A month has passed...already?!?

Hello everyone!

It is difficult for me to believe that it has almost been a month since I arrived in Nairobi. I have felt much more settled and comfortable here the last couple of weeks. It seems it always takes a couple of weeks to get adjusted and to start really getting into the groove of life here. I thank you all for the prayers I know you are speaking on my behalf and for the people at MITS and throughout Kenya. Please continue to pray that God will use us team members to work in the lives of the students and the people we encounter each day so that they will either come to know about God for the first time or that they be able to deepen their understanding of Him and how He changes lives. Please also pray for those people – that He will be preparing them to be able to hear and understand the Good News.

CLASSES
Many of my classes are now underway. I have been working Tuesday through Friday with the Literacy II students in English writing skills and practice (composition), library, and public speaking. I have 14 students in the 9-10 o’clock class who almost all need extra training in sentence formation, uses of punctuation and proper grammar, but they seem to enjoy writing when I give them assignments and can write quite a lot. That is very promising. The 9 students in my 10-11 o’clock Advanced Lit II class are good at making sentences, so my goal for them is to improve their grammar and begin to work on improving the rhetorical grammar by teaching them transitional phrases, how to write more compelling sentences and working on having a strong beginning, middle and end to their stories. In addition to those basic writing skills, my course curriculum for all of my writing students includes learning various writing styles (narrative, descriptive, explanatory, comparative, book report, newspaper article, etc.).

I met with the 7 Fast Track students last week for the first time. It seems they are better, on average, with grammar but also need extra assistance making sure they use correct punctuation and developing their skills to make okay writing great writing.

Anastacia, my journalism student, has been working on some articles for the first newspaper. We plan to have it printed within the next week or two. She announced in chapel last week that students wanting to help write, illustrate, or take photos should come and tell her after chapel. She had about 20 students sign up, which is very promising. The students seem quite excited about the project. I may add some students to my class once we print the first paper so that Anastacia can work on articles and assigning stories, opinion pieces, movie reviews and illustrations while I begin with the basics of the industry with the new students.

This Monday, I began teaching a class in English writing for the three mothers we have in the boarding and education program in Eastleigh. However, Catherine was not even able to write her name. She will have to start with square one of learning English. Yvonne, who is currently pregnant, finished grade 8 in school and seems to be pretty good already. I believe she will be at the same level as some of my Lit II students. The other mother wasn’t there while I was, but I left an exercise for her to do so that I can evaluate her level. I will teach that class every Monday for an hour and then work with the small children.