Thursday, May 9 

This morning, at 1:30 am, I awoke to a crazy amount of dogs barking. Apparently everyone in our neighborhood has guard dogs. By 2am I was wide awake, and I am guessing my body decided it was done sleeping. (Or was confused with the time zone). While I put my ipod on “shuffle”, it decided to play “Who Let the Dogs Out”, exactly when the dogs started barking again. Hahaha. Thanks, ipod. I love you too.

I finally got back to sleeping at 4am. I was up for 9:30 church, celebrating a Feast day. Anezka and Magda walked me to church and I caught up with two of the Sisters, as they had already gone to mass earlier in the morning. I felt great in the morning, but during church had one of my “dizzy/almost pass out” episodes, and the Sisters walked me back to their house for a little while, and then drove me back to the volunteer house where I slept some more. (I feel like all I do is sleep, but apparently my body really needs it after the insanely long flight, and change of altitude). Sister Margaret came to bring me lemon tea with homemade honey in it to make me feel better. The girls made pasta for dinner, and we ended up talking for 2 hours, getting to know each other more. They told me more about what they teach at the school, and Magda has to take one more exam for her social work degree, while Anezka has 2 more years for her teaching degree. They say they believe that I will be following the school social worker who works with the children, their parents, and does home visits. Awesome! We had real ice cream for dessert, and then all went to bed.

  Friday, May 10 

Today, I feel normal again! (If that is possible for me). I am finally getting my room organized, and trying to catch up on blogging. Today was only a half day for the school in the morning, so I was told to just sleep in again by the Sisters. They are celebrating Maria Mazarello, the founding Sister of the Salesians. The girls came back to the house to quickly eat, and then left to run activities for children, a common Friday occurrence. I will most likely be helping with this starting next week. I start my real work on Monday!

 The girls told me some wonderful news today: The girls were living in a volunteer house connected to the Sister's house until about a week ago when they were told that I was coming. The house only has room for two volunteers, so now we are in the bigger volunteer house. However, in 5 weeks when they leave, and the new American volunteer is here, the American volunteer and I will probably move back to the house connected to the Sister's because they do not like having just two girls alone here. (Although the house is gated, alarmed, and has guard dogs). This is fantastic because I won't have to worry so much about driving, and the alarm system in our current house, and also, I will have internet access all the time. Actually, constant internet is probably a bad thing; as I was glad I don't have it at night to distract me from prayer and blogging. But, it will be nice to be able to skype and upload pictures and my blog without worrying about only doing it rushed in the little time before and after dinner.

 We had dinner together again, and they seem to put cream in everything, like ice cream, and today's meal of soup with rice in it. They made me try it, and it makes it more creamier. It's just a weird concept. They also made me try a little of Anezka's homemade custard, caramel Captain Morgan's concoction. So good! It really rained tonight, apparently a rare occurrence for their “winter”. The girls had bought South African wine to celebrate their 10 month anniversary here, so we drank a glass of that tonight to celebrate.

 Magda told me tonight that they call traffic lights here “robots”. How weird. I've been saying a lot of "I don't understand" to the other volunteers about the way things are here, and they say they've been here almost a year and still don't understand.  I really like being here with them.