Malika Catholic Church! (July 2)

I forgot to mention this before, but in Malawi, they serve Pineapple Fanta. I don’t know if you realize how amazing this is, but it’s heavenly. I would take as many back with me as possible but I’m afraid the glass bottles would break in my bag when they’re thrown into the plane’s cargo compartment.

We had another easy day of teaching, Katherine had to help us a lot with our English lesson still, but Math was great. We had P.E. for the first time, so Jess and I taught Red Light, Green Light and Duck Duck Goose. Red Light Green Light was hard because they didn’t totally understand the concept so we used more of hand motions than anything, but they had so much fun and wanted to play over and over again. Duck Duck Goose was crazy because there were over 90 kids in the class today and we decided to have them form one giant circle instead of a few small ones. Let me tell you, those kids can run. Jess and I picked the goose for a few times before we let them pick each other, and we got tagged every single time. We even stopped slowing down for them and they caught us at our fastest. They thought this was hilarious. By the end we were so tired and out of breath but I think it was the most fun they’d had the entire week! Next week we’re playing Twister and teaching them the Hokey Pokey. I also want them to learn some kind of VT cheer too so I can get it on tape.

After class, instead of having our usual class discussion we walked about 45 minutes to a village church. It was Malika Catholic Church and they performed beautiful singing and dancing for us! I used my entire memory card on my camera just from pictures and videos of this event. Even little tiny children were up there singing and dancing, it was adorable. And, the walk sounds long, but we all need it! It’s a great work out and the scenery is beautiful. The mountains looked bigger than ever on this particular walk, and there was so much green grass, which is rare to see. Jess kind of caused a bike accident, which was scary but kind of hilarious. The bikers here are crazy and we never know what side of the dirt to walk on. The two girls rang their bell for us to get out of the way but they were going way too fast and as Jess ran to move, they hit her backpack and went flying. She was fine, but the women were so mad. They weren’t very nice about it either, but we made sure to help them up and everything. After that, every time we heard those bike bells we cleared the entire path, haha.

I’m getting sick, we all are. I’m also exhausted and it’s only 8:45pm so I had better get to bed. Hopefully the internet starts to work because this is so annoying, paying for it but not being able to have access. Oh, in town, DeAnna and Caroline bought 75 blankets that we spent a lot of our night cutting into 4’s. All of us are trying to come up with 300 blanket squares that we’re cutting neck holes in and giving to the children at Malemia as blankets/jackets. Those poor things looked freezing yesterday, and they’re worse off than the other two schools, in that respect atleast. On Saturday we’ll have the edges hemmed so we can hand them out. What a fantastic gift. I’m glad they thought of it! Tomorrow we’re paining blackboards for all the classes, at all of the schools, I’m really excited about that too. Being able to do these type of things for the schools is my favorite part of this experience.