Blessings!

This week my house really felt the "This is Africa" experience. TIA (this is Africa) is a common response here to when things don't go as planned, things you were expecting don't happen or don't exist,  or basically life just became a lot simpler. For example, at least once if not a few times a week the power will go out. The funny thing is it doesn't really phase me or anyone else living here, it just happens and you work around it without question! Well, on Wednesday our water pump broke. This means the water had to be turned off for several days while it's being fixed. Living without water however has been a blessing! It means we have to get creative and adventurous- something I love! It means I have an legit excuse to not take a real shower for a few days (hope that doesn't gross you out haha!). It means my roommates and I wash each other's hair with a bucket and the neighbor's water. Most importantly it means we are experiencing the life style of a very large percentage of the  households living in this continent. So many families here not only don't have running water, but also may have to walk hours or even days to get water and bring it home. We only had to walk next door to fill up a bucket of water to brush our teeth. (As I say in my class) Easy peasy lemon squeezey! While living several days without water has been an adventure, I feel incredibly blessed and thankful that this is a rare occurrence and generally I can turn on a faucet on a day to day basis.

On a completely unrelated note, my kids are still wonderful. While being a first year teacher includes challenges, I can never go a day without smiles and laughter. Almost all of my students speaks English, but most of them speak British English. This means their vocabulary is slightly different than your average american 5 year olds. Here are a few examples...
When they have a loose tooth, they tell me "My tooth is shaking!" When they are hurting or have a head ache, they say they are "paining" "Miss Merz, my head is paining!" If someone is ignoring them or not doing what they want, they will say things like "She refuses to get off the swing." or "He is refusing to listen to me," always refusing. When they get warm they ask me if they may "remove" their sweater (or sometimes "jumper") . It took me about a week to find out why my kids kept telling me that I looked "smart." I thought it was so funny that they would say that I "looked smart" until I found out that looking smart just means you are well dressed and has nothing to do with your intelligence.
I know there are more phrases they use that are different than how Americans speak English, but I think I'm becoming so used to it now that I can't think of any more.

And a last tid pit that is also completely unrelated to anything else in this post. Today I was asked to come lifeguard for a birthday pool party of one of the 3rd graders. The birthday girl received some wonderful gifts, but everyone agreed that the best 2 gifts she got were a heath bar (American candy is super rare here, so it's a pretty big deal to have it) and a chicken. Yes, a live chicken for your 9th birthday, as she said after opening the box and seeing it, "This is the best birthday ever!"

Well this post was full of some pretty random thoughts, but I have such a hard time thinking of what to write sometimes, I figured I would take advantage of my rare inspiration and write about all of it. Hope you enjoyed!

Love Love and more Love!

Life is still good!

I figured you guys were probably getting tired of reading, so here's a video instead! Enjoy :)