Update

Wow, when I signed in to write my blog was in German! Not what I have written but everything else. Here we are at the first Sunday after Easter. And here is a little update.

It is the rainy season - has been since the beginning of April , although today we have not had rain yet. Leaves are coming out, the piper is flowering, in the patio of the home we are seeing green grass coming up. The patio got an especially hard workout this summer and was very brown and dry - so we shall see how it comes back. We had a lot of adolescents doing their social work at the home and so a lot of extra soccer games as well as volleyball. They played along with our kids. Now I can see green grass poking its way up and I wonder if we will have the lush patio we have had in the past.

We now have 24 girls officially on the role. One didn't return from Easter Weekend as yet (and may not I think - she is 14 and her mother placed her at the home so she could go to school and be in a safer place - but that is a hard transition for someone who has had fairly unsurpervised access to stores and all the alure of city life - even as unsafe as the area she was living in was. I hope she has returned to the Darien with her mother if she isn't coming back to us. While she was with us she got some badly needed dental work done.) and two were admitted on Thursday. There is one more girl in the paperwork stage. We have 32 beds - but we use one for an adult to sleep with the youngest kids (we have two 5 year olds) and we probably won't go over 30. If we get to 30 that will be the most since I have had contact with the home - which is now 19 years!

School is in full swing. This year MEDUCA (the ministry of education) is comitted to have improved education. So far there have been very few days when even one girl has not had school because of teacher absence. There isn't now and has not been a substitute system here.

Our two new girls are sisters ages 12 and 13 and as with every girl we have admitted this year (2007) that is 9 they are very out of synch with their education. Both are just starting 4th grade and both are well below grade level in arithmatic and one has a lot of problems reading. She says her teacher in her previous school says that she needs glasses - so we will be checking that out. These two girls also are very thin - but some time with us will improve that as we serve nutricious food and often have snacks. Everyone gets a glass of milk a day (this may seem little to some of you). The milk program is a gift from one of the friends of the home. We buy long-life milk at 70 cents a quart. Fresh milk would be a little less but it goes off easily here so this is better. A serving for each takes 5 quarts! a day. We also use some of it on cereal and in the breakfast drink. Ideal (evaporated milk) also goes into the morning drink.

Our morning study time (from 8AM to 10:30) is very full for the staff. Often one of us is working with 2 to 4 girls at once - and they can be in 4 different grades. I do a lot of remedial work in arithmatic, work on the girls mastering the times tables and improving their addition and subtraction skills and multiplication and division. There are four (ages 10 to 14) who have not mastered even very basic division so we spend time placing pennies and other things in groups and going on from their. If, in addition to this they are just memoring their multiplications tables I teach them the 2s, 5s, 3s and then start using those to practic doing multiplication on the grade level. In 4th grade they are learning to do such as 235 x 21.

I also have learned most of 7th grade math and some of the algebra that is used in 8 and 9th grade.

Our three first graders (ages 7, 9 and 10) are doing fairly well. Our 9 year old had been to kindergarten 4 years ago and then not back in school, but she has an older sister who had finished 2nd grade and so she is doing well in 1st. The two girls, ages 7 and 10, who are the first females in their family to go to school, are going ok - especially since when they came to us in mid January they only preschool skill they had was coloring.

I'll be in Philadelphia for the month of May.

Tia Sue