This has been a very busy week and a half, unfortunately, not with many “fun” expeditions. Rather, I have been creating exams for second and third graders that are scheduled to last 2 ½ hours. The children come at 7:15 and leave at 10:00 a.m. This proves difficult when you factor in language restrictions as you try to create a science exam that is about animals in their various habitats. Or you have student like Alfian, who tell me that his brain is broken and he can’t do the exam!
Compounding that, I’ve been creating and running off my co-teacher’s exams as she has been hospitalized. Medy has not been able to keep any food or liquid down for the past two weeks of her 8 weeks of pregnancy, so her doctor put her in the hospital to receive nourishment via I.V.
I’ve not been sleeping well, so I am up and ready to go long before Pak Toto (the driver) picks me up at 6:00 am. So I began walking to school. It’s light and somewhat cool at 5:30 in the morning, and the school is about ½ hour walk from my house. I get to see a quieter Cirebon. There are becak drivers who have 8 or 9 huge blocks of ice stacked in their becak as they laboriously pedal to their destinations. I’m fascinated and wonder how much ice melts during the journey.
I’ve also begun to walk around a track that is part of a military base next to the school. After school, when it’s slightly cooler, I head over and walk for about 20 minutes. I’ve attracted a “gaggle” of little ones, who at first were shy and would only peek over the dirt mounds that line the track. They remind me of the scene in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy’s house lands on the wicked witch in Munchkin land. After a few times around the track they began to pop out and became bolder, waving and saying hello. Now we all look forward to my daily walk.
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