checking in

ben folds'in it up (i'm a creature of habit)

It's been awhile! The past few weeks have been a blur. My house waged a vendetta against me last week, first the water then the electricity.

Two days after I moved in, a tube thing (pipe?) in my water heater came loose and instead of just being cool it started spewing water all over my hallway. Conveniently, this happened at like 11:45 at night, right after I took a shower. So, wet hair and all, I got to run and wake up my retired landlord yelling "Flood! I have a flood!" Miraculously, I know the Arabic word for flood.

This problem got solved a day later when my friend was able to find someone with a wrench. Being a lady, I don't have such things in my house.

I thought the house and I had made up, but a day later I plugged in my computer and the electricity in the entire place went out. I actually thought in my head "Okay, house, I don't like you and you don't like me...but we have to work together like mature adults." Which is just silly. Anyway, long story short, I had a really nice guy come look at my electric meter and turns out some bozo had taped some wires together with scotch tape. I'm not sure exactly what effect that has on my wiring except that it's bad. So that's fixed now and I think house knows who's boss.

On the bright side, the past two weeks have been really good in terms of food. I had tea with a random family last Wednesday after souk, lunch with the Dar Chebab guard the next day when it was too rainy to go home, couscous with the Dar Chebab director's family on Friday (I'm teaching his wife English), lunch with my host family Saturday, and lunch with them again yesterday. Plus I made pretty delicious macaroni and cheese using Laughing Cow.

Other things going on: I'm slowly but surely becoming more independent. Example: yesterday I re-registered my post office box in my name (the postal workers still thought I was the volunteer that I replaced) and paid to rent it throughout 2010 all by myself. This probably doesn't sound like a big deal, but trust me, it is. It involved paperwork and official stamps and three separate trips to the post office.

Also, I've started learning to read and write Arabic script. It was really overwhelming the first couple tutoring sessions but I'm starting to get the hang of it. The other day while waiting around at the post office (see above paragraph) I realized I could read a couple lines on the paper I was holding. Swiyyyya b swiyya.

Listening/comprehension is getting a lot better, too. Yesterday my brother told me a story about how he caught a frog and I understood the whole thing.

In terms of work, things are a little slow right now. I have a few diehard English students that I really enjoy teaching, but the younger kids are starting to lose interest. I don't mind so much because it gives me more time to just hang out with them instead of being their teacher all the time. This morning, for instance, no one felt like learning English so we started playing Uno and it turned into a huge, fun game.

I don't want to teach if the kids don't want to learn, but then again it can be a little stressful letting the whims of an 11-year-old dictate your work day. Last Saturday I showed up with a full lesson plan--we were going to review the vocabulary we'd been studying all week, then start a lesson on opposites where I planned to teach the kids how to sing "Hello Goodbye" by the Beatles. I even brought my laptop, and that bitch gets heavy when you are going up and down hills all the time.

Alas, when I got to Dar Chebab there were only three girls there, all of whom wanted to "play ballet." Hmph. I obliged, and brought them into the big activity room and started leaping around with them. This quickly dissolved into them demanding that I show them different steps, so I was jumping and spinning around in jeans and socks for about half an hour. Not gonna lie, I had a good time and it feels great to have a chance to do a little ballet every now and then, buttttttt I spent awhile planning that lesson and I really want to teach them "Hello Goodbye."

Anyway. Hoping to start some bigger projects, probably after February when I get back from a training session up north. I need to get comfortable living here before I can really work effectively.

If I were to sum up my life right now in a simple sentence I would just tell you that it's going on. Everyday I wake up with an idea of what I'm going to do and go to bed having done something else. I kind of like that though, I guess.