Big Fat Pony

18th of November 2011
It was finally time to get a little taste of life as a volunteer. We were going to teach at a local Nepali school. As we approached the school, the butterflies in my stomach started taking of. There, all of the children were assembled in the schoolyard. Today they wore white bottoms and shoes instead of the grey bottoms and black shoes of yersterday. This messed up some of the preparation made by one of the groups. (They overcame it by changing "Your" to "Our".
When the assembly ended, the children ran up to their classrooms where we were greeted by song. I was teaching 4th grade along with Katrine. When we announced that they were going to draw while I read a fairy tale, their faces lit up in a smile. Katrine and I had decided, that we were going to read "The Swineheard" because it took 10 minutes toread out loud, and it had a princess.
Whether or not the children understood what they were supposed to do was a bit unclear in the beginning, since they were completely still while the fairy tale was being read. It was only when Katrine started drawing that they picked up their pencils and followed her lead.
The game of Hangman was the polar opposite. In an attempt to make the game less morbid, we drew a house instead of the hanged man. However the children exitingly cried uot "Hangman, Hangman" when they realized what the game was. So we did the original version instead. At first they were all seated at their tables, one saying a letter at a time. But as the game went along they stood pressed up against each other in a half circle around the "white borad" screaming letters at the same time. It was a wee bit confusing.
Well with the one hour past and our our program finished, we expected somebody to come and take over the class. This did not happen. So we had to improvise. Luckily we had been taught the energizer "Big Fat Pony" in which you run around in a circle whilst singing a song about a big fat pony. Fun and easy and they loved it. A lot. It becomes slightly less fun the seventh time you run around singing, with barely any breath left. But we played it over and over, even when we were told that we were done teaching, we did it again - just one last time.
We left the school feeling a bit like rock stars, because as we were leaving the children were running after us asking for our autographs. We managed to write quite a few, before they were hurdled back into their classrooms.
Back at the platform, we decided to celebrate this our first day of volunteering, the bast way we could think of; with chocolate cake, butterscotch ice cream and a game of charades.
/Kia and the rest of the volunteers, who have eaten way too much cake