Thankfulness

Thanksgiving was a tough day, but I am actually praising God that I still had to work! It kept me so busy so I was not pinning away missing my family in PA!

Today, I am grading my student's autobiographies. It is actually a great time! I am learning so much about their past and what is special to them.

One of my students is an excellent writer and her life story (even at the age of 10) is touching and filled with the grace of God. She has such a heart for the Lord, the story literally brought me to tears! I think I might have an author here!

But she ends with this, "My life is still short, but plentiful and i am so blessed by the Lord!"

May we always recognize how SHORT our life is here, yet how PLENTIFUL it is through the HAND of the LORD! What innocence, yet divine wisdom! This is why I LOVE teaching kids.....not so much when they are being michevious!

Africa Outfit

here is my new African Outfit! haha...so funny. But this is a typical stlye that you see here. Usually the girls wear them a bit tighter, but I asked for it to be lose.

Joelliane

I just found this...and cracked up. Thought I would share...

On one of my student's Bible notebooks they wrote an acrostic.

B- basic
I- information
B- before
L- leaving the
E- Earth

LOL! what will they come up with next!

5K FUN RUN….oxymoron??

Stupid me thought I was “in shape” and could handle running 5K….3 miles. Not to mention the 7:30 am start…to help fight the heat. But I forgot how steep the hills here, how hot the sun is, and how humid it is! Another teacher, Michelle, and I stayed together the whole race…we kept overtaking each other and then having to catch up. Man I thought I was going to die right in the middle. But afterward, I was glad I did it. Running seems to be like that. Want to start…hate it during….and feel so good about it after you finish. Lol. Good thing I don’t make decisions about when I will run again during the race.

I did make it…and even got 2nd in my age group. Got a nice cheap metal out of the whole deal! Lol. But everyone had a great time. 3 of my students did the run in just under 20 minutes!!! I couldn’t believe it. The best time was 19:20 I think. One of the gardeners names Meshack.

Lots of volunteers made this work. Here is Kate and Naomi pretending to me harsh time keepers.
One of the better points of this school: the parents, community, and anyone else just joins and in and helps out. There were a few different people who go to my church that had no children or involvement with HOPAC, but they set up shop, handed out waters, and cheered on all the kids. It was so sweet to see familiar faces at the half way mark handing me cold water!

I think mainly all the volunteering is because there isn’t much that goes on around here. Events like these seem even more exciting since they are so rare. But even more, it makes the events fun. I know so many of my parents they are now friends to me. People I could go and see help from, pop over and visit, or just call up to talk. I NEVER thought I would say that about the parents of my students.

Yea, I know how red my face is….but you have to remember even at 8:30 in the morning…IT IS HOT!

william's Village

Last Saturday I joined with the team that heads out to a village not too far from us. One of the gardeners at school is a Christian on fire for the Lord and on fire to bring change and improvement to his village. So far, they have raised some money for a church…but the first church was poorly built and has fallen down in the last year. Plus it was built in the middle of the soccer pitch….yea don’t ask…no one really knows the reason why. I think someone just said…ok…here.

Now the biggest challenge in the small villages is the Swahili. We tried to bring as many people with us as we can…and manage with the different words we all know. But we just played games in the morning. Then Michelle told a bit of Bible story (with William as translator) as we handed out snacks.

Here is one of the helpers putting on nail polish. Everyone got nail polish..boys, girls, fingers, toes, arms, faces. It was pretty funny.

As always you meet some kids that just break your heart. One little boy had some mental problems and these are not understood properly here. There is no help for those children and others immediately see something is wrong therefore treat the kids very differently. He tends to hit and bully others, but mainly because people try to discipline him with hitting. So it is not a good situation. We try to stay loving, but he is just a bad kid too. Many, many questions..

Anyway, some of the kids came out to the run our school had. It was so cool to see them interacting with HOPAC students….more about that later. The tallest girl in this picture came to the run. :-)

INTERNATIONAL DAY

This has got to be the best idea ever made. Our school takes one day and celebrates all of its countries. It was so fun! Parents, teachers, and students all put in so much work to make this day happen. Each country comes together and decorates a room with items, decorations, and FOOD from their country.

In the morning all the students come dressed in clothes they would wear in their countries. Then we meet together in the gym sitting in our country group. YEA USA! Once we’ve all assembled, they play the national anthems of each country and the people parade around in the middle. It was so neat to see all the different outfits everyone was wearing and to truly celebrate where everyone comes from. Once this is over, we split off and the kids have “passports” they need to fill in for each country they visit collecting information as they go. And of course they were eating all the food as they went.

