Into November

We finished up the first quarter at school.  I survived, although that last week was pretty intense!  But that's kinda exciting.  I think I'm starting to get the hang of this teaching thing.

I've had the opportunity to pray with 10th class on a regular basis.  That's been a real challenge.  As religion is something the students have been exposed to a lot, their expectations for morning prayer (and God) are pretty low.  There's the added challenge that is before 9am, which isn't my peak hour of activity exactly.  But it's been a big reminder of the reasons I'm here, and the opportunities I have at this school.

So it's fall "break" right now.  Today I typed out lesson outlines for 7 of my 14 classes.   *Yawn*...but it's good to be ahead a little bit!  There are a lot of speeches in the works for my older students!  :)  They're not gonna like me very much right now.   I'm also working on some Thanksgiving and Christmas events I'd like to do.  These next two months are gonna be a blur!

I learned the Kyrgyz alphabet Sunday afternoon!  It's not too bad, just 7 new sounds/letters, the rest are the same-ish as Russian.  I'm thinking I might start trying to get myself a little immersion.  I also translated one of my second song into Russian with a help of a friend this week!!!

Hopefully tomorrow I'll get to visit an orphanage in Karakol!  We'll see how that goes.

Looking around at life, I've been struck by a couple things.  Life is pretty busy, although there's not a lot of structured things going on, just school is exhausting.  Then something like a computer cord breaks and that's a whole afternoon of hunting.  Just living in Russian is kinda tiring as well, especially when it comes to staff or youth leader meetings.

I've figured out a couple things:  1)My address!  Or well, how to use a PO box.
2)Just a folder from the US costs $35.  :(  
3)I might be the best Russian teacher I'll find.  I know what I need, I just need to structure a 15th class.  :)  When I've studied, the results have been stuff I've put to use very quickly.  Just need to study more.
4)Also, I'm gonna have to focus my efforts as far as how I spend my time.  Right now I'm sorting whether this means I should step away from the youth team, in order to focus on orphans.