Saturday, March 1 was the start of Ramadan and Saturday morning when I went for a walk there was a lot of traffic coming into Kaçanik. I decided to walk up the hill towards Stagova and away from the noise and traffic. Saturday's walk was really good. The temperatures were in the low 50s and there was no wind. It was really comfortable.
Sunday, however; was much cooler and rainy. There was no hike schedule. I am not sure if that is because of Ramadan or the bad weather. I went out for two walks and got wet both times. I still got a 4 mile walk in even with the rainy weather.
On Wednesday, I went with Mirvete to the village of Biqec. Mirvete is subbing in English classes for a teacher who is on medical leave. WriteOn is a creative writing competition is put on by Peace Corps volunteers and Mirvete had seven 6th graders that wanted to participate. The competition takes place in Albania and Montenegro as well. After WriteOn, I visited the 4th and 1st grade classes to talk with students, before returning back to the vocational school for the last class.
On Thursday, we had our normal 2nd hour class. Then we have a break. Gazmend had to go to the gjimnaz for a union meeting. Our 4th hour class is a automechnic group and they weren't into the last lesson we did on fashion. Since I had a break, I decided to see if I could find an ESL activity related to automechnics. I actually found several. One had a paragraph with a brief description of some of the parts of the engine and how they worked. In the paragraph, there were some words in bold and they matched to a diagram starting with the battery and the flow of electricity to various parts. The students had to label the parts with the bold words and then match these words to their correct definitions. This is a class where it can be hard to get 100% participation, but today all of the students worked on the worksheet. I had a harder worksheet with a diagram of a car and a dashboard. There were 35 parts of the car that they had to identify. About 1/2 of the class work on that one. It was a really great class and a lot of fun.
Thursday is also the day I have afternoon classes with Besim, however; he sent me a message on my way to school that he had the flu. So when I got to school, I did two of his classes on my own. These are senior classes and they were get a vaccination for Tetanus shots. The first class didn't want to work because they were anxious about get their vaccines and second group did not want to work, because they had just got their vaccine.
With Thom gone and nothing on the schedule, calls home are much more important. I talked with Thom on Saturday and with my niece and her family on Sunday. It is nice to talk with the girls (Rori is 6 and Maggie is 3).
I am sure that the month of March (Ramadan this year) will be hard for students and I am not looking forward to it. They will be tired, thirsty and hungry. Since many of the students smoke and they also can't during Ramadan; many will be craving cigarettes. I think they will have a hard time focusing, but I hope I am wrong.
The lettuce I'm growing in the apartment
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