Waiting for the week-end

July 15, 2001 (Hamle 8, 2003)

Brother Esayas arrived yesterday afternoon with Brother Getachew, from Diré Dawa. After dinner, I took Esayas, Getachew, Belaynah and Johannes over to talk with the kids. They asked questions like, “what is not meeting your expectations, or how is this different than you imagined?” They also answered questions about things such as time (several East African countries begin the day at 6 o'clock, rather than 12...so nine at night is really 3, three hours after sunrise or sunset.) It makes sense since near the equator the day begins at six and ends at six.

It rained hard during the night, which has led to some anxiety. Tomorrow is graduation, an outside event and the last thing they want is rain. The soccer field that was almost completely submerged this morning is, by this afternoon, is dry. They are erecting tents and are expecting at least 100 of their graduates. Not everyone comes back for the ceremony because of the distance. The kids are going to sing “Sanctuary.” They sang it for us last night and the Brothers were very impressed. It will be the highlight of the ceremony.

We traded classrooms today. It is unbelievable how many children just stand at the doors and look in. It was heart-breaking today when one little girl begged to come in to learn computers, “just once.” But all 25 spaces in both classes have been filled. The children we have are very, very bright and very eager to learn. They touched a computer for the first time on Monday. But they have no fear of the technology. The problem is their unfamiliarity with the keyboard.

Today, just for the heck of it, we had the second class get out the Lego robots. They have never seen a Lego, much to Jake's dismay. I wanted to see how they would handle an on screen pictorial tutorial. Animation isn't very common in Africa and from my years in Kenya I wasn't sure how seeing it for the first time would work. But they were great students. Not only are they dealing with the unfamiliar terminology of computing, but also concepts of beginning programming.

Yesterday, I brought Brother Esayas over to see the new computers, the microscopes and the Lego Robots. Mr. Alemu, the Biology Teacher was still here with a pile of leaves, a jar of dirty water...as I said before, he may never leave. The point is the Brother Esayas was very impressed and enthused about the potential of having such a set-up at all of our schools.

I am about to loose my chair. Everything is being moved outside in preparation for tomorrow. A big day. All of the graduates from here qualify for the university as opposed to the 40% or so from the government schools...that is why families are willing to pay tuition. Last night we asked and found out that almost one third of the students here are on full scholarship. The tuition is only about $120 a year, but for the people here it might as well be 100 times that much. The kids on scholarship are proud they have been selected to attend school here. As we see daily, the numbers of kids who want to be here far outnumber those who have been selected.