August 6, 2013

After finishing a wild game of Uno (and it’s said ‘you know’, not ‘uw-know’ – sorry Americans) with the seven of us at the farm, I am under my covers, typing up this blog.  My days are quite busy and so I’m finding it hard to find time to do some blogging.  It is a lot of fun at the Farm with so many people and we are getting along great.  We are having awesome meals – chicken parmesan, burgers fried on the braai (or BBQ) and something called  Pakistani Kima which is meat with some veggies and spices and it is served over rice.  We are eating very well over here and since I am not doing anything active this summer like soccer and boating, I think I will need to do a lot of exercising when I come back L.  Book camp – here I come. 

On Monday, I worked in the office and taught until lunch time.  After lunch, I went to Cullinan where there is a diamond mine.  

They had a cute historic street.

Roses were blooming.

A neat tree.

A sidewalk with Afrikaan's words - but I could read most of them. 

The sign when we entered.  

We had to go through security and it felt like we were entering some governmental building. 

Inside the diamond mine.  The big metal structure carries tonnes of rocks to the top where they are separated according to size.

This is the location where the world’s largest diamond was found.  A man’s hand could not wrap around it, it was so big.  They ended up giving a large piece of it to the British royalty.  We did a surface tour and were able to see some of the huge equipment that they use.  I think the neatest thing was seeing the huge pit where they started mining in 1903.  It is 1 km by ½ km and is about 180 m deep.  Now they don’t do open-pit mining, but rather go underground.  The reason that they changed was that when they were doing the open-pit mining, they came across a huge amount of rock that is guaranteed not to contain diamonds and it would take 14 years to remove this rock.  So they decided to go underneath. 

The hole. 

I was expected Tuesday to be another regular day in which I go to the office for a few hours, go to the school for a few hours and then back to the office until about 5.  However, when I showed up at the school, the Grade 4 teacher wasn’t there.  As a result, I taught Grade 4 all day.  Once again, I was left with no lesson plans.  I decided to focus on English since I knew where I wanted to go with that.  To start off the day, we read and discussed a piece from Deuteronomy.  This is quite a hard book of the Bible for students who have English as a second language.  Currently they do not have a strong Bible program, but one has been made for them, so hopefully they implement it soon.  After Bible, we did maths  -not math, as I was calling it “Teacher, why are you calling it math – it is maths?” So this led to a discussion about different types of English and words like eraser rather than rubber, stoplights instead of robots, etc.  After maths, we had breakfast.  It was oatmeal and some of the students did not like it, and so did not eat it –so if any of you have used the saying “Eat all your food as the poor kids in Africa would love to have it”, well, that’s not necessarily true. ( J ) From about 9:30-12:30, we did different ESL activities.  We had a spelling test, practiced their words for next week, started reading a story about a snail, did some drawing and had a story on Roman history.  The day was fun.  There are still things I have to get used to.  For example, “Teacher, can I go to the toilet?”, “Yes, Lucia, you may.” She (as well as any student that asks) then walks to the teacher’s desk, counts out 9 sheets of toilet paper and goes to the toilet.  Another thing I had was a student all of the sudden went out of the room.  I called him back and then he said something and I wasn’t quite sure what he meant.  He then acted out that he had to fart.  (He didn’t know that English word).  He didn’t want to stink up the classroom and so he went outside to release the gas. 

Today was a regular day.  I am getting a long ways on a study guide that I am creating.  This involves taking the lecturers hard-copy notes and putting them on the computer.   About half of the notes were emailed to me, so I didn’t have to retype them.  Some of the notes were online articles, so that didn’t involve much typing, but for the remainder, I had to retype them.  As well, I have to organize it all and make sure it looks professional.  Currently I am at 92 pages and still need to be a fair bit more.  My goal is to get it done before I leave.