First day of School

Today was the first day of school, and it was just about as chaotic as I expected. After breakfast I sat in the courtyard and watched as students trickled in; some with parents in tow, some being towed by parents, and some confidently on their own. With the preschool kids, it was pretty much like any first day of school. Some kids impatiently dismissed their anxious parent, others had to be pried out of their parents' arms, screaming and flailing. Mark and Marsha and I spent the first hour or so helping the two Pre-K teachers to calm down all the crying kids. (At one point, all but 2 of the 16  three and four year olds were wailing, those two just rolled their eyes, put their heads down on their desks and went to sleep.) The principal even came in with a bag of candy and each kid got a lollipop, which I thought was a great idea, but somehow they managed to cry around those too. Eventually they all wore themselves out though, and realized that mommy was not being mean and hiding on the other side of the classroom door.

I went up to check on the 3rd floor classrooms, and discovered that no classes were actually being held. Apparently the high school teachers are all part-time, and teach at several different schools. So they spend the first few days going to each school and trying to figure out a schedule. This would sort of explain why our school secretary told me that there would be lots more kids  in class next week, because lots of parents don' bother sending their kids for the first week of school.

Back on the first floor, the preK and Kindergarten kids were having recess, which for the preK kids involved sulking at the fact that mom or dad still hadn't come to rescue them, and for the Kindergarteners (who dealt with all that crying stuff last year and are so over it) this involved using us blans (white people) as a jungle gym. When they saw me, they all disassociated from the pile they were in - it turned out Mark was underneath the pile holding two of the sulking three-year olds - and flying over to pile on me. I told them I only speak a tiny bit of Creole, but that didn't stop them from peppering me with questions. One of the questions I managed to pick out, strangely enough, was "Do you eat goat? (Ou mange cabrit?)"  and I replied yes simply because I had understood the question. (Technically I'm not sure if I've ever eaten goat, the meat here tends to be mystery meat and we usually just don't ask). This prompted a hundred questions about what other things I eat..."Mange pul (chicken)? Mange bef (beef)?" and lots of other foods I didn't know the words for, so I just said yes to everything, and then said that I eat little children and chased them all around the courtyard some more. Considering my generally pathetic levels of Creole language skills, I considered this to be a highly successful conversation.