Last week's post

As much as I love being here, I am very much aware of when I will leave. It’s weird. I do feel "at home" here, but then I know that I am only temporary. Ultimately, I have another home that I will return to, and everyone will continue here as they do now. I didn’t realize that I would think about home so much. I think about it all the time. If I’m not comparing the way things are here to what they are like at home (school system, transportation, health and safety, people), then I’m thinking about what things will be like when I go back to Vancouver. When I think about home in relation to here, it’s just about always in a positive way (there are so many things – foods, stories, pictures – that I can’t wait to share with everyone), but it can almost be distracting, because it’s always in the back of my mind.
Anyway, this was week 10 (counting down – there are 9 weeks left). I’m not counting down in an "Oh, thank goodness, almost over kind of way" – it’s the complete opposite ("Help! Only x# of weeks left and there’s so much that I want to do!)! But then I think everyone finds that.
Last weekend we stayed here at the school, which felt really nice. As much as I love traveling around the area, it’s a lot more relaxing just hanging out here. On Sunday we had our picnic! It was a really nice day. Rosalie & I spent ages making sandwiches (peanut butter and banana, honey, cucumber – without the crusts of course! –, and jam), insisting on doing it all by ourselves (meaning that we had an enormous audience). We’d bought 5 loaves of bread, and had calculated to make about 50 sandwiches. We also had carrot sticks, bags of chips, biscuits, sweets, pop, and 2 cakes. It was a feast, but then we were also feeding about 25 people, and if you could see the amount of rice that they can all put away, you’d understand why we were afraid we didn’t have enough! Anyway, it was all a great success. We walked down to the train loop, which is about 3km down the road, and made all the boarders carry something (the boys got really into that & kept trying to get us to give them more things to carry). Then R & I served them all (some of them were really suspicious of the peanut butter and banana sandwiches and refused to try them), and managed to completely stuff them all out (so much so that none of them were hungry at dinner)! Then they all played cricket for a bit, and we walked back to the school in time for tea.
This week’s event (we’ve managed to get away with having an interruption to regular classes every week so far!) was Earth Day, on April 22nd. One of the teachers had prepared a program, so we were to teach classes I to V a song (actually, they’d wanted us to teach more than one song, I think, and/or a poem or two, and up to class VI but we don’t even have any classes with them). In true Blue Diamond/Indian fashion, they told us about the program less than a week before it was to take place, meaning that we had to scramble to a) find a song that we could sing/teach that was about the earth and b) teach it to them all in time. We settled on All Things Bright and Beautiful (for lack of any other ideas, given that we couldn’t use the internet here*) – not a favourite of either of ours, but at least it is somewhat to do with the earth. Also in true Blue Diamond fashion was how increasingly elaborate the production became as it drew closer to the event. On the actual day, it began with an assembly, then a break because the guests of honour hadn’t arrived (and it was ridiculously hot), then a rally (which was so funny – we walked up and down the main road, the students had placards, and they all shouted slogans like "Save the trees Save the earth!", "Save the water save the life!", and something like "No deforestation Yes aforestation!"), followed by speeches made by the guests of honour (scientists from the gov’t environment department), that were painfully long in the heat. We were also supposed to give a speech (which they only told us about on Monday), but fortunately got cut in the efforts to keep the program as short as possible. Then we finished with the song, gave out a few prizes, and everyone did their best to get out of the heat of the grounds as quickly as possible. The whole program was originally meant to be about an hour, then an hour and a half, but took the entire morning.
The only other noteworthy thing I can think of about this week is how many horrible, creeping, crawling monster-bugs that are making appearances in our room! I guess it will be good for me (I’m already less squeamish about cockroaches, and am now able to suppress my screams when I see them), but they’re not exactly pleasant. However, one of the advantages of sleeping across from the boys is having a ready supply of spider-catchers when needed!