Spring, and other fascinating topics

I think Spring is, hand’s down, the best season ever. Everything is green and fresh and just being outside fills one with boundless joy.

I titled this post “spring” but I’m mostly going to be talking about what’s going on in my everyday life. My life slowly plodded along in the winter, but with the dawn of spring came a renewed burst of energy. Hurrah!

I finally have something to do every afternoon, Monday through Friday. And let me tell you, I love being busy. Especially with my own little car to zip around from place to place in. Especially since it’s spring.

Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday there is After School Program for the kids who live in the trailer park behind my Aunt and Uncle’s Church. Let me tell you, those Hispanic kids just burrow their way into your heart.

I don’t know if you remember my post on Andrea a couple weeks back, but she is one of the ASP kids. She still has struggles. Often she absolutely refuses to go where you tell her to, and sometimes I find her crying by herself in a corner. It breaks my heart.

Tuesday and Thursday, from 12:30-2:30, I help teach English as a Second Language to Arabs in the area. Sometimes I do assistant teaching, sometimes childcare for children of the students. This also takes place at my Aunt and Uncle’s church so I just stay there when I’m done, and around 3:00 people start arriving for ASP.

Wednesdays there is a Backyard Bible Club at Merryweather Hills, which is an apartment complex in Harrisonburg where many immigrants live. We have kids of all backgrounds that come to this Bible Club, but it’s harder to get close to them cause I only see them once a week, as opposed to the ASP kids. However there are two girls, Dania and Julia, that I know very well because they come to English as a Second Language classes with their mothers quite often.

And Fridays…drumroll please…I have begun tutoring!

Sandy, the lady in charge of the After School Program, approached me the other week wondering if I could tutor a little girl who was flunking kindergarten. The girl, Jehirah, goes to the after school program but I hadn’t spent a lot of time with her previously.

So last Friday I took her to the library after school and worked on letters and colors with her. She was really scared at first, but by the end I was her best friend. Now she attaches herself to me at ASP.

“I have a lip,” she told me the other day.

“You do?” I asked, a bit confused as to her meaning.

“I have two lips! Wanna see?” she said, tugging at my hand.

“Sure,” I said, as she led me over to her backpack.

She pulled out two tubes of lip gloss. “See? Two lips!”

…

Mornings are still very bare, but I’ve been using that extra time to study for an SAT! My biggest dream right now is to go to college, and of course the first step towards that goal is doing an SAT. I signed up to take it on May 1, so now I’m working on it an hour a day.

However, today it was over three hours that I worked on it. My  SAT study guide has a diagnostic test that you give yourself so that you can see what your areas of weakness are. It takes about three and a half hours to do, but I hadn’t done a quarter of that before it was glaringly obvious what my area of weakness was: math.

I was pretty good at reading comprehension and writing skills, but my math skills were virtually non-existant. Often I would look at a problem with little to no idea of how one would go about solving it. Sometimes I solved the problem using lengthy round-about experiments, while other times I just had to skip them.

I seriously haven’t done math for three years. Yikes.

But hey, I have so many empty mornings, what’s to keep me from studying math now?

I want to go to college so bad.

…

So there you have it: an account of my day-to-day schedule. Although it’s all volunteer, so I’m still very much financially dependent on my parents, there is something lovely and satisfying about having the opportunity to devote myself to volunteering.