Day 5: April 8th, 2010 – Teaching English and African Health Advice

Good day today.

Played with the kids in the morning. I actually taught a class in the afternoon, too! A full 1 hour and 30 minutes. These kids are super smart. They knew a lot of animals, colours, numbers, the alphabet, descriptions, languages, and countries. The kids loved my lesson on languages of the world. It all started with the French. They asked if I knew it, I’m like, fuckin eh I know French, and wrote some on the board. Next, Chinese? I’m like, sure, I know Chinese, and scribbled something on the board, and the kids laughed. So we worked our way through Japanese, Thai, Italian, Korean, Islam and Khmer. I don’t know half of those languages, but they found it absolutely fucking hilarious that I was trying to write them on the board. They especially laughed when I wrote some Khmer on the board: something that resembled a squiggly happy face. They impressed me, though, because they could spell words like Chinese and Korean (the hardest was Italian). After I tested their animal, description and sentence-making abilities, we moved on to an epic game of hangman, a beautiful game that sucked up 20 minutes of time. Really impressed. I’m going to have to step up my efforts to challenge them next time.

The one thing that really surprised me today was how one kid was interested in learning about the stock market, or at least he sat through my blathering. His name is Sokhum and he’s about 12 years old. I was checking my stocks when he walked into the office and sat down. I showed him some charts, I showed him how I’ve lost some money on one stock, but made money on some others. I tried to teach him about trend lines, but I’m not sure he completely understood how to draw them. He did understand that an up-trend line is good, whereas a down-trend line is bad. At the end, we went through about 6 or 7 stocks and we pretended to buy 100 shares each. He owns lsg.to, pnp.to and osk.to. He did not want to buy clm.to I bought clm.to, bbd/b.to, and lsg.to. I told him we’ll try to check the prices every day. Next week we have off, so I’ll see if he’s still interested in another week’s time.

Bought two paintings. I’ll post pictures. The orphans made them. Made me think of how I can get the kids involved in writing a story with me.

Back at the guesthouse, one of the girl’s works in the kitchen wanted me to teach her some dance moves. I tried to teach her a few, but she was shy, more willing in words than in body.

Heard one of the funniest health tips ever today from a Swedish girl took some advice from a Ghanan doctor: stop eating meat and drink whiskey. Four shots in the morning, one at night. Wow. I have yet to try. No doubt it’d make my day a lot better!

Did some creative writing today. Working on the feature film to be shot in Canada this year.