End of the School Year

I have had a few things in mind to post, but it has been BUSY around here. Layla was very sick for an entire week and now Ryan has the same thing )= Just a high fever and no real secondary symptoms. So we've been close to home for about two weeks now.

The heat is really coming in now....it has been around 95-105F which really isn't summer weather but that is starting to change. I don't consider it really HOT (at least this is what I tell myself!) until it hits 110. This afternoon it was 114 which is hot but the worst thing is even at night in the total dark it is still 100 degrees (= We are hoping to get our pool set up! We need to get a shade put up though so the water doesn't just heat up....that is pretty icky.  Poor Tom has about 50 errands to do to get this accomplished.

Anyway, the other thing that happened this week is the Certificate Ceremony at Layla's school! She is finishing KG2 and is going into first grade this coming fall! We are very grateful for the school and how positive it is. The principal has a great perspective on trying to educate a whole community and not just the student.

The big push this year was to have SOME sort of order at the certificate ceremony. Typically at big functions like this (which, honestly, rarely happen because women and men don't often sit in the same room) is that the kids run around everywhere and everyone talks on their cell phones. Last year the girls were in AMAZINGLY elaborate dresses. Basically on par with what a NYC fancy wedding flower girl would wear....hair all done up, henna etc etc etc. It is super fun and way over the top. There are also families who bring tons of big balloons, gift bags large enough to hide a small child and many other distractions. 

This year, they INSISTED the children wear their uniforms, arrive early an wait separately in an air-conditioned tent outside (I cannot imagine being the teachers and having to entertain 200 kids in a tent a 8pm at night waiting for their three minutes on stage!) The end result was a much more efficient and streamlined event. 

The afterschool program I do is at this school and the highlight of the evening both last year and this year was the Tae Kwon Do demonstration! It is about the only time when the entire audience is quiet and not looking at cell phones or something (=

Just to give you a sense of the room. Not sure you can actually see anything but this is a cool function of Tom's phone!

Layla is walking on stage with her class. She is the last one in this picture.

Here they are getting lined up for their picture

Her teacher is on the left and I'm not sure of two of the men but I'm sure they are in charge somehow. The guy in the middle is the vice principal who is a very wonderful man. He was with our current principal at their their other school in Sohar. He commutes every week in order to work at this school! The gal on Layla's left is her best buddy.

There is always a small portion given to reading the Q'uran. When this poor kid stood up he dropped the Q'uran! Not sure what his parents must have said later but it is a big honor to be chosen to read.

End of term assembly

Last week was the end of Layla's school where we run the After School program. The school wanted to do one last assembly to wrap up the school year and we were the main event! We handed out the certificates to the kids and gifts to various people who helped out and we had a Tae Kwon Do demonstration. As usual, the demonstration was a huge hit!

This is the third year of the school. The pre school and kindergarten kid s wear the green  shirts and the older kids wear yellow. There are about 250 kids and next year there will be about 400. You can see Layla in the upper center part of the picture. She is sitting next to our friend's daughter, Rebecca.

The prinicpal and most of the staff are from South Africa and are quite experienced with schools in the Middle East.  95% of the student body are local kids and the rest are from ALL over the world.

We have run the after school program for a year and a half and the Tae Kwon Do is always the most popular. Several of the kids earned Yellow Belts this year.

....and everyone's favorite part...Breaking the pieces of wood!

The After School Club - Music class!

So much of life out in the Middle East for me is doing things that I don't really feel  confident about. Part of that this semester was teaching a Music class to 10 elementary girls! I had a solid foundation in music theory growing up (thanks to good old Suzuki method and my Korean violin teacher!) so I was able to do some basic things. We also learned how to play a few songs on the recorder!

Doing something like this is much easier out here as the expectations are much lower than in the US. There students and parents expect lots of technology, color photocopies or things that just aren't available out here.

One of the other classes offered was origami and it was amazed at what they could do!!

The After School Club

Our first meeting was this week. We started with the third though fifth graders which is a much easier group than first and second graders (= I am teaching music to the older group and I haven't taught elementary kids here yet so I was quite curious about how it would all go down.

Layla's school is a British Curriculum International school with about 90% local kids and 10% from elsewhere in the middle east and the rest of the world. I remember meeting one family straight from Iran and no one in the family spoke Arabic. Can you imagine? Thankfully there was some staff member around to translate for them.

The school has been open for three years and is adding a grade every year. The principal and core of the staff are all from South Africa and they are top-notch. The prinicpal says he prefers not to hire american or european teachers because their expectations are too high. They are not prepared to teach with limited materials, or to teach children with families with very very low education levels. Most of the 40 year olds in this country did not group with electricity, paved roads, hospitals or elementary education. Those of you who have been in developing countries know that a country without a long history of education has a whole host of issues that will be worked through as it creates its own educational foundation amongst its people. The principal believes that most South African teachers are more familiar with this dynamic than their American or European counterparts. I think it is a very valid observation.

So anyway - a friend and I decided to start the after school program because we were both hankering to do a little something more in the community and we both had kids at the school. The leadership is very grateful and supportive of us running their after school club because it means that they do not have to do it themselves (= So it is a win-win. We do charge for it for many reasons but MOSTLY to make sure kids actually attend regularly! We have about 7 "classes" offered at any one time and from 50-75 students involved depending on the semester. We are in our third cycle of doing this.

The music class that I taught was pretty basic. We are just doing some rhythm things and will do some basic theory along with having some guest performers. The strangest moment was when I asked a girl her last name and she didn't know what to say. It is similar here to what you read in the bible: layla, the daughter of so and so the daughter of so and so the daughter of so and so etc etc. So she wasn't sure how far to go back and then her friends told her to give her tribe's name but she didn't seem to clear on that (= So we just settled for her first name and then a few more back from that (= So interesting.

I'll post more as we have more going on....the biggest news this week, actually, is that it has been raining off and on for DAYS! this is so amazing. It also means our roof is leaking water. But hey, we love rain out here!

Catching from Easter, to Sue's visit to our road trip

Our wonderful Azeb baking Ethiopian bread at 4am!

 

Sue making Monkey bread 

It took Ryan awhile to get the hang of his first Easter Egg hunt (=

    

Examing in the loot!

Family photo Easter morning 2013

Add caption

Will this work? Captions are not working. I am irritated.

Don't know where this will show up, but after the Easter sunrise service we did an egg hunt then we all took a big nap. Except mama of course.
Then we went to a nice, Western hotel and swam in their lovely pool. It was a fun day and the weather was PERFECT. The camels were randomly walking down the hill behind the hotel. So crazy.

Have i said yet how irritated I am at this crazy caption thing? What is the point?? I love the sunglassse on the kids (=

Our Easter photo - keep in mind we had just come back from a sunrise service in the desert (=