I don't feel good.

I haven't been feeling well today. In fact, part of me thinks that is a bit of an understatement - but I don't want to be a drama queen. Another girl here and I woke up bright and early this morning with stomach trouble. Here in Central America, that is a frightening thing. The weird part is, neither of us had any more problems like those all day. Instead, we just began to feel extremely weak and achy. I may have had/have a fever, but I'm not sure because I don't have a thermometer or the magical motherhood ability to detect them.

So here I am - in bed, thankful for the help of Tylenol and wondering if it will be okay to eat something. All I've had today was a pack of eight plain Ritz crackers around 10:30. I really hope I feel better tomorrow because it is so hard to be a good teacher when all you want to do is lay down.

My students did pretty well today. We're really working on walking in an orderly and quiet line when we travel together around the school. I'm starting to wonder about the expectations held for their structure and behavior in their previous years of school. I felt a little bad for them because they spent the vast majority of their day looking up vocabulary words. It blows my mind how poor so many of their English speaking abilities are - so content that would have already been challenging to understand at Vincent becomes even harder because they don't even know the words. One girl even asked me today what the word "tired" meant - so terms like "vascular" in science and "descendant" in social studies are probably more than overwhelming.

We also had a little adventure this morning with two VERY large spiders crawling on the ceiling. One of them eventually came down the wall, and I tried to kill it, but I missed and it jumped into a basket. Then one of my brave girls threw it outside.

In a survey on the first day of school, many of my students indicated that they believe they are Christians, and some said they are "a little." However, when I asked them to tell what that means to them, I got a lot of answers that seemed very undeveloped or even works-based. I pray that the Lord will use this year to give them wisdom and understanding about what it really means to know Him and to have a relationship with Him.

My upstairs neighbors have become loud during the last few days... I'm tempted to grab a broom and pull a Mr. Heckles. haha...

To continue the list from a previous post about things that are different here:
- First of all... a correction. Dr. Pepper does exist here. We went to a store similar to Sam's and I found a case of 36 cans. In comparison to other drinks, it's a bit more expensive. At the grocery store, I can get a bottle of Pepsi or Fanta (similar to a 20 oz. but measured differently) for about $0.50 or less.
- All of the lightbulbs here are energy-saving and flourescent. It's annoying. I bought a lamp because the light in my room hurt my eyes, but then I couldn't find a lightbulb for it that served the purpose I was looking for. I finally found out that one of my roommates had some soft white lightbulbs left over from an old roommate a long time ago, but they didn't fit in the lamp. So I compromised and put that one in the overhead light fixture and settled for a flourescent lamp.
- Another interesting thing about the lights is the way they hesitate when you flip the switch to the on position. In my closet and my bathroom, it's a bit like a strobe-light as it blinks on and off for the first five seconds. The best is in my classroom, where it's almost like a guessing game just to see how many of the lights even try to come on when I flip the switch.