more questions from dad and teaching today

i'm about to go get my hair braided (which is probably going to take 5 or so hours) so i'm not sure if i will finish this post.

today was full of good and bad. the morning was incredibly frustrating. i'm not sure if i was just over tired or impatient, but i had a really hard time teaching the kids. at first it was only gifty, and i realized that it is too hard for me to teach her to speak, write AND read english all at once. i'm focused on just trying to teach her to speak. but then the other children came, and for whatever reason, they did not feel like learning today. we slowly worked our way up to small sounds but they kept guessing. it drives me crazy that they see the letter p and yell any word that starts with p. they've been taught backwards: they taught themselves to just remember words by sight of the first letter so that they can do well on tests, but now i have to teach them that is bad and THEN teach them how they should have learned in the first place. they were all about guessing today and it was frustrating. i know that me being angry or annoyed doesn't help their learning so i'm trying to be patient but this morning was rough.

this afternoon was much much better. for lunch, mhairi and i went to a chinese restaurant that we'd been to before. then we went to go visit our drummer friend. he was so excited to see us. we hung out on the beach behind the market for the few hours that we had free. it was nice to be able to hang out somewhere i felt comfortable; we hadn't yet found a place like that for us and it's too expensive to take a cab back to our hotel and then back again to teach. we stumbled upon some really cute little kids playing soccer. they were about 3-6 years old. they yelled at me: abroni! (oh-bro-knee, it means white person) snap my picture! so i got some really cute pictures of them playing soccer and falling all over themselves to be the only one in the picture. it's sad that the beaches here are used for trash dumps (the ones that aren't touristy). the beach was a mess and the sewage line emptied into the ocean along this particular beach. for the afternoon session i had to teach the special class again. we spent the whole time reading. i'm really impressed with how well they can read. i didn't really see that when i was volunteering during the study abroad part of the trip. i was most proud of Hannah (a girl who comes for the morning lessons) because she was leading the whole class in reading today. this is a girl who was sent for extra treatment because she can't read, and she was reading better than anyone else. i was so so soo proud of her. it was a really great moment that i could literally see that the frustrations i face in the morning really do pay off in the afternoon.

so, speaking of beaches, my dad had some questions about them. the water is really warm. its very comfortable to go swimming but the waters are dangerous so i've only gone in once. they have markers that show people where they are allowed to swim and i only swim if Brad (a really good swimmer slash lifeguard friend) is with us so he can save me. i haven't seen anyone build any sand castles the way kids in america do. usually boys are playing football (soccer) on the sand and girls are watching. people don't really lay out the way americans do, obviously because they don't need to get any more tan. most people who live on the beach or who hang out at the beach alot are rastafari men. it depends on the beach that you go to whether or not the sand is soft. mostly yes, but i've been to one little rock beach. also, i've never seen anyone boogie board or surf. the waves are usually too big and i hear that the undertoe is really bad. actually, almost all of the africans i have encountered don't know how to swim.