I need sleep. - Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 (journal 4)

Okay, so when we signed up to help with this camp, we were told that the children would have a total of 3 hours of formal English training per day from an English teacher. It’s been two days and so far we have been doing everything. It’s a bit ridiculous, and at the same time we are enjoying the time with the kids. There is apparently no longer any formal part (if there ever was). I am not an English teacher. We’re obviously trying our best, but it’s quite hard.

Today, we woke up far too early. I’ve been staying up late because I’m still not connected with the time change (as I’m staying up even now...) and this is not doing so well for me. I’ll be adjusting more quickly at this rate.

The first thing that we did with the students was teach them parts of 3 songs. L.O.V.E by Frank Sinatra, Don’t Stop Believing by Journey, and Hello, Goodbye by the Beatles. They seemed to love it a lot. I know I loved it a lot.

One thing that has not been accomplished since the first day is getting to know everyone’s names. It’s quite a difficult feat, learning them all. We got them to decorate signs with their names and things about themselves... one student asked me to write all over his with just 3 words... “I DON’T SMOKE” over and over again. To me, this was pretty incredible as it seems that about 80% of the population of Turkey are smokers.

After lunch, Liam and I went to the city centre to go shopping for him (he hadn’t gotten his shoes or shirt that he “needed” so badly) so I came along as well so that I could get a cell phone. Going along with the theme of not having any expectations, I kind of thought that it would only take an hour, but at the same time I made sure I wasn’t expecting it to only take an hour. It seems to be a fine art here... assuming nothing. I got my phone, which is a sweet-ass Nokia blahdiblah. It’s got a flashlight, which is obviously what makes it important. We also chilled and ate some mulberries for a while, which is also apparently a common theme. I got a towel (YEEEE!) and that’s about it. They organizers that took us hardly spoke any english so we just followed them around and went to random shops and markets looking for various items.

When we (finally) got back to the camp, the kids had been playing all afternoon with Flore and Lindsay and all that we had to do was have dinner. The shopping was a nice break... though I’m a little worried that I felt like I needed to have a break already and it’s only been 2 days.

We also discovered that there is WiFi at the school!... kind of. We have to go outside to the gazebo that is a bit of a walk from the dorms... but it’s far better than no internet at all. WiFi time! We had a meeting with some of the organizers and explained that it’s actually impossible for us to be on duty 24/7. We’re volunteers and we need breaks and time to ourselves. They say they understand, but let’s see if they actually follow through.