8 March 2016: A good day that should have been bad

  I’ve been here for 17 months! What a feat of survival.

                Today for some absolutely unknown reason, I was in a great mood- better than I’ve felt in my village in a long time, given the recent emotional roller coaster I’ve been riding on due to certain events. It should have been a sucky day, really, because it’s all cloudy/rainy/muddy. Plus my double math period with form Cs got bumped off the schedule when 4 traffic cops came to school to talk to the students. I didn’t even care.

This morning, I woke up, did a great workout, ate onions and eggs for breakfast, and got my jacket and boots on to trudge to school. I introduced the form As to Microsoft Paint to help them get used to using the mouse. Most of them have much difficulty using it. I constantly have to remind them to use the left button to click, to point the mouse straight up and not rotate it if they want the pointer to follow its movements, and they’ll ask me for help because they need the pointer to go farther but the mouse is at the edge of the mouse pad already. In due time they’ll get used to it. It was really fun watching them discover how to do things like use the shape tool and to fill something in with color. I’d hear little bursts of gasping or joyful noises when they figured out how to do something.

Then after break, I sat for like 2 hours in the form B classroom as these traffic cops talked to all the students about god knows what in Sesotho. We even had samp for lunch and I didn’t even care! Nothing seemed to knock me out of my good mood. After lunch, I had a nice conversation with another teacher about siblings, about how he’s one of 8 boy. Dang. Then some form Cs wandered into the library and perused books with me.

A few days earlier, my dog hadn’t followed me home from school. I figured it’d come home on its own time, as it had done that several times before. But in the morning, there was no dog in the dog house, and on the way to school a ‘me asked me where my dog was. I said I didn’t know, and she was visibly upset. I soon found the dog on the school grounds. It must have just stayed there all night for whatever reason. Anyway, today I was walking home with my dog, and I saw the same ‘me. She was so happy to see I had found it. She said something along the lines of, “You found it! It was so sad/painful that it was lost. You’re always walking with it. It’s your baby!” I love the bo’me here. They’re the sweetest.

In other news, almost every other day I vacillate between wanting to be a bum and travel around and wanting to go to grad school and/or get a job in the US. Maybe I’m just tired of not really being productive with my life, but I still have the travel itch. I was looking at grad school classes for engineering programs last night. Good thing I have unlimited, consistent, fast internet to fill all my free time with research! Hah, what a joke.