Monday Beach Day!

Well, yesterday was the best Monday ever! I had class at 7:30am to 9:20am and then I was done for the rest of the day so a friend and I went to the beach!! We went back to the same beach that ISEP took us to during our orientation. It was quite a ride, but three different trotros and a taxi ride later we arrived at paradise! We had called ahead so we had chairs set out waiting for us and two hamburgers right up. They were SO delicious, probably the best hamburger in Ghana. Then we went swimming in the ocean and the waves are so big! It's so fun to jump over them and just play in the water. It was an absolute blast!! The best part is that the guy that owns the place is friends with our ISEP coordinator so he waved the entrance fee and gave us a really good price for our food. So our amazing day was made all the better by being pretty cheap!! It was such a nice day, definitely one of my favorite memories now!

Today was also really nice! I went to the school where I'm volunteering. It was their first day of school and it was great to see all of the kids there. They had yellow and green checkered uniforms, it was precious. The school is a primary school run by a Ghanaian NGO, so they find kids that were just out on the streets in that area and provide them with a free education. A decent education here requires school fees and oftentimes families can't afford to send their kids to school so this is a really great opportunity for the kids. It was my first time volunteering today, but they handed me a marker, a white board, one English book and 19 kids!! They were all kind of mixed in there but I think most of them were around 6th grade! I was a little nervous to  be thrown in like that but the kids were so respectful and well behaved that it really wasn't bad at all. I just went off the book and we learned about similes, genders of words and other random things. I had originally hoped to be with the little ones, but honestly I really enjoyed teaching the older kids! It was so great when they got answers right and I liked being able to pass on new knowledge to them! I talked to the director and he said by the time I go on Friday he should have a syllabus ready for me with what I should be teaching them. He mentioned grammar and spelling as weak points right now, so I am very excited to work with that!! I am going again on Friday so I'll let you know how it goes!!

For now I am just studying for my Twi test on Tuesday. I ordered my food in Twi tonight and no one laughed at me!! It was great! I also kind of had a conversation in Twi with a vendor at the night market, it was strained but I am definitely getting better!! I am excited to keep learning more. I'm on the look out for a Twi dictionary that I can carry around, since my vocabulary is still pretty limited. I'm sure it will improve with time, though!

I got a few letters from Marty last week and a card from his grandparents today! Mail makes me soo happy!!! Thank you so so much! It takes forever to get here, but it is totally worth the wait! It's so fun to write back and forth and hear about everyone else's lives back home :)