Figuring it Out

"Turn off the light when you leave a room."
"Did you wash your hands with soap?"
"Speak slower so that I can understand you, please."

I have said these phrases and other similar ones more times than I can count within the last month since school started back. I'm starting to sound like a parent and since there are nine girls ages 7-15 in my house, I think I've started acting like a parent too even though at times I slip back to my "resisting adulthood" self by playing in the rain and having water fights.
It's been a long lesson to learn but I am figuring out that being in charge of a family means finding the balance between just loving and loving but still disciplining.
I don't like disciplining. I don't like giving punishments when my girls don't listen or look at me in defiance and challenge my instructions. But when they tell me no when I ask them to do their chores or choose to do exactly what I told them not to do, I have to correct them because I love them and want them to learn to obey in order to give them a better life down the road.

I use to always dislike verses in the Bible like, "The Lord loves those He corrects and "Spare the rod and spoil the child" but I now completely agree with them. It's because I care so much about them that I try to correct their behavior.
I don't like how adult-like this post is sounding or how my blogs are more serious and less stories but being a student missionary has changed me. I'm still figuring out what those changes are and trying to sift through what changes that I want to keep that are positive and which changes I want to throw out. And although I am changing and being stretched beyond what is comfortable I am growing. I just pray that I am growing more towards the person God wants me to be and that this experience as a student missionary will only help me grow closer to God and my relationship with Him.

Something that I have noticed in the last two weeks is that I've finally reached the point where I have won the confidence of some of my students and the girls that I live with. It took a long time, excruciatingly long to the point that I wondered if everything I was doing for them was going unnoticed but I've formed deep relationships with them and only within the last few weeks have I started to see the results. They confide in me their fears, boy problems, what they're scared about and will walk with me to class and tell me about how they are feeling. I feel so privileged to have just gotten to this point with them and although it's taken seven months to reach this point, I think it's been worth the wait.

Short and blistered

Sunday mornings are now our service days. We go cut other people's grass, we pick up trash along the road (did that in the pouring rain a couple sundays ago but it made some pretty good memories) and most recently, my older girls went out to machete the banana grove. We tried to machete it every so often last semester but when vacation came, we let it grow and worked on cutting the grass around the mission. Because of that, the grass was taller than my head! My four girls that I had brought with me didn't seem daunted by the task in front of them but began to hack their way into everything, machetes swinging, grass flying and blisters forming. Well, I was the only one who got blisters since i hadn't macheted for a month and my hands had turned soft again but I discovered something, i'm not a terrible machetier any more. I'm actually cutting things when I swing instead of hacking at the same patch of grass over and over again. My girls said I had improved a lot and the only thing I could do to improve would be to keep my body still and just swing my arm as I worked. Yay for trying new things, practicing for months and finally succeeding! Next thing to accomplish, learning to swing an ax successfully.

One, Two, Three - Time to Read

My schedule is a little bit of everything since I teach 6th grade every Monday, teach three different English classes and two 5th grade classes.
There were only three rambunctious boys in my fifth grade classes until last week when one of my girls was moved from 7th to 5th grade. She's older than the boys in her class but she can't read or write. Because of this she will probably not pass her classes although she can copy everything written on the board but not understand what she's writing. Besides my Social Studies class that I have with 5th grade I also have a reinforcement class also known as an hour to study and do homework or study for quizzes or tests. Come last Monday, during the study hour I had Zulma pull up a chair and sit next to me as we went through the alphabet. I have zero experience with teaching someone how to read but I decided that my trying to help her was better than doing nothing at all.
Last year in college I took a class on how to help struggling readers who had fallen behind but the kids always knew the basics and I didn't have to start from scratch like I'm doing with Zulma. Luckily, it's Spanish that I am trying to teach so I don't have to worry about teaching the letter names and the sound or having her memorize site words.
We went over the alphabet sounds and she knew almost all of them so that was encouraging.
Next time together she learned her vowel sounds and what a vowel sound then we started to blend two letter words together. Turns out, I don't know a lot of two letter Spanish words but it's ok.

I'm excited for her to learn and although right now her motivation for learning to read is because she does not want to be embarrassed in her classes, I hope she'll eventually find a passion for reading and spend every minute that she has expanding her mind, exploring new worlds and imagining and creating different images when she picks up a book.

.......

Not to be dramatic or anything but I had it in my mind to pack up and go home after one of the girls from Wiemar told me that they'd seen a flying snake in the jungle while the group heading to the zip line tour. I've seen those nature videos about those snakes that can glide from tree to tree but when I learned that they are literally living within twenty minutes of me I had to calm myself down and ask twenty or so children if they'd ever seen a flying snake and after 19 no's and 1 yes, I felt more at peace. Still, there seems to have been an uprising in snakes recently. After 5 months I'd only seen one dead snake but within these last two months I've killed a snake, seen a baby boa and there's been two bigger ones in Miguel's house that have been found hiding out. The day I find a snake living in my upper story house is the day where I will really weigh my necessity to be here against my fear of snakes.