Hello Loomis People out there!!

This is a hello to all those Loomis people out there who have gotten a hold of my blog this way or that! Thank you for reading and THANK YOU Chrz for your comments and THANK YOU SO MUCH FITZ for the package!! (Fitz sent me a package of yummy food even though I haven't talked to her in a bzillion years and it managed to get here faster than any other package... Fitz, care to explain?)

Also a quick note about being sick a lot: a lot of people seem to be worried about the amount of sick i/we am/are but I want to make sure everyone rests assured that we are well taken care of and well educated on how to handle stuff. (Yay PCMOs). We aren't allowed to take things like imodium because it could turn out really bad if you stop bad bacteria from being able to get out of your body. And a lot of the time it isn't even bacteria that are causing the problem so there aren't even any good drugs to take to get rid of things like viri, so instead we learned about how to properly replace fluids and electrolytes in the meantime. Everyone knows you're supposed to eat bannas and toast and rice and apple sauce when you have diarrhea but in addition, especially if it goes on a lot time and you aren't able to eat because you're puking or can't stand to eat or eating just gives you insta-diarrhea then you need to drink some oral rehydration salts. The recipie is something like 1/2 tsp table salt plus 4 tbs sugar plus 1 ltr water. And you also start to get a feel for how much more water you need when you're sick versus normally and how all that changes with whether you're sweating. Some people don't really get into this stuff but I think it's interesting.

Anyway this is the first day in a while that I've been able to get pictures up so here are a lot. This first picture is of my tutoring group and my LCF, Patrice. We meet everyday after classes for another hour to have just french conversation since there can never be enough practice and Patrice is an amazing teacher. He does that perfect amount of correcting you while you speak for it to be really helpful. The other PCTs are Ray and Cassandra. Ray just got his Master's in Mecanical Engineering before coming here and Cassandra's two years out of college where I think she was a Psychology major. Patrice grew up for a lot of time in the Ivory Coast where his parents still are and now he's here. He's a real nerd. He knows 5 languages, including English which makes language class easier sometimes when you're looking for a particular phrase or something. He's been my LCF from the start so I also had a ton of regular classes with him and he's also been the one to come over to my house and make sure my family is taking care of me and that we are able to communicate well and to tell them that I don't like to eat fish heads. Yay Patrice!

Next up is a picture of my host father (who I don't think has made it up on this blog yet) and my littelest host brother, Nayeme. Nayeme is a perfect example of the french word bandit. But that's OK, he's 2. That's the family's moto, which is what people have here instead of cars. I figgured out why my family is so enormous! My host father has 20 siblings (that's by 7 mothers) and so that's why my family has seemingly no end. Last night the family threw a party for three kids who had passed their important academic exams and it was a real good time. Lots of dancing by the young and older and cold drinks and being happy about academic accomplishments. It went till 2 am which is exactly 5 hours past my bed time so I kept wanting to fall asleep but everyone kept pulling my arm to go dance more... so i tried to keep it together.

Yes and then there's teaching. Here is a picture of some of us SE volunteers in the salle de profs preparing our lessons / relaxing after teaching. It takes quite a lot of time to prepare lessons. I mean I always kind of understood that about teaching in general, I think, but it's really something that you can't rush unless you've taught it before or you want it to show that you weren't prepared because every little weakness gets amplified with the whole in-French aspect. There are always at least 10 words in the biology lessons that you have never heard or seen before so you always need some time to practice pronounciation or something. That's, from left to right, Marty, Pete (also from Cornell), Garrett, Lara and An. This is also a pretty good shot of an average classroom, shot from the door. Nothing fancy. These are the rooms into which a hundred kids or more get put for the 6th grade classes. Three or four to each bench.

And this is a picture I stealthily took of Ray while he was teaching the other day. It's important to be stealthy about it because if the kids see a camera they freak out and get really excited and all swarm you trying to get you to take a picture of them. Ray wouldn't have liked it if I'd dome that to his class. He's teaching half of the 8th grade model school class here and watching a kid do an exercise on the board. TomorrowI'll start teaching 3eme which is 9th grade and I'll teach them about bones. Bone growth, anatomy, problems, etc. It'll be a big class too - like 80. There's so many because they're thirsty to get some more practice on the material since the 3eme material is what will be on the BEPC test which determines whether they can go on in school.
This picture is of the GEE trainees who live in the village of Komsilga. Komsilga has a sign, indicating that it is Komsilga, but the sign does little good since there isn't really a road that goes to Komsilga and you don't get to the sign until you go off 4 km through the bush and then over a hill and then see the village along with it's sign. It's literally in the middle of nowhere. The girl there in the middle, Christina, also went to Cornell; It's like a Cornell convention. The Komsilga crew are the ones in GEE who had the best French. They started learning Fulfulde right away, and they will go up in the north where the Foulani and the Peul people are who speak Fulfulde. It's about an hour bike ride for these guys to come into town and PC is being a pain about giving them a ride sometimes. It's a tiny tiny village though. Tiny. This pic is during a storm out that way. The lightning here is always extrordinary. Anyway, enjoy the pictures, I'm going to go home and plan out my lesson and start a new book I think and eat some granola and maybe clean my room. Thank you all for the emails and such. I'd love to get more real letters! So far Addie's the only one who's mailed me anything. Emails rock but real mail is amazing. I also love comics or magazine clippings or pictures or anything else like that fits in a normal envelope.