Friends from Istanbul

We arrived back at Miracle Corners at our appointed time. The adult class (which was really high school aged students) was already in progress and three (English Speaking) high school students from Istanbul, Turkey were conducting a lesson. Of our three new friends from Istanbul; one was from the US orignally and one was from Egypt. I'll get the 411 on that tomorrow as we plan to eat lunch with them and communicate about how we can all work together for our time here. The adult class was SO much more advanced than we could have imagined...more to come in a minute...Tim from the Tribunal is here to talk to us, so I will continue this post when I return. Also, I am having trouble accessing email, so if you have emailed I will get it ASAP! I'm back...I realize that to you reading this, it seems like I never left, but I did publish and now I'm editing to add to this post. Anywho, I was just able to check email (phew) and where was I - ah - advanced. The class was reviewing tenses for a test they need to take coming up soon. The information they were covering is more or less the nuts and bolts of our language that we, as native speakers, don't always think about. Past, present, and future tense which can then be broken down to four categories for each: simple, continuous, perfect, and perfect continuous. I learned quite a bit in the English as a Second Language course. These are the pieces that help us to speak in a grammatically correct way and it is incredibly complex and difficult to explain. Thinking backwards for a moment, when we first got to the class, the students from Turkey were holding a lesson on introductions, or the class teacher was and the students were filming - I'm not real sure on that one. Regardless of who was facilitating the lesson, I had the opportunity to jump right in, talk about myself, my family, my likes, dislikes and what I've learned about Tanzania. Evidently, I'm a fast talker...because while the teacher did not see the need to translate for my Turkish friends, he did need to translate for me. So, I need to learn to slooow down a little. Besides that, the Arushans seemed to enjoy what I had to say about what I've learned about Tanzania and that was that even though it's the dry season, it's still pretty rainy!