Andrea # 3

Panamanians   J   2010        3/17

“Another day shall commence!” cries the announcer on her megaphone at what feels like 5 in the morning! When actually it was Christine’s sweet face telling me we must get up at 8:15. But it felt like 5 in the morning!

We taught preschool after having our delicious breakfast by our wonderful cook Veronica. (Or as we have nicknamed her, Vana. If you don’t know who that is watch Wheel of Fortune.) The kids are great, full of energy but good! We then get back to Delores’s house and ate a wonderful lunch of Spaghetti and meatballs. (Notice there is no Spam! Much to the boys disappointment.) We then ran off to Edwin’s school at 2:00 where I have my first basic class. However nothing truly hilarious or exciting happened today, unless you think learning nouns, prepositions, prepositional phrases, verbs, subjects, and objects is fascinating….then have at it!

I however find this story particularly funny. I have a reader named Shamyr, she doesn’t know hardly any English. And I mean practically zero English!! So I was trying to teach her the word Bitterness, and how you can get rid of it, which is of course, with forgiveness. So I was on the ground stooped over holding the “marker of bitterness” which was basically just that I was holding a marker that represented bitterness. And I would keep holding more and more “markers of Bitterness” and asking her, “So how do you get rid of all of this bitterness?” And after a long pause….she replied with a very serious face and tone, “Well, I would add more fruit.” I just stood there for a moment thinking, “seriously she thought I was talking about the taste!?” And I had literally spent 15 minutes trying to explain bitterness, and all this time she answered with FRUIT!! I laughed!! And then tried to explain the feeling of bitterness. That was definitely the funniest story so far!

Even though I am supposed to be teaching students, they seem to be teaching me! Including how to get rid of bitterness, now this is real gold, fruit is the answer! But really I loved it and have enjoyed every minute of this trip! Please keep praying for us as we continue to try and follow God’s guidance one Panamanian step at a time!

Love you all!

God Bless!

~ Andrea

Message from Andrea # 2

Panamanians!  J  2010       3/16

Well the first day of our classes was a success! I had four Basic classes, the first at 2:00, that one was small with only three students, but still a good class! My second one at 4:00, had about nine, or ten students, that was a good one! And the third class at 6:00, had ten students, that was a great one! And the last one was at 9:00, with about four students. Then I had three regular students which were great!

I realized when I first started the first class I didn’t have all of my material! I was standing there thinking, “Oh great I’m supposed to be this great North American that doesn’t have all of her stuff together!” But then God just started dropping ideas in my brain, and we kept going.  I have one class that has a lot of younger kids in it but there are some adults in it, so it was interesting trying to balance having kids and adults but still having to teach the same simple material. But it was lots of fun! I absolutely love teaching!!!!