William the Inventor

June 21st, 2008

Today was… pictures, a lot of pictures. Doing a group project involving painting each child’s hand green to represent leaves on a tree. It is a little bit like those tacky kindergarten projects but it was so much fun to do and the kids loved it. They formed this giant line, pushing each other and trying to cut and have green paint spread across their hands.

I’d push their hands down on this massive tree and then we’d immediately wash it off to prevent chaos. Even Jah-Jah, Massy and Cathy wanted some paint on their hands…     They performed for us while Cathy taught them a new dance. At one point Allen farted and everyone around her started rolling on the ground in complete hysteria… I was laughing so hard I had a few tears in the corners of my eyes. We filmed almost 2 hours of Cathy taught them. We look like a joke when we film because I have this minidv cam rented from FSU that’s probably 3 years old and an external mic that I hold above my head on a flimsy wire. So that’s my boom mic…I’m so pro. For lunch they ate the leftover mac and cheese that we made for them last night. They were loved it so much, they kept fighting over it.

Abdu messed up his toe by wrapping a rubber band around it and cutting the circulation off. He stayed home from school Friday and we put some gauze around it and wrapped it because it looked pretty awful. It healed up today but he kept asking for a bandaid. He’d ask me for one and I said he looked okay and didn’t need one he played the “mom said no, ill ask dad” card and went and asked Heather right after. After this he went and got Muzafalu who has this horrible looking cut on his shin, we put a bandaid on that one.

At one point in the day, Pons came in while we were drinking some tea and was rolling on the ground laughing and repeatedly saying “pig-e-wei-wei.” We had to ask what this was or meant and Norah said that he was saying he was going to beat us in Swahili. We laughed for a very, very long time.

While I was taking pictures today I came across William working on another one of his inventions. I’ve never seen anything like this. This little boy collects all kind of mechanical and random objects and uses them in these pretend machines that he builds. This is what I’ve noticed in his collection so far: Half of a blue soccer ball that he wears on his head usually when he’s inventing, a unicef press badge that he wears around his neck while inventing, a mattress coil, gears from a bike, a power strip and other random unidentifiable mechanical objects. It’s superb.

Norah and Resty, Joweria, Specioza, Ben, Cathy, Massy and Isaac sat up with us until past midnight asking us questions about America. They asked us if we had parents, what we did when the power went out, if we had tribes, if we had homework, if we had a king, if we had elephants and on and on and on. Yep.

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