St Jude's

On Sunday we all went to this orphanage called St. Jude's where we saw 90 children ranging from new born baby's to 16 years old, most of them wearing rags...none of the baby's or younger children were wearing any type of diapers. All those places you see and hear about on TV...well there it was, so real, staring me in the face. When we arrived we were greeted by many of the children with a hand shake and them bowing to us. We played with the children for hours. After we were there for a while we sat down and the children sang and danced for us. 10 of the children were HIV positive, many of the children were there because their parents had died in the war. My heart just hurt for these children. What struck me at the core was that these kids were 'performing' for us! What had we done to deserve them to perform for us? These children that seemed to have nothing in my eyes, had everything in their own eyes, a safe place to sleep, food, water, and even a soccer ball to play with!

I have been in the classroom observing for 2 days now and it's been great! I've already been up at the board teaching and walking around, checking the students note books for understanding. Denis is a really good teacher and knows his stuff but yet after every class he asks, 'So what do you think? How was it?'. I feel so blessed to have been paired with a teacher who wants my advice and respects me as a woman math teacher. There are not very many women math or science teachers in Uganda and the men sometimes treat the women poorly. We teach each level of Secondary School, S1, s2, s3, and s4. Our class sizes range from 40 to 80. The students are incredibly well behaved! I shall right a whole other blog on that later! When speaking in English, the people here have a British accent, so I have acquired a little bit of the accent, if you do not speak in the accent they can not understand you. It has slowed down my speech, which if you know me I tend to talk very fast, so it is a good thing that I am learning how to speak slower, especially for in the class room.

I want to thank all of you for actually reading this blog, in the beginning I did not think anyone would actually read it! So I will be sure to continue posting frequently! You are all so special to me! I am grateful to have such a supportive group of friends and family!

Casey