Joy - Day One

Let's do a photo-story today, yeah?

To get from the main New Life office to Boma (the town where Fountain of Joy is located) we took a 20 minute daladala (bus) ride and then went the rest of the way in this little thing. It has three wheels and looks like a cross between a tractor and a motorcycle and a volkswagon bug. I’ll get a picture of the outside next time, it’s such a funny looking car! We stopped at Zoe babies nursery on the way because it is right next door and we wanted to check if the Joy girls were there

Are they in the kitchen? No...

Are they in the nursery? No...but the babies are so darn cute

Say hello to Angel, Anita, Precious, and Purity (or as she calls herself, Pwetty)

Some of these babies are the children of the girls at Fountain of Joy, the others were left on the street either because their parents were insane or passed away. Now they are in the care of the New Life Mamas, Bwana asufiwa

Okay, time to do some actual work. Girls, say hello! This was the class I taught today (there was one man too but he didn’t make the picture. He was a teacher who wanted to come and learn English as well)

The lesson today was on emotions

They know I am 18, but they completely respected me as a teacher. This was evidence to me of how truly they want to learn

The girl standing is named Happy. Ironically, she is acting out the emotion sad. After they repeated the emotion out loud, the wrote it in their notebooks, and then I asked one girl to act each one out. The negative emotions were hard for them to act because they couldn’t help smiling, but I guess there are worse problems…

The lesson was a full day lesson, so I taught them a song in English to keep the mood light

And where there is song, there is dance

After we sang and danced, I wrote sentences in Swahili on the board and asked the girls to write the English versions. For example, I’d write “Mimi nina wasiwasi” They would write “I am worried.” Then, they would say it aloud and act it out

The final activity was for the girls to create their own sentences. Given that it was the end of the day, I thought this one was fitting…

This has been my favorite teacher-student experience so far. I can’t wait to return next Monday.