Greetings from Guinea! Hope you're doing well wherever you are reading this blog.
School's in full swing here at the mission school; we're on week three of the new semester, and it's keeping me busy, trying to prepare for my classes. I'm currently teaching a middle school life science class, a high school elective: Photography & Digital Media (co-teaching), elementary & 7-12 Phys Ed. They're all very different classes, and I'm finding that I probably spend more time getting ready for each class than actually teaching it, except maybe in the case of PE. For the middle/high school group, I get to teach volleyball for six weeks, so that's been fun since it's one of my favorite sports. I've been trying to dredge my memory for some of the drills we did back in my high school volleyball days.
The Photography and Digital Media class is probably my favorite, mostly because we get to play around with pictures on the computer. So far, I've had the students learning a program called Gimp or Gimpshop, which is similar to Photoshop but is open-source and therefore free to use. We've been working on learning the selection tools, so the first project was a virtual Mr. Potato Head, where the students practiced cutting out eyes, ears, mouths, etc, and pasting them onto a potato. That's resulted in some very interesting (kind of scary) potatoes as finished products.
Since my classes range from the morning hours (life science) to about 5:15pm (for PE), it's been harder for me to find time to get away from the mission center as much, so my primary interaction with Guineans has come through people stopping by my porch. There are two girls that I've probably mentioned before who like to come by to sit and talk or drink tea or eat dinner together. We've also been playing cards -- mostly Go Fish since that's all my limited French (and their limited card-playing skills) can handle right now. A couple weeks ago, one of the other missionaries went through a brief discussion of the gospel with them in French, and they seemed to be interested and listening, but I'm not sure how much of it completely sunk in, since French isn't their first language, and they don't usually sit still for long. You can pray for my interactions with them, that I am able to show them Christ's love for them even though I can't really speak their language.
That's a quick update of what's been happening here. Write me a message or comment on the post or whatever to let me know what you've been up to lately! God bless!
