Thursday, September 10, 2009

Field Trip!






Today Alex and Nathan's school went on a field trip of sorts to another school. I think the idea here was to let the kids have class in a different location for a day. I was asked to join the group at the last second since another child became ill and the mother could not go. Also this let me bring my camera along to visually record the days events. Fortunately the day began quite easy compared to other days. Kathleen agreed to get up at 7am with me to help get the boys ready while I got ready myself. This was a feat in itself since she gets home between 3 and 4 in the morning and at that point only slept for around 3 hours. My good fortune ended though when the boys went to school because as soon as we arrived at the school they decided that they did not want to go on the field trip and Nathan, in particular, wanted to go home. After about fifteen minutes of "convincing" they decided to go. The bus we took was not to awful compared to standard U.S. buses. It was however smaller and could not accommodate the 25-30 kids and teachers so we took two vehicles. It took a little while to actually go the 1o miles or so the other school since the drivers of the buses had to stop and ask for directions 3 times. The last time we stopped, we were traveling on a dirt road directly underneath the landing pattern of the local airport that services both commercial and military traffic. I will say that traveling in a bus on a bumpy dirt road is not the most comfortable ride available. We bounced up and down for quite a bit and constantly had to get to kids to sit back down so they would not go flying. As I said before the field trip was basically a normal class in a different setting. The kids played first and then had there snack. After that, they painted and were able to see a few of the animals at the school. ( This school had several different animals. They had rabbits, fish, chickens, cows, and water buffalo. The school was located adjacent to a farm and I think that they had some kind of co-op running.) The kids loved looking at the animals. Each one lined up to be able to hold the rabbit. Nathan did not do any painting as usual. He hasn't been participating in school activities lately. But Alex had a lot of fun painting his bag. First they painted a sheet of paper and then attached it to the side of a bag provided by the school. They also enjoyed the snack which was basically a tomato sandwich. I find this especially funny since if attempted to give them this kind of snack at home they would most definitely not eat it.
We arrived at the other school around 930am and we left at 1130am so the entire trip was only three hours from start to finish. The boys had a blast though. I hope that in the future we can do more of these outdoor activities especially since the rainy season is almost over. I can be assured that they had a great time since they were very sleepy the rest of the day. Tomorrow we are actually planning on visiting the Aga Khan Palace so we will see how that goes. That's all for now. More to come later.