Giving up Control

Yet another week has flown by… Okay, okay, two weeks to be exact! In my defense, it is incredibly hard to write a blog post during the week. *Sigh* I now have a deeper appreciation of what it takes to grade homework and class work assignments. I was never one of those kids who needed to have their work back and graded right away, but now I understand why sometimes teachers do take forever to grade assignments. For a class of 40, it takes about 1 ½ hours to grade the simplest of assignments. Yeah I am sticking to that excuse, I can’t blog because I have too much grading to do! However, I will work on my blogging so that all subsequent blogs will hopefully be written on weekends. Yayy! :D In the meantime, be patient with me please… 0:-)

A quick update:

Lizziey and I made it into Accra the Thursday before last. We thought we were doing passport/visa things, but instead we ended up having a walk-about “tour” of Accra while on the hunt for a cell phone and some money. Seeing as it was a school day, and we still had class on Friday, we decided to head back as soon as we were done eating. At 4pm we managed to get a cab that would dare take us back to Kasoa for 20 cedis (about $15)! Although it is technically a 90min. drive to Kasoa, the traffic is so bad that it took us 4 hours to get back. Needless to say it was a very long and exhausting day!

On Sunday Lizziey and I accompanied Mimi (B3 homeroom teacher) to her church “Assemblies of God”. I loved the English part of the worship, and enjoyed the rest of the Fante one, but the preaching was difficult to follow for 2 reasons: 1) The pastor insisted on screaming his sermon in his heavily accented English, 2) A translator repeated everything the pastor said in Fante, also very loudly. The combination of all this and the heat was perfect to create a headache. But we will continue to search for more churches.

Last week was pretty “normal”, each day with its own ups and downs.

On Friday we had or first spelling bee. The top 5 students of each class, picked during the week, competed for 1^st  place overall. Amazingly the B1 students beat all the older kids!  Saturday, Lizziey and I cleaned our room and did our laundry… or tried to since we were out of clothes pins and  it had started to rain… Sunday we were supposed to go to Takoradi with the sisters but decided to stay and have a spa day. We did pedicures with our buckets, tanned on the roof, and even managed to make our own pizza (thanks to the pizza kit Lizziey’s mom had sent). All in all, a pretty perfect weekend! J

Back to the present…

As Lizziey mentioned in her blog, every single day here is different. Each day presents its own new challenges and rewards, as well as new learning experiences. So far I’ve learned: how to make the perfect spaghetti sauce out of tomato paste, the 101 uses for cardboard, how to procrastinate while still actually getting things done and how to properly treat a spider bite. Ok, I am still working on that last one but with Lizziey’s help and her well-stocked “pink bag” (a.k.a. emergency kit), I think I will make it.

 Anyways, the constant ups and downs of my days let me focus on the most important thing in my life: God. I am learning to rely on God fully, even for the day-to-day things. It's easy to turn to God when we realize we can no longer do things on our own. However, it is because we believe that we can do certain things without His help that we get into trouble in the first place. Depending on God for the little things is harder than for the big things. So I will continue to lay everything that I am and have before Him. I will continually give my life to Him, so that He may use it however He sees fit. I will trust that He has the best intentions for me, and He knows what is best for me. It may be easier said than done, but I fully intend to see it through.

Nyame Inshirawu (God Bless You)

~Jamie

P.S. Some things we love about our days: starry night sky, when kids “get it” (our lessons), eating fried plantains (yumm), getting caught in the pouring rain (except on laundry days), getting packages (or letters), and last but not least blog comments. So please comment! Madasi! :p