Picture This

In case you haven’t figured this out from this blog yet…I love pictures.

(A disconcerted male lion, at Gorongosa. Photo by Matthew F.)

Give me any book and the first thing I want to do is see the pictures or illustrations. THEN I’ll read it, if I must, in hopes that what’s written has good mental image potential as well. J

So I had a ton of fun this week as I searched Google Images for visual aids for the health sessions I had to teach. Sanitation was one of the topics I presented and I discovered an amazing wealth of close-up fly pictures. They fit in quite nicely with the sanitation theme.

Fly face

Fly foot (magnified a gazillion times). Cool, huh?

My objective in using these photos was to help make the microscopic world come more alive to my students in order to make my point about the importance of sanitation. Hopefully it had the desired effect. I know I was scared.

The Intensive Seminar for church leaders/monitors is held every 6 months at the mission. This time it was held at the "old farm", where we used to live and where the mission school is, because the school offers the best in terms of classroom space. It does make for a lot of driving back and forth for the entire week though.

Scenes like this kept the drives a bit more exciting.

A bushbaby scampers along the road ahead of us.

Out here in the bush we don't have electricity, so we have to generate our own. When we arrived in the evening for the first health class, the place was dead dark.

Oops, no flash.

That's better. (Keren and socorristas Celestino and Simon)

As soon as Dwight got the small generator up and running, the place flooded with light and we got started. This is the mission's health course kick-off: first class of the first health course using the first print run of the new health manual :) The course was offered to the monitors who have completed the rest of the courses in the leader's training program. These men were teaching classes to new students during the day, so our classes had to be held each evening.

Keren teaching with me translating.

Me using pictures (many of them drawn by Keren)

More pictures.

And then we had a learning activity with a soccer ball on the last night. That was fun!

Opportunities were given for sharing ideas.

We had some good discussion times too. And at the end, a group photo. Yay!

That's about all the photos I took this week, but Matthew took these great photos of some of the week's activities.

Dwight teaching the 35 monitors who will return to their areas and provide the same teaching to more than 600 other pastors. It's very exciting to think that the health manual will taken that far afield too.

Alta and Eunice presenting the session on women's ministry.

Students taking notes.

A quick pose for the camera.

The monitors stay in tents during intensive seminar week. And it's very cold at night. They're very committed!

Sponsored grade school students, now on winter holidays, do volunteer work. Here they help the cook prepare veggies from the mission garden for lunch.

Sponsored highschool boys having some fun while doing dishes.

Sponsored girls help out with carrying water and other chores, but here they take a bit of time with Keren to learn how to make cute stuffed cloth animals, like this giraffe...

He's mine and I've named him 'Gerry the Contemplative Giraffe'. I didn't make him, Keren gave him to me. Apparently the turned neck wasn't really intentional and she has jokingly suggested that he may have chiropractic trouble. Personally I just think he's contemplative, picturing many things with his mind!