Today was wonderful!! Two teachers showed up, so we combined the two younger classes and I taught while the other teacher stared the kids down. Mom, they almost have the "I wiggle my fingers, I wiggle my toes..." song down! My goal is that they have it mastered by the time I leave. The teacher that sat in with me had just gotten off duty as a guard (the teachers also work as guards for the prison), so I don't think she had slept that night. She was extra crabby with the students, so they were angels for me the entire class time. As one of my lessons, we practiced writing the letter "M" in lower and upper-case. Afterwards, we switched their pencils out for crayons and let them draw pictures of a rainy day or a sunny day (trying to teach them weather) on the same sheet of paper but on the backside.  Funny story - Andrea who helps with the older class taught them the itsy-bitsy spider (I didn't teach my kids that, the english is too difficult for how young they are), and I let her borrow that spider you sent me. The one that vibrates when you pull on the string. Apparently when Andrea took it out to go with the song the kids stopped singing and were genuinely scared of the spider! They didn't understand and made the most frightened faces and backed away from the it. Andrea, seeing these reactions, put the spider away and the kids finally settled down. I guess cultures are different as well as environments, and here, spiders like that actually exist. Kids also aren't used to having toys like that so they might not know it's something to laugh about. The kids did not see that as a fun prop. It's terrible, but picturing that in my head is highly entertaining. 


After the first part of the day the teacher let the kids out to play/lunch like normal. After I walked outside, though, I noticed something different. The lunchroom wasn't being set up and the "kitchen" shack wasn't smoking (from the cooking fire). That's when I found out the kids weren't getting any porridge that day. They didn't have enough food, so couldn't feed the kids. I thought I was done with slaps in the face from being exposed to the third-world poverty, but this really dug into me. I love these kids so much at this point; seeing that there was no food for them and their little stomachs wouldn't be filled killed me. I know they didn't get any breakfast, and now it was almost noon and they still had had nothing. Because there was no food for lunch, which by their reactions might occur more often than I'd like, the teachers send the kids home. Trying to teach hungry kids doesn't work. Andrea and I walked home with the kids, and we were about 1/4 mi. away from the prison gates when our CCS van pulled up. At this point about 15 kids were still walking with us, so with the permission of the driver we piled all the kids in the van and drove them the rest of the way to the gate. They LOVED it. I wonder if some of them have ever even been in a car. It made the whole "them starving" misery ease off a little from seeing their laughing faces during the ride.  


This afternoon a batik artist came to the home base and taught us how to create a batik painting! We each did our own. I will explain the process to you through pictures: 

First, start with a plain piece of cloth

Draw the outline of the picture you are planning to paint. I did three lions under a tree in front of a sunset.

Flip the cloth around and saturate it with water. Then begin painting, with a sponge, the backdrop of your painting. For me, it was the sunset. 

Note the fading colors. Because of the water soaked into the cloth, the colors fade into each other extremely well.

Turn the cloth right side up and paint wax onto the parts of the painting you want to protect from the black silhouette. Whatever you don't paint in wax will soon become black. 

This is the painting en process of painting it black to create silhouettes.  Because the wax is there, the black doesn't bleed anywhere besides where it's supposed to. 

I forgot to take a picture of this, but before this ^ step, we crumpled up our cloths and rubbed them together, making all the wax fold into each other and fall off the cloth. The wax turned into tiny balls that we had to rub off, trying to get all the wax possible off. After we rubbed off all we could, you iron your cloth to flatten and melt any remaining wax back into the painting. You can see the difference between the top and bottom of this cloth from the wax melting because of the iron. 

Finished!