Semana Tres y Los Caballos

It’s the end of my third week here and I am even more in love.

I had a taste of what a “normal” week looks like. No work team. No visitors. No parties. Just a few normal school days.  It was a wonderful week! I am continually amazed at the amount of time I have on my hands here. I guess when you cut out drive time to and from school, preparing meals, and all that jazz, there is much more time to spare! It’s a beautiful thing to be able to take a walk down some steps, across a yard, through a kitchen, and up some more steps, and be at school in just a couple minutes. Sure beats the 30 minute drive (one way) I made for student teaching.--Our school schedule will be changing a bit this week. Our school is going to be accredited which means that our students will be able to take the test that public schools give during the year. However, we just got some of the books/curriculum for that and there is a test coming up in a couple weeks. Prayers that our kids would adjust to this new schedule well and work hard to cover what needs to get done as well as prayers for us teachers would be greatly appreciated during this time of transition!

It’s amazing how different life is here. I don’t mean in the ways you might be thinking: people speaking in Spanish, no toilet paper in the toilet or anything like that. I mean the simplicity of life. I feel like life in the States is so fast paced, high stress, and go, go, go! all the time, so it’s nice to have time to relax a bit, work out, read a book. I started reading a book when I got here and finished it last Monday! I can’t tell you the last time I’ve leisurely read a book…and I’ve already started another one. J This week, we also started up a new series for our ladies Bible study, which I am really looking forward to!

Wednesday, we celebrated (briefly) the students’ 100^th day of school. We had a few fun activities for the younger students to do in honor of the special day. They each painted 100 dots (of paint) with Qtips onto a paper and they also were able to decorate a little crown that said “100 days smarter!” They wore their crowns around all day and I even had a few kids wearing them on Thursday just for fun! :) You can check out a few pictures of these crafts at the end of this post!

Friday, we did not have a normal day of school. Friday ended up being our Saturday, a day for planning school for the next week, and Saturday (today) ended up being our Friday in the form of a field trip to the city. I really didn’t know what to expect. All I heard about this trip was that there would be horses from all over the world and we would all get to wear out matching red shirts!

The trip itself wasn’t too eventful. Almost half of the kids are sick and did not come with us—Prayers that they would be feeling better would be greatly appreciated! At least one member of the family has been sick all week and it just keeps getting passed from person to person.—We got to see lots of beautiful horses from all of the world, watched a few ‘competitions’ if you can call them that, saw the worlds fattest cow (at least the biggest one I’ve ever seen), and watch some horses ‘dance.’ The kids were exhausted afterwards and we stopped by Costco to get some pizza for lunch (at 4) before we left the city and headed home. Check out some fun pictures from the trip below!

100th day dots

100th day dots

100 days smarter!

Me with my buddy at the horse expo. She's such a cutie!

We got a group picture with what some kids called the "camel cow"!

He's HUGE...and has a hump?!

This is the main site where we watched the horses dance. There were horses lined up all around the ring and one at a time came up on the platform and danced while a band played music for them.

Dancing away...