Thursday Sept 17

Today started out pretty well, but then I was told I was having 2 parent meetings in the morning which I didn’t know about. I was nervous thinking what are they going to say to me, what have I done wrong, etc. I mean I’ve never been a teacher or had to have a meeting with a parent except with Young Life stuff. They ended up going well ; the parents just wanted to let me know specifics about their kids, like if they have ADD and how I can help them and stuff. Then I saw Jake outside the office and I was like what is he doing here? Well then here come Dennis and Vicente. They were all in La Union and decided to come to Gracias for the day to have meetings with the American teachers. It was mainly to encourage us, see how we were doing with things, and they gave us some constructive criticism as well. It went pretty well for me, but some of the other girls had harder ones. After that meeting I had one more parent meeting so in total I had four meetings in one day. My nerves were shot! I stayed after for help class, came back home and we all vented about our crazy day. We were going to make spaghetti for dinner but then we found out, surprise!, we had ran out of gas. So we had sandwiches for dinner instead. The power went out twice during the evening so had to do some grading by candlelight. Just like in the old days. I don’t take things for granted here: thank you God for hot water, electricity, gas, cell phone signals, and great people.