Fr. Blaise stepped up his game today. Everyone did. I decided not to make a run to Kara as I had originally planned due to an unfortunate case of worms and the unavailability of the friend I was going to visit. Also, I had an unexpected surprise as a few students showed up to work in the garden. I had asked them the night before if they could come and figured it was a long shot, but it turned out being worth it.
We successfully finished off over half of the garden project by clearing brush and burning it in the furrowed rows, digging up over 100 mason bricks and creating a wall around the entrance of the garden (the part that is visible from the entrance to the monastery), created new paths, and cleared rocks out of a portion of ground that was previously unusable for planting. In finishing up today, I came to two realizations. The first, the garden will have more than tripled in size since my arrival and has even more room for expansion if it is needed. The second, I should have taught the 4th grade class. Not that Pelimliwa and I aren’t good friends, but I think that the potential was there to have about 5 or 6 Pelimliwa’s had I been in the other class. There are 11 more students, most of them live within a 4 km distance as opposed to one of mine, and they are more outgoing. Not that there shouldn’t be a degree of professionalism when interacting with students, but my more playful and sometimes childlike demeanor meshes very well with most of them. I visited a few of their houses this afternoon to thank them for coming to help me this morning and in doing so I ran into a few more and the little outing turned into a school reunion! Not that I have any regrets about how things turned out, but things could have been different in a very good way.
As it stands, I will get a nice day of rest and recovery tomorrow before packing up and putting some finishing touches on the garden Monday and Tuesday before heading to Kara on Wednesday, Lomé on Thursday, and Nairobi on Saturday.
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