First *Real* Day of Class

So yesterday we administered a test in order to determine what level the kids were at, and then I just played word games with them for an hour.  Today the actual curriculum started.  I got advanced level kids, so I read them an except from Walter Dean Myers' memoir (actual word I was supposed to teach them, but had no idea how to spell) "Bad Boy."  But the things they had the most trouble with weren't the convenient;y underlined words with their definitions, but instead phrases like "a chorus of laughter."  They didn't know the word "chorus" and they certainly couldn't understand it's place in this story.  But my first class of 12 - unusually large because 3 kids who weren't supposed to be with me wandered in- got through it all really well and I felt like everything was timed perfectly.  My second class was another story.  There were only 6 and 3 should've been beginners and 3 should actually be in advanced and there was absolutely no middle ground at all.  I don't know how that's going to work out.  Then I taught photography class with another volunteer and we went up on the roof of the camp and took pictures of the view.

Here is a picture I took from my apt's balcony before coming here:

About the camp: this morning was scary.  We drove up to the military checkpoint and they refused our government issued ID number and made us wait for a while while they stomped back and forth with their gigantic guns and took all of our passports.  There was one with red, sunken eyes who looked like he could care less about life and I thought, for a second, that this sounded like the beginning of a forensic anthropology story Tulane professor John Verano would talk about, with a few random Americans disappearing in the middle of nowhere and a catche of anthropologists getting hired by the families to identify the remains.    Of course it all worked out in the end, but still.