Merituh is walking! I am so excited for him. He is walking across the room by himself with great balance. When he gets to me, he is soooo proud of himself and I get to enjoy his wonderful smile and laugh. We did a video last week of him walking and playing with me. Trying to show what a wonderful personality he has. Hopefully, the video will help find perspective parents for him. He really needs someone special. All the children do, but each one of them have different types of personalities and will have their specific type of obstacles as they grow up in the States.
I am also seeing progress in the classroom, little by little. They all now understand how to trace letters & numbers and more than half of them can write without tracing. Over half of them can count to twenty but by memorization. We are still working hard on number & letter recognition. I decided to try and teach something new to the older children. I showed them how to do greater than, less than, & equals. They just sucked it up. I could see they were really excited to learn something new, especially Sammy. He got it right away and did a page of about 50 problems and got them all correct. I was lucky that the day I decided to introduce it, one of the nannies helped me by translating. It is so much easier to get my point across and for them to understand if it’s translated.
My class is now down to a more reasonable number of about 20. This past week a lot of the children that I know went home with their parents. We had a very touching ceremony, like always. But this time a lot of the older children got to go. I spent a little time with the parents and they were very appreciative of having me there and wanted to know everything I knew about their children and what they could do. They really made me feel so special and that what I have been doing is really important. They just kept thanking me and all the kids gave me a big goodbye hug with happy faces. It was really funny, one night when I went to see them at the family guesthouse, as soon as one of the little girls saw me, she looked at me, and said “Mommy, one..two..three”. It was really cute. The Mommy comes from the care center. All the children call Beckie, and even Newton, and me, Mommy.
I can see how teaching can be really rewarding. I really wished that I enjoyed it more than I really do. It would be the best way to get to go to so many different countries and maybe even get paid. I really enjoy the children but I really don’t think I could teach all the time. So I have the utmost respect for those of you who are teachers.
Progress has also been made with my health. I have finally recovered from the flu and have stopped coughing. And my voice is almost back to normal. But now I’m dealing with ringworm. I thought I was going to make it without getting it, since I only have three more weeks. Beckie has had it since I arrived in about four different spots. All the children have it so I was bound to get it. Hopefully, by using Beckie’s prescribed cream I will be able to keep it from spreading.
