I’ve been in Lebanon for 5 months now. It’s funny how you can get used to new things and then they seem totally normal. I spent 21 years living in the UK and I didn’t think it would be easy to adapt to a different way of living. When I go back to the UK, everything’s going to seem so strange. I’ll have to get used to: fresh milk, fitted carpets, 24 hour electricity, 24 hour hot water, supermarkets… the worst thing of all, everything costing so much! Do you know, we can go out for a nice meal here and it’ll cost the equivalent of £3.50.
My class are due to be given their 3rd set of grades soon. These will be ‘daily grades’ and are made from class work not exam results. I’ve found most of the results very encouraging, as they’ve increased since the last time grades were produced. The class is working much better now than they were last time I did daily grades. The naughty ones are better behaved and they all mostly get down and work hard when I tell them to. One boy, whose mother works at the school, found working very difficult at the start. He would not work and turn around and talk all the time. I wrote a report on him every lesson, and wrote a note to his mother in his homework diary whenever he was silly. He now works better than most of the class. I suppose it’s difficult to judge if their grades are going up or whether they are just finding the subject matter easier.
The Bible lessons are going well at the moment also. At the moment I’m teaching about stories that Jesus told (i.e. parables). They seem to be responding to these a lot more than when I was doing Moses. I think the point of the story is more apparent to them. They’re asking a lot of intelligent questions and I think they’re beginning to see past the stories to the meanings – which is good. We are also going parables at the orphanage when we go over to lead the evening’s activities.
This month the chapels are themed on trusting God, and they seem to be going well also. One chapel was disrupted however by a cat. It had crept in to the room the day before and was sleeping in a tent on the stage. When the person leading the chapel moved the tent, it leapt out and caused chaos with the children. It ran and wedged itself between 2 cupboards at the back and the teachers had opportunity to scare it before we chased it out. It is a nasty cat, and we have a rather nasty nickname for it. All the time it’s trying to get into our houses and eat our food. Extremely sly it is.
According to people who’ve lived in the area for their whole lives, this has been the mildest winter yet. We had the heat-wave in December and so far we’ve only had school closed for 4 days because of it (usually it’s 10). Apparently, the villagers had to dig tunnels through the snow in 1992 to get out of their houses. We’ve barely had 20cm this year. Last week we only had 1 day of school. 3 days off for snow and 1 day for a national strike. The strike was in protest at the bombing in Beirut on valentine’s day last year. Our MP is quite outspoken against the people blamed for the bombing so we also took the strike.
When it was Australia Day, we decided to have a barbeque because there are some Australian teachers here. It was snowing and was quite fun. The best part was, the Australians couldn’t light the barbeque. They are used to these gas things. They found it highly amusing that we had to use charcoal and that it was cold and wet. They soon stopped laughing when we told them that it was the average conditions for barbeques in Britain! We found some sausages, though we don’t know what meat was in them. They were too cheap for most animals. I suspect they were cat or something.
I’ll sign off, I have some bread in the oven, so I need to go and make sure it’s not burning.
Pete_k
|
