptive clans we have each gained 20 cousins.) All the students, including the 3 girls of 32 total, have now arrived on campus safely, despite some blisters from walking many kilometers to get here. I'm getting the hang of this whole teaching thing - lesson planning and reviewing English grammar rules I haven't looked at in years. I even pulled out the stern "These are my laws for my classroom" talk. The students are one of my joys here already and I can't wait to get to know them better...

Now that I've begun my actual job, I'm feeling quite settled. This is my vocational purpose in Korr, so having started working and getting to know the kids who'll be in my life for the next year means "nebey" (peace.)

Things have really gotten "interesting" around here especially since my first encounter with a hunting spider two days ago. These things are inappropriately large; like, the size of your hand. This one must have been a baby, though, as it body (not including legs) looked only as big as my palm. I was teaching a fabulous lesson on the parts of speech, when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye about 3 feet away. This was the catalyst for a series of events which eventually led to me standing on a desk while Abduhlai threw the door-stop rock on top of the arachnid and someone kicked it's gross little body out into the sand. The kids thought this was a riot, of course, because they've all seen hunting spiders before. Teasing ensued, and Shamy told me that "where there is one hunting spider, there are many" and someone else agreed, saying, "Yes, Mme., now they will come for you."

I went back later in the afternoon to see if I could get photo evidence of the spider's dead body, but it was gone... Dum dum dum.

Like I mentioned earlier, Jamie and Ruth, fellow short-term teachers have just arrived in town! They flew in today around 2 pm after circling our three potential landing strips multiple times and then flying off. Um, hi.. Um, hello...? We're here... All this rain has created small canyons and mushy soil in the airstrips, so the pilot evidently had to fly to Marsabit to first deposit some passenger weight, and then return to drop off the girls. But they arrived happy and healthy, and we've all begun settling into the house together - getting to know each other over Lynne's chocolate cake and the lost front door key I eventually found in my camera case... Oops.

(Included is my photo of the day: The students raising the Kenyan flag at assembly this morning. Also Jamie and Ruth's plane taxiing to our waiting car. Why I have a picture of their plane, but not the girls, I don't know...)