Wow

So I don't remember the last time I wroteor what about, and I don't know if anyone is even reading this page, but I like it because if I want to go back and read them to remember my trip I can. Let's see, today is Friday, end of the second week of teaching. I really have the best job ever. What is nicer than getting paid to play with little kids and see the world? NOTHING of course :-D

Each day I love my class even more. The parents are getting better. The Qatari parents really want their male students to succeed. It's not that they don't care about the girls, it's just in this culture, like most cultures, males are more valued so I have a lot of pressure on me to make each boy student the "best boy in the class." And yes I have been told that multiple times.

I still don't have definite plans, so I've just been teaching how I want to, and what I want to, which is awesome and horrible at the same time. About half of my students don't speak English, so this has been a great challenge for me. I decided that each week the class will learn a poem, and it will be posted on the wall. THe students can look at the words, and I have multiple students each day point to the words as we read it. Yesterday, Thursday, we read our poem for the last time. It made me SO happy because each and every student in my class was reading the poem aloud in English!! They were smiling and it was so great to hear their voices. It is crazy to think that because of me, this year about 10 new students will be able to speak English. I will have taught them English, I will have taught them to read, I will have taught them to count, I will have instilled confidence and a loving attitude in each of everyone of them. ME ME I will have done that. It is seriously the best feeling in the entire world to be teachng kids, and I am just so happy I agreed to come here. Each day is a new learning experience and it is great. I thrive off of this stuff! I love meeting people from all over the world (which I have). I love trying new things, I love neat architeture, I love everything :-D

Ok, away from school.... we have been eating out a lot because it is so cheap here and it's hard to go to the grocery store in a cab. Wednesday we ate at Ponderosa for a "Iftar" buffet. Iftar (i don't know if that's how you spell it) is when the sun goes down and they can break their fasts. So we sit down and we have to wait to get our food because the sun was still up. Finally the workers at the restaurant come around and tell us to go get food. So we all go up to the buffet, wait in a long line, get our food and then sit down. Of course, like you would in America, we start eating. Seems normal until someone else who was with us told us we had to wait 5 more minutes to eat, and everyone in the restaurant was staring at us!! It was the worst feeling ever, I felt horrible. One of my least favorite feelings is being rude to other people, and I'm sure we looked horribly rude to everyone in that restaurant! Ugh.... oh well we'll never do that again!