Last week at the African refugee tutoring I walked in to find "R" waiting for me and was greeted with, "you're late!" We quickly sat down and I got the Scrabble flashcards I brought. But first we had to sort through some stuff for his job and it seems I will be making a trip with him to the bank sometime soon to make sure they're putting all his paycheck in the right place; he said the man told him the bank might have to take a fee out - why can't people just be honest?
"R" is still learning his letters and even though he can carry on a conversation in English really well he cannot read words and cannot correctly indicate certain letters. We listed the alphabet with the cards and then went over their sounds and started making words. The first word he wanted to know was "cute" - he said some of the girls at work were calling him "cute" and he wanted to know the difference in comparison to "beautiful." The next word he spelled was "love," and then he wanted to know how to spell, "Jesus."
I have to say it made me a little nervous when we started spelling it out because our professor has stressed that we're not there to "convert" them, so I didn't want her to think I was stepping out of bounds as far as the rules went for our class. Later I felt pretty silly for having a second thought about spelling it with him; he was the one who asked. In another post I talked about him asking to go to church; we tried to take him this week, but he called early Sunday morning and said his boss called him in to work. He had called five times on Saturday wanting to set up the plans for coming to church with us; I hope it will work out soon. He seems very eager! I will ask him what kind of church he would like to go to and he replies, "Any church! Any church!"
After the tutoring, he and two other students packed into my little VW Bug and we drove to their neighborhood a few blocks away (they walk to the center because most of them do not drive). Some of the other women from our class had taken several other students home so we all arrived in the neighborhood together and met Mugo, the leader of the tutoring program. We're planning on having a block party for the neighborhood before the quarter is over and so we walked around meeting the women (usually only the men attend the tutoring because the women stay home and cook and take care of the children). We went to the front door of all the houses and were met by smiling faces, women inviting us into their humble homes (and I mean humble - one house had a hole in the roof and it still puzzles me that there were people living in it - others had up to 11 people residing in them). They had us sit on their mismatched furniture and we asked them what kind of food they liked and would want for the party. Most of them said they liked goat, chicken, rice, kasava leaves and fruit.
Many of the women sat out on their porches together enjoying the warm weather and others were hoeing the garden in one of the vacant lots. They wore t-shirts or tank tops and brightly-colored wraps as skirts, and some wore head wrappings. The women seem less "Americanized" than the men, and it's probably because they're not out in the public as much; they stay home with the children and do not go out to work. However, some of them do have jobs as cleaning ladies so perhaps they just choose to keep the traditional dress more so than the men. But everyone wore a welcoming, warm smile and we left them with friendly waves (most of them could not speak very much English so Mugo did most of the talking/translating, but a smile need not be translated!). I felt like we had made new friends that we would be seeing again in a couple more weeks. We plan to bring the food to them a couple days before the party and they will fix it (this may seem odd that we're hosting the party and they're cooking the food, but Mugo said they wouldn't have it any other way).
I'm very excited because Scott will be accompanying me this week and helping tutor the children since he's finished with school for the summer. I cannot thank God enough for sending us this wonderful opportunity and to have these people be a part of our lives.
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