The end of the afternoon finishes with dances, songs, skits, and anything you want to show off. The students worked SO hard on all their dances. There was even a group of Koreans who did some Tykwando. Two of my kids broke boards with their hands! I went a bit easy on them the next week…didn’t want anything on me broken too! Lol

Enjoy the pics.

Racism what?

One of my students is a muslim girl and we were hanging out waiting for our soccer game when she said the most AMAZING thing to me. I will never forget it. Just touched my little heart. I pray for her often, she is so torn between the truth that is taught at school and her Muslim family that puts a lot of pressure to believe what they believe.

ANYWAY, she was talking to some people and was saying how IST (another school we play) is a racist team and only play white people…etc. I was just sitting there and didn’t say much. But she turned me just then with a thoughtful look on her face saying, “But not you Miss Reger. You love all of us just the same.” Then she gave me a huge hug and skipped off to find her friends. Poor me, I was left fighting the tears at how she had touched my heart with her compliment.

But it was so much more than that. I was so joyful to see that SHE WAS RECOGNIZING THE TRUTH in her heart. She saw that ALL people whether, Tanzania, Irish, America, English, or Korean…whoever deserved love and to be loved the same. Sigh, it is so encouraging to see the truth of the Bible coming out from this little girl’s heart.

Joys of Coaching

I might have mentioned before that someone who was not thinking has made me the u11 soccer coach. Now my knowledge of soccer includes don’t pick up the ball and kick it towards your goal…so this year of my “teaching” has been a bit challenging. Needless today, the girls didn’t improve terribly much. Not really their fault mainly mind for not knowing how to coach..oh well. But we did have a good season.

Some of the boys team.

The BEST part though was hanging out with the girls before and after the game and going through the pains and sorrows of losing or feeling like you aren’t succeeded. Friday I got to talk with one girl (who really is just terrible at the game!) But she didn’t want to play anymore because she felt she wasn’t good enough. Now I had just enough players to play this second game and two of them were fading fast! So I needed her to play bad or not! But her and I had a great conversation about not giving up and concentrating on just the small victories. Recognizing when we accomplish something instead of the many failure.

She is one of my students and this year I have been struggling with spelling. I am constantly spelling words wrong on the board and the students correct me. Whatever, it happens! But I used that as an example of me messing up and keep on going.

In the game (she plays defense) she made 3 amazing saves and clears. I was screaming at her!! It was so exciting to see her perk up because every time she touched the ball I specifically cheered her on. Yet as her confidence grew so did her skill. It was a tough game to lose. Considering the only goal was scored by our player…INTO OUR OWN NET! Yup that’s my team! Haha, but all the girls left with smiles and a desire to try again next year.

Libby who was struggling with feeling like she wasn't good enough! Poor girl.

Sam....yea scary! :-)

Ha Yeong and Angela...aren't they cute??

Mirjam relaxing between games.

Kemi trying not to laugh.

Drilling the teacher

Yesterday, I felt like I was put in the hot seat with the spotlight turned on! For some reason, my kids suddenly all decided to question faith, God, and the Bible...and ask me if I knew the answers. It started with our discussion of the Romans and how they believed in many gods and goddess. So I took that opportunity to clearly define who is God and who I put my faith in. I explained the difference between lower case "g" and God.

Through it all, I was so thrilled to see how many of the kids were truly seeking answers. You could see the tentativness as they first asked. And as the questions continued, I was able to tell them that questions are fine and it is perfectly alright if they answer my question of "do you believe every single word that is in the Bible?" with "I don't know". So we ended up going through questions and answers of some major Biblical doctrine. Me, trying my best to say things in a way they can understand it, but still speak the absolute truth. I was praying so hard the whole time.

The sad part was to see the many different experiences that these students have already seen of demonic influences and pagan rituals. One of my girls (from India) was at a temple with her friend. A man was proclaiming to bea god, so she walked up to him to "test" him. And asked him what her mother's name was. Now this man didn't know her at all. And he knew her mother's name. she was very frightened and had been wondering about this since it happened. I had to explain to her (and my class) that demons have knowledge and power and pretend to be angels of light. But in the end I think she was reassured once i continued stressing who had the most power and who would in the end win the fight. I must have said a hundred time (well maybe not that many) that she can not trust anything that doesn't come from the Bible. That the devil is liar and trying to trick us.

