A Hard Week at Work ... Nearly

Been at work now for 4 days and the kids don't actually start til the 22nd. The other Grade 3 teacher hasn't arrived yet so all the resources are piled up in my room waiting to be split between us. Tony has been in every day since Monday which has sped everything up for me. The walls are done and I've got him making maths resources. The other newbies on our floor have been borrowing him to put up their wall displays and fix things for them. It's been quite funny watching him run around for all these single women. The Egyptian dadas think he's funny. The language barrier doesn't seem to matter when Tony's around.

I'm hoping he will be able to volunteer to listen to the kids read because they are all learning English as their second language and there are about 6 that need extra 1:1 support. They have been identified as "Warning / Failure" so I'd like to give them as much exposure as I can because they're not getting it at home and their parents are paying extra to have their kids at our school. The sad thing is the Reading Specialist teacher would have to be 65+ and all she has to say about the kids she's worked with is nothing but negative. I wonder why she's there.

Anyway, we are hoping to get a bank account started next week so we can transfer some money over. The bank will come into school to set them up and we don't need our work permits to do it thank goodness. Sorting out a budget has been interesting. We keep converting to NZ which makes things really cheap and then we remember that we're not earning NZ, we're earning Egyptian, so there's no point converting. Scary thought some days but we've worked out how much we can spend each week until payday... so all is good.

The museum and Saqqara are our next ventures but we have to wait to see what happens now that Morsi, etc have been found guilty. There should be some retaliation from the Brotherhood but we are not really worried about it. We just keep our heads down and don't get into political conversations with the locals unless we know them really well. The Egyptian friends we have are all happy with the current situation. They have been through so much change in the past 10 - 12 year I'm not sure they have any idea what normal democracy is. We are so lucky in NZ!

Woohoo! Tomorrow is the last day of the week and I intend on leaving at 2 again.  There's only so many hours to a working day ...