Feelin’ hot hot hot. (It’s 95°F outside.)

Sorry that it has taken me so long to update this again. I meant to do it a bunch of times, but I got a little lazy. And then I got sick. But I’m better now, with being sick, not being lazy. I think I’ll always be lazy. Since Thursday I’ve been feeling really tired and my eye has been a bit red and swollen. I went to the doctor Monday night and got medication and have been resting. I feel a lot better and a lot more energized and my eye has cleared up (though on the outside it looks a bit like someone punched it). Like the title of this post says, it’s a bit hot outside. We think that I got sick because of the heat and also because I’ve been accidentally drinking the tap water pretty regularly. Oops.

Before I got sick, I’d been trying to figure out the best way I could help out at the Terry Wood’s School at House of Martha. I had been teaching a few lessons in the classes, and while that was a great learning experience for me, it wasn’t really productive in any other way. The biggest need with the kids there is with their lack of good reading skills. Since there are about forty kids at House of Martha and definitely not as many caregivers, the kids miss out a lot with no one able to work one-on-one with them, as a parent might do. So it would be great for someone (like me) to work with them on their reading skills one-on-one. I’m really excited. To find suitable books for the reading levels the kids are at, I decided to look at the library at the school, and I found that it isn’t really organized. I started to attempt to organize the small library at House of Martha. I don’t pretend to be a librarian, and after this, I have no ambition of every becoming one. Haha. Now that I’m better, I’m going to start that slightly daunting project again.

I’m slowly learning Nyanja/Chewa. I have a notebook that I keep with me in which I’ve been writing all of the words and phrases I learn. Nyanja is a much, MUCH simpler language than German. My relief when I realized this was massive. Learning German was (to put it very lightly) an incredibly humbling experience for me.

One of the most amusing things I’ve noticed about myself since I’ve come here is the change in music I listen to regularly. Wilco and Keane have been shunted aside for the likes of…Taylor Swift? It’s kind of funny, as at home I have a tendency to not know a lot of popular songs (like that Airplane song. I’ve never heard it all the way through. It’s terrible, anyway. Someone gave it to me to put on my iPod a month before I left so I’d at least be attempting to know popular music. Nope. It’s annoying). I think the getting into popular music has to do with homesickness of some type. But it’s still funny when I look at my most played music on my iTunes and see Taylor Swift toward the top.

Also, if you want to write to me (I would love you forever), the address for mail is:

P/Box 603X
Ridgeway
Lusaka, Zambia

I’ll try to write here again sooner rather than later.

p.s. The Save Blue Like Jazz campaign has raised over $25,000 past their goal of $125,000, so I feel no need to shamelessly advertise to save the movie anymore. Sorry about the last blog post. : )