August 1

Milan and his student

This week I will be spending the days with Milan and his classroom. It was strange but exciting to see him sitting at the teacher’s desk, looking through the lesson plans for the day. Today they learned, and I reviewed ‘coordinates’ and graphing them on a grid.  By the end of class, they had a pretty good handle. Milan reviewed the quadrants of a grid with them and later reviewed their multiplication tables using the game “travel” that he has played in his own school in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.  And of course, there was freeze tag and ‘futbol’ (soccer) for break time. These kids play in flip-flops and barefoot, and they play hard. It’s weird to be playing amidst goats, but they are all around, and usually scatter out of the way when they come running.  One black goat in particular would butt his horns at us when we got too close, so when the ball rolled near him, it took some distraction and quick maneuvering to get it back!
 

After school today, we agreed to videotape a group of youth that had recorded a song in a studio in Yaounde, and now wanted to record a video for it. They had arrangements with another gentleman to record them, but it fell through… so, they saw me with my camera and made the request. There were about 8-10 youth in the 7 video clips that we recorded. It was actually an R&B song and they sounded pretty nice. Especially the part in the song that says something along the lines of “You’re the only sugar in my tea…” I wish them well on their musical endeavors!! 

And wouldn’t you guess, on the way home, in Njinikom, Africa, we watched four young gentlemen as they played foosball on an outside table. It was pretty rickety, but it seemed to be able to withstand the brutal goals that they were getting on each other.