Second Week Updates

After such a busy first week in Lithuania, our second week has been pretty low-key. This is mostly due to the fact that most of us are sick. My roommate Camee has been sick with a severe cold sine last week. And this week the rest of the girls caught it. I was feeling fine for most of this week, so I was hoping that the sickness would pass over me. However, Wednesday night my throat started to feel a little sore. I drank some water and went to bed praying that I would wake up with my throat feeling better. Then I woke up at about 3:00 AM and my throat was aching. Panic set in, and I was sure that I was getting strep throat. I sent out a few agitated texts to Mom and Jessie and went back to sleep. Thankfully, when I woke up on Thursday, my throat didn't feel as bad as it did in the night. But during teaching that day, I started to get major chills. My entire body was freezing from my head to my legs. As soon as I got home, I crept under my bed covers and tried to get warm. I woke up today and the chills were gone. My throat still feels a little dry, but I'm hoping that was the extent of the sickness and that it won't get any worse. Since the rest of the girls are sick too, we haven't really gone out and done anything this week. Hopefully next week everyone will feel better, and we can start doing things during the day before teaching.

Teaching has been fine. We had our first evaluation on Wednesday and our scores weren't very high. But talking to the other girls, I guess everyone got a low score. Our head teacher probably wants us to try to improve and keep working hard until the end of the semester. It is kind of an interesting situation, because all of the children we are teaching right now will be gone at the beginning of June. Then supposedly we're doing a summer camp, but from what we've heard, only three kids are signed up right now. So I guess we'll just have to wait and see what will happen.

Here are some pictures of my students from this week. We made paper boats.

This is Birute and Laurynas. Boy, are they both obnoxious. But also very smart. 

This is Oleg. He is very hard for me to figure out. Some days it seems like he loves you and others like he hates you. 

This is Maya. She's our little crybaby, but she's also an absolute sweetheart when she's happy.

This is Kira. She is pretty quiet. I try to get her to participate, but most of the time, she just says "I don't know." Hopefully, we can get her more confident in her English abilities. 

The whole class.

This weekend we might be going to Trakai Castle. It is a really cool floating castle that was built around the 1400s. Trakai was also the medieval capital of Lithuania, so it's supposed to be a really cool town. A girl we met at church is taking us. She is really cool and her English is perfect. She goes to Vilnius University, so she's around our age. It will be awesome to be shown around by a local. Yesterday, it was also Maggie's birthday. She spent the day with celebrating with her host family, so we're having our celebration tonight. After teaching, we are going to go to Hesburger for dinner. Then we're going to watch Austenland, which I guess is her favorite movie. So hopefully this weekend will reinvigorate us for the last couple weeks of teaching this group of kids.

Lastly, we got our vacation dates. We have vacations June 20-29, July 3-6, and July  18-26. We already have a list of places we want to go, so we're starting the initial planning. It should be really exciting, but I'm not going to get my hopes up until the plans are approved. The ILP director is coming next week, which is abnormally early. But that's how it worked out, so we'll have that next week as well. I miss you guys!