Last Week of Home Stay

October 26, 2012

It has been a great final week of home stay. We have been just practice teaching at the primary school in the mornings and then having language class outside under the mango tree in the afternoons. Everyone is pretty much checking out of training now that we all know our sites and we are so close to becoming actual volunteers. Since we don’t all get together during practice teaching weeks, the Nakolo crew is trying to soak up our last bits of time in our communities together before we are all separated and sent off to start integrating all over again.

Practice teaching has been going really great. All the kids still love us and the lessons have been super successful (even though the kids are significantly behind where the curriculum thinks they should be…). I was the only one in our group who taught all three days, and did not observe a day but it was fine because we only taught for 1 hour really extra work. One my lessons was doing reader’s theatre with class 6- we did The Very Hungry Caterpillar; it was awesome hearing their accents and hearing them say the different lines in different voices. All the kids love acting and doing gestures to different words and lines in the story.

me and some of the GPS Nakolo boys

Having language class outside has so many advantages, not only do we get the wonderful breeze (which is the only way to survive the heat) but we also get to watch the community goings on. We get to watch people coming to and fro work, kids to and fro their lunch break from school, pig migrations, cows being walked to the bush, dogs fornicating and then being stuck together and try to free themselves (yes we have all heard it happens, but I can assure you it is a real thing and it is painful to watch)…. After class we eva (wonder around the village) around or we just lay on our tongan mat and eat random snacks. Yesterday, we were a bit more active and we played with some village kids. We played duck duck goose, spelling games, and we made them sing for us, the best part though was when the kids pointed to Katy and called her fatty, like a melon! Katy is super awesome about her weight so we all laughed and were not offended by now it is the joke in our group because Katy has been deemed the fat peace corps in the village (by the community) and we always make jokes about her sino fakatonga (tongan body) and her host mom tells her she will keep feeding her bacon so she will be as fat as their little dog Nemo. In this instance, it was especially funny because the kid was maybe 9 and was very clear about how Chiara, me and Steph were pakau (thin) and Katy was fatty. We are really lucky Katy is so cool about it because it has been a source of much laughter throughout our stay in Nakolo.