Last week in the Internship....

Some of my amazing and awesomely cute little girls from my class on our walk down the hill to the bus.

My classroom, it ate much by American standards but it's adequate

Well, last week seemed like the official beginning of our internship because we finally began teaching English.  Last week we were told we would teach between 15 and 30 kids and were a little afraid but willing to go through and do what was necessary.  When we arrived at the Marqez in the morning we found that the number had blossomed to well over a hundred and our classrooms were just not large enough to take care of all of the children.  I taught a class of between 40 and 60 girls in a tiny room where there were so many of them that I couldn't even fit in the door.  Fatimah and Ali soon decided that we wouldn't be able to make this work and so decided to split up based on gender and age-group.  We will be teaching boys on Sunday and Tuesday.  Each one of us will have two classes a day and then on Monday and Wednesday we will teach the girls again in two seperate classes each for a total of eight classes total.  Every day we teach the class, more students show up and by the end of the week we were at probably 150 students or more with some classes exceeding 20 students even now!  Now that you know about the semantics, let me tell you about the actual teaching because it's insane.
  The boys are pretty terrifying.  I really do not look forward to teaching them because they never pay attention, yell your name out randomly and never do what you ask.  What is more, as a whole they know much less English than the girls do.  My first day of class our boss brought a broom stick into my room and told me to hit any of the kids that didn't pay attention with it.  Austin and I have found a much less, abrasive  approach and now simply kick out any kids who are exceedingly loud and disruptive.  Today we actually kicked out brothers, he kicked out the older one from his class and I the younger from mine.  Well, the older brother didn't leave and kept coming into my class and goading on the kids.  I kept telling him to leave and he wouldn't so I tried to simply ignore him which of course didn't work.  Then, the next time I saw him I told him every way I could think of in English that I wanted him to leave at which he called me "dumb-ass" in Arabic and then spit at me.  I took one step towards him, I don't feel like letting little kids talk like that to me, and he ran away and I didn't see him or his brother again.  Finally, I got so sick of them not doing anything that I simply let them go about 40 minutes early after I saw that Austin had done the same thing.

One of two giant spiders I slaughtered today
in class.  I think this spider can get as large as 6
inches across but we are having trouble
identifying it from the mass of guts on the floor

  The girls... let me just take a breathe of fresh air thinking about how awesome they are in comparison.  We teach girls that range in ages from 4 to 17 split into four classes.  I get to teach the two older classes and they are so well behaved.  When I ask them to talk with each other in English to practice what we just learned they love to do it and do quite well at it.  What's  more, they beg me for homework (even the little ones) and love it when I check their homework and they do well.  I think part of it might be that I look a lot like the famous Turkish actor Mohanned who is apparently very attractive in this culture, and if I smile at any of the older girls they immediately hide their face and forget what they were saying.  As a whole, however, they do a great job at practicing and learning what I try to teach them and from my experience so far it is no wonder that the women go to college in at a much larger rate than the men do if this segment of society is indicative of the rest.  I love teaching the girls, and I think we might start making little videos of them speaking in English so I can let you see them.  They are awesome and I honestly look forward to teaching them tomorrow.
  Besides the teaching English, we will hopefully be doing the survey for the Iraq Al-Ameer area every Thursday although I doubt it will actually get off the ground.  It is extremely likely that everyone will be very busy and then when Ramadan comes in August and Austin leaves, they'll probably just drop it for awhile.  I do hope it actually happens, however, because I think it would really help the Marqez know what they must do to help the people in this area.  Also, we have been progressing on the 3 million dollar proposal to the worldbank.  The work on it is progressing, although slowly because translation is a lengthy process.  At the end of July we will travel to the Angwhar area, which consists of all the regions along the border with Israel, and will set up workshops for them on project management as well as conduct secondary surveys to help us understand the other work we are proposing to do in those regions.  It also is going well and adds a bit of professionalism to our internship here.

The "Sanitary Amenities" this toilet as a diameter
of about 3 to 4 inches and is probably 11 inches tall
I imagine watching me try to use this would probably
be one of the funniest things an Arab could see

  Things are going well, and for the first time in two months I actually feel like I'm making some sort of small difference.  Actually, as I write this blog post, Austin is in the other room with our boss who wants him to write down all the words to a song sung by Celine Dion.  They do love her here!