Beth's Adventures in Mbarara Uganda

For Valentine's Day, the kindergarten, p2, and p4 students created a "Sweetheart Cafe" for their parents. The kids came early and helped set up, then they served as waiters and waitresses for their parents. It was just lovely!

We also had a combined Valentine's Day party during school, where we ate a yummy picnic lunch, had a guest reader (KK), decorated heart-shaped cookies, and played fun games.

Make sure you check out my pictures: http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/bethellent/my_photos

My wonderful roommate, Terri, made Amy and I dinner! Plus we got to eat chocolate-covered strawberries!! YUMMY!!

Be sure to see the pictures at http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/bethellent/my_photos)

*We took a planet walk (WAY BACK IN SEPT.), where we mapped out the solar system. We drove stakes into the ground and measured proportionally how far away all the planets are from each other.
*We tried to figure out if "Ooblech" is solid or liquid.
*We kept track of the medals won during the Olympics and made a huge pictograph to show each country's medals.
*We tried our hand our explaining how to make an "apple carousel." So, ours may not have turned out the way they were supposed to, but we had fun trying to follow each other's directions anyhow!
*We went on a field trip to the Coca Cola Bottling company to learn about their recycling and environmental efforts to preserve our world. Unfortunately, they wouldn't let us take cameras inside there, but we took a couple of pictures outside with our tour guide, Nicholas.
*We're doing "book projects" every month and we got to present our first ones to the class.
Curt read "Moccasin Trail"
Kiho read "A Cricket in Times Square"
Eric read "The Sign of the Beaver"
Herin read "Misty of Chincoteague"

On December 14, the preschool, kindergarten, P2 and P4 students put on a Christmas program for their parents in the evening. Some kids read scriptures, some played the keyboard, some the recorder, and of course we all sang lots of Christmas carols.

Thursday, December 15 was our last day before the Christmas holiday. We had a "progressive" combined party, where we started out in the P2 classroom doing crafts, then we travelled up to the P4 classroom, where we played some fun games and even exchanged gifts with each other. We ended our party at the Kindergarten classroom, where we ate some yummy treats and watched a fabulous movie, "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!"

Be sure to check out my pictures website: http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/bethellent/my_photos to see lots of pictures of our Christmas celebrations!

Way back in November and December, we did a big unit on some Laura Ingalls Wilder books and Native Americans. We ended our Laura Ingalls Wilder unit by having a big "Pioneer Day," where we made several different treats to eat and played some Pioneer and Native American games. It was quite funny to see the faces of the students as they tasted some of the foods, like vinegar pie, cornmeal mush, fried cornmeal mush, etc. They DID enjoy making the ginger molasses cookies (because they got to roll them out and carve out shapes with knives), but they didn't really like eating them so much. As we made our own butter, the kids commented how thankful they are for "Blue Band" (the Ugandan margarine gook that doesn't need to be refridgerated or anything!) because their arms were tired of shaking the cream. Plus it just didn't taste that great!

Also, as we studied Native Americans, the students created Alphabet books and we did many other different activities. We made a class totem pole, created clay coil pots, tried to do some rain chants/dances, "weaved" paper mats, and even made Navajo fry bread (which was a HIT!). There are some pictures of my P4 students reading their Native American Alphabet books with the P2 students.

Please make sure to check out my picture website (http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/bethellent/my_photos) to see some of the pictures!

p.s. Pioneer Day never could've happened without my sister, Debbie's, help! THANKS DEB!

So, in a journal entry, one non-English speaking student of mine wrote about how much she enjoyed our Folk Lore unit, where we kept all our papers in a "blindfold" and turned them in at the end of the unit.


We've recently been working on complete sentences, run-ons and of course fragments. They had to determine which each was, and then correct if necessary. The "sentence" was:

Although the fish were biting.

One student said, "That's a fragment. So I changed it to, 'Although the fish were biting us."

Another student said, "Although the fish were biting us, we told them to stop fighting."
A second try was, "Although the fish were biting, they were not angry."

So, I've been walking a lot lately--for exercise--not just to get where I need to go (since I have no car). If I'm walking alone (as opposed to walking with one of my teammates/wonderful walking partners), I just grab my ipod and hit the "track" around our glamorous golf course here in Mbarara. The trick of walking here is knowing which side of the road to walk on because piki-pikis might just zoom up behind you. Of course with my ipod blaring in my ears, it's even more difficult to be ready for them.

Anyhow, I get lots of "looks" from Ugandans as I'm walking. I think this is mainly because I'm a muzungu (white person). And I'm not just talking about a glance here and there...I'm talking about full-out STARING. When I make eye contact, they don't usually even look away. So I decided to try smiling at everyone I passed as we made eye contact. I'll have to admit that I was pretty discouraged that most people didn't even smile back. . .

UNTIL, I remembered that people in Uganda often use and smile with their eyebrows. So I started doing the same thing. I raised both of my eyebrows as I smiled at everyone I passed. And it worked! The smiles started coming faster than you can say, "Power's out."

I guess smiles aren't always universal...unless you know what's considered a "smile".

• When I was babysitting the Baker children and the power was out, I stood out in the hallway while the kids were supposed to be going to bed. I happened to “overhear” bits and pieces of their conversation. HOW PRECIOUS!
• While I was walking to town church from the Bakers’ house, I passed my house and there were kids playing in our tree-house. It was the neighbor’s kids who called out to me, just a friendly hello. As I kept walking, passing our neighbor’s home, I heard someone calling to me again. This time it was Fahd, calling from high up in the tree. When Fahd what he was doing up there, he replied matter-of-factly, “Eating chocolate.”
• One night when power was out, I left from the Bakers’ home to run home and get another change of clothes. Because the power was out and it was overcast, it was pitch black. I guess I sort of “forgot” we have a dog and must have jumped a mile when she came running up to me. Apparently Livingstone was sitting outside and saw the whole thing and just died laughing.
• So, I was riding this piki piki (moped-type bike) on the way to the Fouts’ house the other night and my driver tried to get up their steep driveway. He was spinning his tires pretty badly and I was worried the bike was going to just fly out from underneath us. So instead of waiting to crash, I kind of jumped off the piki piki, but the driver tried to grab me to hold me on the bike and I ended up falling off. Livingstone saw this one from our house too. I guess he gets all sorts of laughs because of me!
  

So, our house has DSTV (don’t get too excited, we only get about 25 “African” channels about 75% of the time), and we had the chance to watch the super Bowl live from UGANDA! The only catch was that it started at 2 am! It was a long night…but a lot of fun.

Lori and David showed up around 11:30 pm, and then Jay came around 12:15 am, followed by Shane and Carole at 12:30. Everyone brought all sorts of treats—Chex mix, M&Ms, Hershey’s Miniatures and more!

Most of us lasted throughout the whole game—even that lovely half time show! I think it might be time for Mick Jagger to retire!

The game was pretty good, although I think the refs made some pretty bad calls, all in favor of the Steerlers! We were worried about the power going out at 6:00am (and the game wasn’t over yet!), but luckily we escaped that power load-shedding. The power stayed on and we were able to see the whole game without the deafening generator.

Luckily, we were able to sleep in this morning a little bit too. Then this afternoon, ESPN Africa replayed the game around 4, but we had to start the generator because out power went out at around noon. Curt Baker came over and watched most of it by himself. He had his own little Super Bowl party…make sure you see the pictures on my picture website. It was very cute. He even asked if we could fast forward the commercials!