Staring at the Wall

The past couple of weeks have been pretty uneventful. My days have been spent at the school staring at my counterpart and the wall and trying to come up with things to pass the time since she has me there for almost 12 hours a day but does not give me anything to do. I made some spreadsheets to better organize the childrens files and contact info and when i finished those in about 1O min my counterpart was in disbelief that i had already completed it and kept apologizing for having me work. peace corps told our counterparts that we are not supposed to work for the first 3 months so instead she has me go there and just stare at her. I have been trying to plan for next term and working on various projects i can do with both the school and on the side.  


I have also been lucky enough to find the best tutor in the world (please note the sarcasm} my tutor does not let me talk during sessions...hello this is a language class...He is a teacher and here in Uganda students are expected to sit and listen and memorize there are very few if any hands on activities to help the students learn using various learning strategies. I am also hoping on holding training for teachers at the school i am placed with on using different learning strategies. Many of the sessions the past few weeks have been on tenses when i say tenses i meant past present and future such as going to go going and gone (not sure if that is the best example but oh well} well his idea of tenses is present simple/continuous past simple and about 8 other tenses i have no idea what the difference is in English let alone Luganda. instead of teaching me how to say various things in various tenses he would write an example and then i had to put it into the present simple or present continuous categories...this did however brighten my day when he would "stroke" or put a / between simple and continuous and then say "i stroke this because..." i could not help but laugh and he looked at me like i was crazy wondering why i was laughing. I did get to also incorporate some cross culture into this by teaching my tutor the correct way to pronounce the letter g in uganda they say g like it is pronounced in geezer not like gee. 


Last note on the tutor...one day he ran to the wall to unplug his phone when i asked him what the rush was he stated that he did not want the wall to take the power back from his battery since it was about to be full...apparently here in Uganda if you leave things charging too long when they are full the power companies take the power back out of your battery and it goes back into the wall for others to use...only in Uganda would people actually believe this happens...