There were some good questions raised and some were left unanswered for them to seek the answer themselves.

i was exhausted at the end of the day, but also encouraged. So many kids from christian families just listen to what they are told, but never accept it for themselves. Several of my students are really struggling with working out their faith and trying to understand what they themselves believe.

Two students were totally not concerned. They had already weighed the cost and decided to side with the Lord. It was so neat to see how comfortable they were with all these questions having thought through them and even offered some answers.

As much as I love my students, all these questions really messed up my teaching schedule! lol For good reasons I guess.

More walls falling down!

Well the last I had written we had our temporary wall up and the compound was looking good. sadly this did not last long! The following week we had another huge rainstorm. This one was a full day of lightening and thunder (louder than I have ever heard). How I wish I was a good author and could describe the sound, but the storm just felt so close as it got nearer. I literally felt like the thunder was right over my head.



The storm began around 4 am, so that the last hour and a half of sleep was not very good, but it was nice to just lay and look out at the ocean and see the awesome hand of God. Quite breathtaking. I almost didn't mind being up so early.....ALMOST.



One crash was particularly loud. This I come to find out was not one, but TWO of our walls falling down. It wasn't thunder at all.



One wall was right one in front of my house and the other at the back of the compound. The bricks (thankfully) crumbled instead of falling in one big block. If it had fallen as the first wall did, it would have hit our house. So when it happened all we felt like saying was, "Isn't God amazing". He even makes our walls fall down in a way that protects us. Plus as an added bonus our landlord decided that he was going to build them properly this time! So they are almost all back up in bricks with plenty of mortar! We even have supports! Its amazing.



The joys of the rains...and they tell me this is just the short rainy season...

Rains!

This week was a bit interesting!! Monday (maybe Tuesday I forget) it just POURED. It was unbelieveable. I have never seen this much rain come down in one day. But apprentently, I have to get used to this because rainy season (about April-June) there will be just as much rain.

But anyway, around our 6 house compound there was a cement brick wall about 6 feet high. For lots of secruity reasons (not the least of which is we are foreigners who are known for having money) there must be secruity. Hence the huge wall with metal at the top.

Unfortunatly, the rain and wall had a huge fight and the wall lost!! The entire wall just fell over inches away from the closest house. It was next to my house, so no damage there. However, the car that was in front of the wall did not fare so well. Clare had borrowed a school car and the battery died, so it was still at the compound instead of at school. There wasn't major damage because it was parked a bit away from the wall, but ruined the bumper....and added lots of scratches.

So that night, everyone was really nervous. Well, not so much me. but Edwin (the man who takes are of the property) and the owner were both very nervous and made all 4 guards stay that night! We were very protected, and the girls locked every door including the roof door. So that meant that someone wanting to come in, would have had to get past 4 men, scale the wall of a two story house, and sneak in the roof door (that they didn't know was there). I just laughed and went along with it. It is good to take precaution I think.

The next day there was a crew of men there putting up sheet metal as a temporary fence....as in that is what will be there for the next few years I am sure. :-)

Pictures forthcoming...as soon as the computer feels like linking up to my camera. That is apparently not today.

Here is Carley...looking sad at our fallen wall! Or maybe she is laughing..alright. she's laughing!

Egg Drop Experiment

The Friday before break, my kids were so excited. The past few weeks we have been talking about flight. So their project was to make a device that would protect an egg when it was dropped from the top of a fire truck.

As you can imagine, they were very excited. The reward was starbucks (tokens towards a prize store) if they were able to successfully protect their egg. So when the ESD came down the kids would all huddle up and wait to check the egg. As soon as i would say it was good, they would freak out screaming and yelling. The whole class, even if it wasn't their egg. It was so funny.

One of the best parts of the day though, were the firemen. They brought the truck to the school and hung out waitin for us. Then let each of my kids go up in the bucket to drop their ESD (egg saving device). They even came up to my classroom and were hanging out waiting for the end of the day so i could fill out some paperwork. But seriously, such nice guys. and so happy to spend their day helping us!

It was so cute to see all the kids supporting each other. Some even comforting the people whose egg broke! but it was a great day out in the sun.

Sunita, Tanya, and Caleb showin off their ESD.

Aidan, Sophia, and Stephanie are really pumped. Side note: stephanie is the top swimmer in Tanzania and is going to South Africa later in the year to compete against all swimmers in Africa!!