breaking it up.lykke li

Spiders. hate em. never will enjoy their presence. Sunday night the roomies and I were watching Thomas Crown Affair on the bottom part of my bunk bed with our backs against the wall and the window open. There were about 20 minutes left of the movie when I looked to the space on the wall between my head and Sharla's only to see one of these (http://www.dkimages.com/discover/previews/995/80001188.JPG). Ew. Back in my first blog, I mentioned a spider just the same as this one in los tweems' room, except that one was not chillin next to my head. So after I saw this second one and probably made some girly squeal, Sharla then started to say as if it was totally cool, "I thought I felt something crawling on my head earlier." Ashley also played it cool, but I could definitely tell Katy felt the same as me, even though she did not act as girly as me. Being the cruel roomies that they are, okay maybe an exaggeration, they made me finish the movie while it was still crawling along the wall. Naturally, I could not focus, and when it was over, I made Sharla kill it despite the fact that they kill mosquitoes. This is no ordinary task because these suckers are super quick and jumpy. We usually keep the windows open at night for the cool breeze, but I have not opened mine since only to find out from Anne that they are inside the house and do not come from the outside...and Robin called me and Katy newbies for caring. I will always care. creepy.

Monday was a holiday here so we hopped in the truck to go to Cabarete, which is about 45 minutes away. The beach there is wonderful because you have the opportunity to watch the professional kite surfers out in the water. I do not know how they do that. It requires some major arm strength and the lack of fear of sharkys, scary. This weekend Sharla wants to vaca there with the tweems so she asked me and Katy to come with her. Weekend at the beach, with the occassional watching of Isaak and Jakob, not too bad :) Jakob calls me nendall now. Katy tried to teach him to say k-k-kendall to practice saying the k sound, and instead he now says k-k-nendall. No joke, every time he calls me over or to look at him he says that because he actually thinks that is my name. I know I should correct him, but it is just so cute! Jakob and Isaak just got stick horses for their birthday from Nana so all day long Jakob says "be horsey" to me, and for hours I run around the room in circles with him and Isaak pretending to ride a horse. I make all sorts of sound effects for them...ok I will stop there.

Side note for Wednesday morning at the preschool: I help Cristina out, but it is usually getting things done for her, helping the children with their manipulatives, or just plain being a kid with them during free time. I have not had the real opportunity to teach yet, obviously since I do not know the language, but Cristina asked me to read a book to them on this particular morning. The book had the sentences in English then in Spanish so I assumed she wanted me to read it in English. Ohhh absolutely not...I smiled and said "en Ingles?", and she responded also in a smile with "no, in espanol." I wish someone could have been recording this. It was a sight to see! I pronounced word after word wrong, read the story so slow, and found myself pronouncing the words like they were French words (for those of you that do not know, I took French for three years so when I say something in Spanish, I want to use a French twist :) ). Quite a humorous sight to see. At least I have a sense of humor about it, eh?

After school on Wednesday, I went with Ashley to one of the villages called Chichigua that sends kids to our preschool. Ashley goes every Wednesday to hang out with her students' families so I decided to join her this week. We got there and walked around at first, and I felt slightly overwhelmed. I just walked around and smiled at everyone having no idea what they were saying. This can be very intimidating. You really do get the feeling of what it is like for those who move to the US and do not know English. So we continued walking around and one of the families invited us into their home. When I say home, I mean a one room shack. My student Rebecca and Ashley's student Jeson lived there with their mom, dad, three sisters, and baby brother...more than a humbling experience. In addition, as I am feeling overwhelmed about not knowing Spanish or Creole, the dad starts speaking to me in English. This was a blessing from God for sure because it is rare to go into these poor villages and meet people who speak English, yet here was this man who spoke Spanish, Creole, English, French, and is learning Italian...again I felt humbled. I was so glad that for my first experience God provided me an opportunity where I could communicate with my student's parents. One of the daughter's named Jessica, who is absolutely beautiful, decided she wanted to give me a Spanish lesson so she started talking to me in Spanish, which was crazy because I followed a lot of what she said, and pointed to everything in the room, saying it in Spanish, and making me repeat it. She tried to give me her plain paper to take home to write words on (only paper she has) so I could bring it to Bible school, and she would check it. I have felt grateful about a lot of things, but I think this was one of the greater times. I want to keep writing about it, but I do not think I could express in a short paragraph how I felt at that moment. I could probably write another page about this girl, but I will move on for the sake of not rambling.

So beach weekend in Cabarete with Sharls, los tweems, Katy (aka teetee by Jakob), and I. You will probably hear about it in the next blog of course.
PS I have the whole week off before Easter, and I am trying to decide where to go. If there is a specific country, city, you name it in this vicinity (in the Caribbean or South America) that I should go to, let a girl know :) love you guys!