Shakin' to a New Beat

Although I haven't starting actually "teaching" yet, being at school is pretty exciting...sometimes.  This entire week has been full of celebrations in honor of Youth Day tomorrow.  In the past three days, I have sat through a cumulative 6 hours of traditional dances, random skits, and competitions between Cameroonian schools.  The first 2 or so were extremely exciting--the dancing, even done by young children, is absolutely incredible--but after that it got a litttttle ridiculous.  But I'm still learning a lot and I love talking to all of the kids in their adorable African English...and trying to impress them with my barely conversant French!  I've also been doing a lot of dancing myself--the celebrating involves African DPs, and I have to tell you all that there's nothing quite like dancing like a fool to Waka Waka and being able to say "This is Africa!!" and really meaning it!!!  In general, even when there are not celebrations, school seems to involve zero productivity and a lot of "discipline."  (I have to mention that the students march in line to their classrooms every morning and chant "Always be an obedient child (x3)!  Never disobey."  I practically peed my pants when I witnessed this.  I know, I'm terrible.)  Maybe things will change next week when they get back on a normal schedule.

I'm glad the celebrations and things were this week, though, because not only am I learning about Cameroonian history and culture, I'm getting to know teachers and the kids are getting used to seeing a white girl around before I actually do any kind of activities with them.  The teachers are skeptical of my presence sometimes, but I explain myself and smile excessively, and then they bestow upon me their idiomatic blessing: "You are very welcome."  It makes my heart melt, even if some of them give me the stone face as they say it (others are all smiles, so...phew!).

I'm getting a lot of attention.  I'm not even very blonde and kids just walk up to me and run their hands through my ponytail whenever I try to walk anywhere (I told one of them it was okay, and I think the other 1,800 caught on!).  They give me all of these funny gifts and it's so cute.

The assortment of goodies that I received yesterday from kids at school: two candies, one bag of very stale and crumbled cookies, three plastic butterfly barrettes, and a piece of gum which I actually consumed.  Today was two small boxes full of broken cookies and sticky candy.

I am pretty nervous to start leading my own activities with the kids on Monday.  There are 20 classes of about 90 students each and I will see all of them once a week for 30-45 minutes, so it's only 2-3 hours of work per day.  Still...the number of kids is a huge challenge...and will they even be interested?  More importantly (kind of), will the teachers approve? I have basically been informed that neither the students nor the school have any kind of supplies ("Paper?" I asked.  "No," they replied.).  So I may be sticking mostly to activities that do not involve the consumption of resources...but one of my goals for the next 4 weeks is to get some colorful artwork onto the classrooms' bare cement walls!