School’s In

Things got a little juggled around, with school being so crazy.
Pattie is continuing on at the primary school. I’m waiting out all the practical problems for the preschool and guarding my time for that.
And they asked Kim to teach a new program the government is pushing across South Sudan. It’s an adult, accelerated learning course. It’s for all the adults who were kids in school when the war broke and had to stop their education.
It finally got off the ground this week, an answer to much prayer.
Kim is loving it. She gets to teach a lot of the adults we know—the two house help people at America (Angelo, the guard, and Elizabeth, the househelp), the teachers, some of our neighbors, etc.
She always has good stories to tell. She says all the guys have to leave their guns outside the school building, so you’ve got this pile of rifles outside in the schoolyard. They use the primary school, so the grown men are awkwardly sitting—long legs bent like a spider’s, knees poking up somewhere above their elbows—on the logs the kids use for seats. She says a lot of them really love it and soak up every word, loving to answer what they can in English.
It’s weird, thinking of our adult friends in that situation. We love Angelo, the guard. He’s hilarious. He’s just goofy and always drunk and never doing much guarding at America. We can joke with him a lot and he says all sorts of funny things. The first day in class, he was talking with his neighbor while Mark was teaching. And so Mark called him out on it. Kimmie said he gave the most innocent look and pointed to his neighbor, shrugging. Thinking of him doing that makes me laugh so hard.
I guess the more I get to know the people here, the more we learn the bits of their personalities. And, unfortunately, the harder it becomes to communicate to ya’ll the funny little things that make life here bright and fun, despite all the other circumstances…