A Day in the Life

Since we have started to establish more of a routine, we thought we'd try to give a sense of what a "typical" day is like for us:

On a regular school morning, Olivia and I will get up at 6:00 in the morning to be all ready to leave for school at 6:45-ish. We eat breakfast, get dressed (in a uniform) and brush teeth before setting out. School starts at 8:00 (or at least says that it does) but with so much traffic going into Port of Spain (the capital city) it takes approximately 1 hour and a quarter. The school we go to is built on a hill, and so you park near the bottom and walk up the hill to the basketball court where they have 'assembly' every morning. In assembly, we all line up by form (there are 6 forms) and say The Lord's Prayer, then sing the national anthem, then say the pledge. Olivia and I have been trying to learn both the pledge and the anthem. We think we have the anthem pretty good, but feel mostly lost on the pledge. The schedule is not the same for every day, we have a 6-day timetable. There is only school Monday through Friday still, but there are 6 different schedules. This last week, we did days 1-5, so tomorrow we will just continue with day 6. There are 8 different 40-minute periods in a day--2 periods, then a 10-minute break, 2 more periods, lunch, 2 periods, 10-minute break, and then the last 2 periods. We will have a range of 4-6 classes (assuming the teachers show up) because about half of them are double or even triple periods. We have yet to see a day where all the teachers show up, and last Friday, one of the teachers left in the middle of a class (for good) to join the police!
~Roxy

Just to add to Roxy's entry, there are now 8 people in my form (3 girls, 5 boys) and 7 people in her form (2 girls and 5 boys). I think she's glad to have another girl in her form. People are very intrigued by my hair being blonde and want to touch it a lot.
It only takes about a half an hour to get back home in the afternoons without all the traffic. But, if it's a night when we're going to WITC, then we'll go there straight from school. It's not too far from the school, so sometimes we'll do some errands or something on the way, but still get to WITC around 3:00 or 4:00. The classes don't start until 5:00. Roxy and I bring clothes to change into from our uniforms and some games or something to occupy us while our parents are teaching. There's a lot of nice open grassy space there, and we don't have any sort of yard at home, so we usually bring a ball and play outside for a while. We also bring supper, but we usually try to be finished eating by 6:30 because it's dark by then, so we go into the library and do homework. The classes end at 8:00, so by the time we get home, which takes a little while, it's about bedtime.
When we aren't going to WITC, we come straight home after school. We do homework and practice instruments sometime after school. Last week, every night that was a non-WITC night, we either got invited to go somewhere or someone stopped by, so we kept pretty busy.
~Olivia

A lot of the day for Richard and I is spent in a combination of preparing for classes or other invitations, and in housework and errands. Housework and errands tend to take more time here than at home. Since we have lots of ants and no dishwasher, any use of dishes must immediately be washed. This lessens the ants somewhat, although around here, no building is ant-free. At least staying on top of things keeps away the big insects. Although the apartment here is much smaller than our home in Manhattan, we keep very busy with it. Laundry must be done almost every day because we only have a washer, not a dryer. In this humidity, most days it is difficult to dry more than one load on the line. Ironing is a much bigger deal here, especially for school uniforms. As for errands, well that is largely an issue of negotiating crazy traffic.
Our classes are going well too. It occurred to us that a load of 3 classes is usually considered a full load of teaching. So, here, like at home, it turns out that we are basically sharing one full time position. My classes grew this week. I gained one new student in my Wed. class and 4 in my Fri. class. I also was asked to present for one of the church small groups. So I explained spiritual direction and did lectio divina with them. That was fun.
~Barb

As you may be able to tell from the above posts, I spend a good portion of most days driving to and from school and running any errands that need to be done. While the school is only 10 miles from our apartment, it takes an hour and a quarter to get there each morning. Thankfully, it is usually only a half hour to get back home in the morning and a half hour or less each way in the afternoon.
I've gotten to the point where I can fairly easily find my way to and from the places where we go on a regular basis. Whenever I have to find something new, however, it is often challenging. There are relatively few street signs, and virtually no detailed maps. So far, I've been fortunate in that I haven't gotten completely lost.
~Richard