glona day 3

i can't remember if anything exciting slash interesting happened before glona. i don't think so, classes were long as usual and we played with the hundreds of kids before we taught. this little boy named joshua has decided that he is my personal body guard before glona and he sticks to me like glue. he holds my water bottle for me when i play clapping games with the girls.

oh, i have noticed that in ghana violence is much more widely accepted than in the US. if a kid doesn't want another one near him or her they just whack the other person. the teachers threaten "beating" but they never really do it. the kids actually think its really funny. one of the teachers i work with, Madame Rose (she's Ghanaian), asked me yesterday if she should keeel the children who weren't paying attention. she said: Madame Stephanie, should i keeeel them? and all of the children started laughing.

glona just keeps getting better and better. i'm excited now that i've started to form bonds with my kids. they are doreen (17), moses (16 i think), solomon (16), samira (11), hannah (12), and benedicta (14). we taught them to spell the numbers eleven through twelve again. i noticed that moses was having a really tough time spelling any of the numbers. i pulled him to the side and asked him to phoenetically sound the word out. i discovered he couldnt match any phonetic sound with any letter. i asked him if he had been in school for that lesson and he said yes, but since i didn't believe i asked solomon and solomon said that he had been absent. this just shows how difficult it is to teach at glona: the students can't have set terms because they stop coming to school for periods of time. then when they come back, they are far behind the others. so moses, who was trying to learn how to spell numbers with everyone else, was really struggling because he couldn't sound out the words to match them to the letters. once he got it correct, though, was soooo amazing. everyone was so excited for him and he was excited too. it took them a long time to learn it all but everyone was SO happy when they did. i loved the feeling i got from know i helped them learn and was able to pinpoint the root of his struggle.