School's Out!

As of 7am this morning we are finished with our first trimester. All the grading and recording has taken us most of the last 3 days but we are finally finished. The thing about not having electricity is that you don't have Excel (among other things) so that means you are writing the grades for hundreds of students and calculating their averages by hand. And all school records are written in ink on carbon copy paper so you normally want to do it more than once to make sure there are no errors before you record the grades. What a pain!

Our students did pretty well. We can always tell which students have cheated on our tests because they will have the exact same completely absurd answers. On my last test I has a true/false question asking whether 'l'homme' (man) is an example of an autotrophe (plants that make their own food) and I had three boys say that 'l'homme' was not an autotrophe because it was 'les femmes' that prepare all the food at the house.

Our big victory this week was that Moussa, our student that hangs out all the time, has solved 3 Sudokus!! I'm so proud. At first, when it was taking two days to do a word search, I was losing hope, but he's getting the hang of it now. Also, we have a few sprouts in our garden already. We already have some little bean, carrot, thyme, and tomato plants.

Yesterday the US Ambassador came to visit us. Okay, she didn't come up to visit us specifically, she was in the area and stopped by, but we still felt like celebrities. She even brought us a Christmas present of homemade brownies and banana bread: it was awesome!

Animal update: we are down to one cat and one pigeon now. Moussa thinks someone stole our pigeon but we aren't sure. So I guess we have plenty of room for chickens now. There's this mangy dog around town that Aaron wants to adopt (he calls him a 'fixer-upper') but I think I might veto that (Editor's Note: With a little TLC he'll make a great dog. I think of him as an investment. Kind of like that VW 'fixer-upper' Bug that's been sitting in my parent's garage for years).

Well, I guess that is all the news. The weather here is still warm so it's hard to believe that it is almost Christmas. The other day it was actually cloudy and we got about 10 drops of rain, which was pretty exciting but aside from that it's sunny and warm. We've been told that midnight on Dec. 24th it will get cold (kind of like how in a month we will have electricity).
Thanks to Mom and Ron for the packages.