Video Monday

While doing some strenuous tasks today, I fell into a rhythm that allowed me to zone out and think about some things.  I've been trying to figure out a way to best share my experiences here with all of you back home.  I think about so many of you everyday and want to share these new things with you in the most informative, most efficient way possible.  I decided I would post something every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (and a bonus on the weekend if it happens).  Mondays (like today) will be video day- just to make the typically terribly Monday a little more fun.  "24 in 24" is the format I'm going to follow: my last 24 hours in 24 seconds.  The first of these is here for you to view:

Now you may be wondering what exactly I was doing today (or maybe not, that's fine too).  We started off the day with a walk through the corn field, checking out the quality of the corn and documenting along the way.  To the right here, you can see where some birds got to the corn.  This is not always typical, so we took a picture to document.  We actually spent quite a bit of time in the field; if you can see in the video, the corn is well above our heads, making it difficult to navigate your way out after awhile.  Eventually we found our way out and decided to start making preparations to plant sweet corn next to the feed corn as a test to see how it would grow.

We ran into some problems, though, and had to do some major fixing of the roto-tiller.  One of the local village boys dropped by during the process to give Prosper (the lead farm hand from the village) his lunch.  He's pictured below while watching part of the overhall.  Kris, the farm manager, is teaching all of us everything.  I'll be sure to write more about him later!

While Kris took some more time to teach the other workers, he put one of the other guys, Hamza, and I in charge of cleaning the house.  We scrubbed, squeegeed, and mopped a large part of the house, leaving behind the lemony scent of Pine Sol.  We finished just in time to have Kris and Prosper teach us how the planter works and see it in action.  Kwasi and Prosper are standing behind the planter in this picture (right).  Kris had them ride on it to make sure the seeds were falling into the planter correctly (video).  They only planted 1/4 of an acre to see how the sweet corn would grow in the conditions.

As they put everything away, I set off to prepare some notebooks and pens for the English lesson I will be teaching each day.  George and Prosper, two of the full-time workers on the farm, speak English quite well.  They helped me teach the other farm employees some English basics (right).  We went through the ABC's, each wrote our names out several times, and walked around the farm.  As we walked, I would point at something and say, "Naomi, what is this?"  And she would reply, "That is a mango tree."  "Kwasi, what is this?"  "That is a rubber bowl."  (He eventually got that it was a bucket.)  They did not always know what the object was at first or might say, "That is the mango tree..." when that was not the article needed for that question. These exercises were fairly elementary for Prosper and George and so I apologized for not doing something geared for them.  They only insisted that this was helping them too and said it was good practice to learn particular words.  At this, I thought it would be a great opportunity to teach the use of articles and the difference between "a" and "the."  As I tried to explain, I realized I didn't even have a good grasp!  If you have any ESL (English as a Second Language) resources that I could access online, I would very much appreciate it!

Wednesdays will be "Americans, what is this?" So be prepared to see some different things!