Farm School Highlights: Part Two

Monday, June 29^th

Monday morning started early for Celeste and Maddie, who did end up accepting the 4am cow-milking challenge. However, none of the boys who issued the challenge ever showed up to milk cows! This has been the source of many jokes about the boys since then.

After breakfast, we spent the morning clearing out the chicken coops. The plan is to eventually lay a concrete floor in the coops to save money long-term, so everything inside had to be removed.

Since they didn't have the materials ready for us to put down in the coops, we spent the afternoon resting. And apparently the rest of the team really needed the rest, because each of them took five hour naps! Each of them will tell you that they deserved the nap because they had been working hard all week; I'll leave that open to interpretation. I spent the afternoon reading.

After dinner we had our usual activities, but most of us ended up tutoring the kids in math at some point or another.

Tuesday, June 30^th

The first highlight from Tuesday was something this team had been looking forward to for months: slaughtering chickens. No details in this post, but I will say that each member of the team participated to the full extent that they had originally intended to.

After slaughtering and cleaning the chickens, we were headed back to work in the chicken coops, but some of the, well, less orderly boys had accidentally run their truck into the coop and blown straight through the wall while trying to bring us the materials we needed. Needless to say, there wasn't much work for us to do, since most of the time was spent discussing how to fix the wall and punish the boys instead of getting our actual work done. Also, it has been requested that I mention that we rode in the bed of the truck from the chicken coops back to the dining hall. This, according to my team, is a highlight.

In the afternoon we went on our home visit. It's a good thing we brought Eduin along with us, the student whose home and family we were visiting, because they had been evicted two weeks ago and moved to a new house. Eduin's grandmother has moved in to take care of the kids while his single mother is at work.

In the evening we had the opportunity to watch the second half of the USA-Germany game, we tutored some of the kids in English, and attempted to play cornhole, but our makeshift bags only lasted for two rounds.

- Tomorrow evening we will post for today and tomorrow, and on Friday we'll be returning to Cincinnati.