January 24th

Poor Tom was up till 3 am last night doing a C – section. I spent
the morning preparing for classes so it wasn’t the most exciting
morning. I forgot to share a fun little occurrence. Karen has the
cook, Kadiatu prepare foods for dinner and one day she made a
chicken pot pie sort of thing and she left it in the oven since you
can’t store it hot in the fridge or it eats up the power in the
batteries trying to cool it. So later that night when it was time
for dinner we heated it up and were getting ready to eat it
when we discovered something that made us try not to look to
closely at the food we were eating. The ants had invaded the
oven and gotten in the food and were roasted when it was
heated back up. Not to waste anything we enjoyed the pot pie
while trying to ignore the extra protein bits. I don’t think,
scratch that, I would not have, before coming here, ever have
done that. It would have been dumped into the garbage faster
than you could blink. The things you just deal with in Africa.
Anyway, she made it again this morning so we took a big
laundry bowl, put some water in it and placed the dish in it to
create a sort of water moat that the ants can’t and don’t cross
and so we enjoyed some ant free pot pie for lunch and dinner.
Teaching went ok today, though I gave a quiz today and the
results were less than desirable… The SS 1s told me that they
tried to study but couldn’t understand so we went back over
the material we’ve done this term so hopefully they’ll have a
better understanding. The SS 2s didn’t offer an excuse, they
just did poorly and I don’t know why. I don’t think my questions
were very hard, I just don’t think they study enough. They
apparently only really study right before a test (or in my classes
a quiz since they don’t have quizzes in any other classes) and
several of them said they weren’t aware that we were having a
quiz. Oh well, if they don’t pay attention I’m not going to take
pity on them. Anyway, after classes I came back to the house
for dinner around six. After dinner I spent a little bit reading
then Saidu showed up. We walked over to the school because
Saidu wanted to go for a walk. I saw Kabba there, he was there
for night classes along with many other students, at least 100
and definitely more. It was good to see them dedicated to their
studies even if they still know very little. I don’t know how they
know so little with the number of extra classes they take and the
studying they supposedly do. Anyway, after that we came back
to the house and then Saidu went off to go do some studying
and I read some. But now it’s time for me to get to sleep.

Good night and God bless,
Ryan Brooks