March 6, 2012

My exhausting day began with the cats meowing outside my door and loudly calling to each other. I finally gave up and got up to feed them even though it was only 5:00am. Of course, once I served them their dry food, they disdainfully looked at it and walked away. I worked on some of the materials needed for today’s classes and left to stop at the Megaphon office to check on the status of my modem. The kind woman who always takes care of me informed me that I had the wrong SIM card in my modem, which meant I had to make another trip to my apartment to retrieve the original one.

I had just enough time to make the trip there, grab a few things I needed and get on the mini-van to get to the PedInst. I ran into Maryam, out for a walk with her grandchild, and said a quick hello to her. When I got the PedInst, I was glad to see that the dean had had the whiteboard nailed on top of the old blackboard, which was just the right height for me. I had 16 of the interpreters present and we played “Easy Opposites”, which wasn’t the case for them as they are not used to doing anything back to back. Scattergories was too difficult for they were not able to come up with lists of words under pressure.

During my break, I went to Professional Development Center and found it as desolate as usual. I was not able to get the computer to boot up and only kept getting a message indicating the CPU was not connected to the screen monitor even though all cables seemed to be in order. Unable to do any printing there, I returned to the dean’s office only to find out that he had had to travel to his village due to a death in the family. I printed the registration form and went back to my classroom to set up the tables. The teacher from Khulob, who had given me the collection of short stories to proofread, now clarified that he didn’t want my expertise as an editor, but for me to read each story aloud so he could record a CD to go along with the stories, or in this case, more specifically, fables. I told him I had not time to record 50 pages of fables and that hopefully, we could find an audio file online for most of them.

                                          Improvised gas station on a side street

I started out the teacher training session with only seven teachers and a visitor from Holland, Theo, whom Sadat had invited. We went through my customary “What’s in a Name” game, followed by “What do we have in Common” and finally “Find someone who…” for which the teachers didn’t know what a cellular phone was, as “mobile” is the term used here, diary or martial arts. I asked them to list what they wanted to get out of the sessions and promised that whatever mistakes or opinions they expressed in the classroom would remain among us. Three female teachers showed up and at the end, most teachers complained that they had been cajoled into attending the workshop even though they have teaching duties at that time. They begged me to change the time, but I declined referring them back to the dean for this as I no longer care to get in the middle. I feel that the first session went well and I promised to have all the materials we were using copied and bound for those who completed the eight sessions.

It was raining again when I left the PedInst and I took a mini-van to go directly to Marydean’s house. Cats were fed and I reheated leftovers from the night before. I hope to copy some of her DVDs into my computer to then find a way to watch them from my house. I can’t wait to sleep on my own bed tomorrow night.