Trashbag Rice

YAY!!!!!!!!!! I got my bag the day after the last update...inside my bag i was greated by the smell of vodka...my bottle of hand sanitizer had broken, so all my clothes smelled faintly of alchohal...but that's way better than what my clothes had been smelling like. This week the mission team from Texas arrived. There are 11 of them here, they've helped us a ton with getting desks sanded and moved around as well as our IT friend Butch who just set up all this internet for us YAY!!!! There's alos a medical team of a husband and wife doctor dentist team. One nurse who happens to be the wife of Butch..., and six youth and the pastors wife and one baptist pastor from another church, dayrell, they are all loads of fun. Class started on Wednesday. I teach three classes a day between 8am and 4:30pm...I have two class rooms, both are outside, the one I use in the morning is on the second floor balchony and the one I use later in the afternoon is on the second floor back balchony (pictures tomorrow)...So i get to spend about 8 hours out doors at least 5 days a week...I spend my of my time in class wipping sweat off me and drinking water. The students I am teaching range in age from 15-18. We had nearly 200 studnets apply but could only allow in 126. They answered (in french) three questions, why do you want to learn English? If you could change one thing in the world what would it be? and what do you want to do for work?...I've got a lot to say about the answers we recieved from these questions, but for now let me just tell you that we selected some incrediably bright studnets...I teach the book in my class so it's a lot of reading out loud and trying not to be too boaring. My iron stomach finialy gave out, on the first day of class mind you...let me just say that eating trashbag rice, while tasty, was probably not the best idea. Before you start judging me saying "yeah no kidding it's trashbag rice, why would you eat it any way"...1. it was tasty, 2. it was cheep 3. everyone else was doing it, 4. the woman who cooked it looked like she knew what she was doing 4. she did, 5. it was really really good...so there...the thing is around lunch time people start showing up on the street with food they've cooked to sell. some people bring the food out in large pots as big as small children, the lady we bought lunch from brought hers our in two large trashbags, that's two large trashbags full of rice...this woman has a particularly large following (cause it's so good) so we took our plate from our kitchen walked down the street, around the cornor to the next block, stood in line, mumbled some french and mooree, something like rice with sauce please...then handed her about 5000 cfa (say-fa), trusting she would give us proper change and she did about 4500 cfa, which means that 4 plates of trashbag rice with sauce cost roughly 1 dollar....did i mention that at the time i ate the trashbag rice it was realy good? anyway trashbag rice is good, so there stop judging it was totaly worth it...we have picked up new helpers, our friend sedo, is a university of ouga student (the university has been on strike for over two months). Sedo speaks English, he helped us translate the application papers as well as call all the students who were accepted in one afternoon...that's over 200 applications that the four of us proccessed in roughly 8 hours the day before class started, crazyness!...tomorrow we finialy have a day off...I'm going to the village, Rimkita, where Pastor Zongo and Lazo (lazr) are from...the doctors are doing follow ups with members of the village (they have been working unbelieveably hard) but tomorrow is primarily for the students at the primary school...so yay for getting to play with kids all day tomorrow, i'm looking foward to a football match and getting rid of my beard tan...pictures tomorrow evening, why? because we have internet HAHAHA, absolutely insane...
peace