Final 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 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 (by ourselves this time).

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 so it wasn’t any extra work really. One of the lessons was just doing reader’s theatre with class 6. We did The Very Hungry Caterpillar; it was awesome hearing their accents and trying to put different emphasis on each word (most of the time they accomplished this by just yelling the lines).

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 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 andwe 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 this and we all laughed, she is deemed the fat peace corps in the village and we always make jokes about her sino fakatonga (Tongan body) but this was priceless, the kid was maybe 9 and was very clear about how we (Chiara, me and Steph) were pakau (thin) and Katy was fatty. If you are not secure with your body, Tonga would be a really hard place to live.

Lau (my home stay nephew)

me with some of the Nakolo boys