"Monday" but Sunday

Pastoral scene from Al Far'aa


On top of the mound with students.

Today is Sunday and first day of a new working week.

After having reflected a little over last weeks experiences, I decided to make a go for it with a couple of classic communication exercises that I think are excellent to trigger real conversation in pairs. One of them is difficult in the sense that it demands a bit of self discipline by the students.

Things worked out quite well mostly because the students are brave and curious to see what I invite them try out. Since they are not used to talking English, several of the students will communicate a lot in Arabic between them, but mostly to figure out what to do. So what?

Many of them do speak English, and let's face it: most students of English as a foreign language need a bit of time to accept the role they have to play when they engage in oral exercises as the ones I use.

Also; today was the big day with regards to the table tennis tournament - Spring cup 2010. 55 students had signed up. The participants had been broken into 4 flights, and a timetable from today till Thursday had all been laid out, something that took about 2 hours last night to put together.

At 12:30 as school ended and the competition were to start, 7 students showed up! The natives were right; only the ones who are good at table tennis would show up. I, who wanted an open competition for everybody, experienced a cultural "mini" shock typical of expatriates in an environment where they don't know the ropes.

No big deal. Instead we'll arrange a competition for the 7 that showed up on Tuesday. Since there are not more than seven, we ought to be able to finish all of the rounds maybe except the final by Wednesday.

Had all 55 showed up, it would have been fun, but nevertheless a zoo.

For the second time I was invited to the village and the home of one of the students. This village Far'aa lies some 20 minutes by car from Nablus on the road to Jenin (northwards) in a beautiful valley of fruit - lemon and oranges - and olive groves, wheat fields, and lush and green fields all surrounded by majestic mounds and mountains.

The students asked jokingly if I wanted to climb the nearby Dalsnuten type mountain something I to their surprise said I thought was a great idea. Yeah; let's do that.

Good dinner in a nearby newly opened restaurant after the hike.

After dinner we managed to post the first blog from a student at the Al Salayyah school on the blog established by students at Kongsgård called My grandparents.

Maybe other students will now want to post a blog about their grandparents too. We'll see.