March 15

I'm not in the mood to type much because I just finished embellishing a lot to finish a donation request for some computers. We are trying to get a few more so that we could have a computer class in the weekly schedule. Yesterday and today we had visitors from Raleigh International who will be building a playground at my school during this term break. The two people (1 American and 1 Brit) who will lead the group came for a visit to check out the camp site and nail down a few more particulars before the other 13 people arrive to help with the final design and construction. Of course there was a little excitement, nothing can go as smoothly as I would like. They were supposed to arrive today after lunch, have some meetings, overnight here and drive back to their base camp tomorrow. Yesterday morning I got a ready or not call, they are ahead of schedule and will be there this evening. No problem, I told all the people affected that they would arrive early, we can still meet the next day and we'll be fine. Except that the hostel superintendent who assured me that he had accommodation for them left town and didn't return until very late. I greeted our guests around 6pm, gave them a quick tour of the school and sent kids to check on the accommodations. I convinced them not to set up their tents since the mosquitoes are bad right now, we've had rain the last couple nights, and I was assured that there was accommodation arranged for them. By 8pm we had eaten dinner but no sign of the hostel superintendent who had everything arranged. Finally I got another teacher to help me track down the head matron who was slightly intoxicated celebrating her finishing school and being a newly qualified teacher. The rooms were ok but the bathrooms were non functional and there weren't any mattresses. Everything worked out and I got to spoil them with some cookies, coffee and a shower. All luxuries on their 3 month camping excursion with Raleigh. Over dinner we both got our questions answered and had a nice conversation at the pace of native English speakers. I really enjoyed hosting them and they were wonderful guests; they even swept my kitchen after tracking in a bunch of sand. Six more days of class before exams start. But, with a 4 day weekend in the middle and exams starting on a Tuesday, I've basically stopped with new material and am trying to give the kids some good review work. All of that sort of thing I have to make up myself because the book doesn't have more than 10 questions per chapter and half of them are irrelevant. I've got a chalkboard with lots of yellow and orange chalk. Yes, yellow (Golden Hurricane) is better than orange (OSU) and just to be thorough, red is impossible to read on the chalkboard, sorry Sooners. Try getting that graduation rate out of the cellar.