Everybody knows I’m a teacher, but there’s so much more to my every day life than teaching! Here’s what a typical day looks like:
- 7:00 AM: Wake up, make tea, revise notes for class (if I have one that day).
- 8:00 AM: Walk to school, stopping in the staff room to greet the secretary and drop my books off. After greetings I head to the computer lab to turn on the servers, routers, and computers. I usually don’t have class until 10:30, so I will check e-mail, catch up on news, and work in the computer lab until 10:00.
- 10:00 AM: Tea break. I’ll spend a half hour or so drinking tea and chatting with other teachers. Sometimes I bring a book and read that instead of chatting.
- 10:30 or 11:00 AM: Class for 1 or 2 hours, depending on how my mood is and how much material I have to cover.
- 12:30 PM: Lunch. On MWF it’s githeri (corn and beans, staple food around here) and TR it’s rice and potato stew (blah). We chat and eat until around 1:30 or 2:00. Sometimes I go home and do laundry at lunch too.
- 2:00 PM: Work in computer lab, either researching class notes or maintaining the lab computers and servers.
- 4:00 PM: Ride bike to Tala market (1.5 km). I usually do shopping for vegetables on Tuesday and Friday, but there’s plenty of other things to buy in the market. Drinking tea and eating a chapati is a must in Tala market, I do it almost every day without exception. Other days I go visit the barber and have him clean up my beard.
- 6:00 or 7:00 PM: Ride my bike home and change out of my work clothes into my cultural dress (shorts, sandals, no t-shirt). Only after I’ve done that can I start thinking about preparing dinner.
- 9:00 PM: Dinner is usually done by this time (sometimes I get a late start!) and then I can sit down to do any combination of the following: check e-mail, watch a few episodes of Arrested Development, read a book, prepare notes for the next day’s class.
- 11:00 PM: Bed time!
So there you have it, that’s my daily routine. It’s nice that I’ve actually got a routine now… my little, lonely house is starting to feel like home to me now (though it’s a bit lonely!). Post a comment if you have any questions!
I just read Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. I didn’t realize it until I had finished the first chapter, but the book is actually a collection of short stories. At first I was upset because I had grown, in such a short amount of pages, to really feel the emotions being developed in the narrative. I remember putting the book down to go make some tea, excited to pick up where I left off, only to find a new story being introduced. I feel like an idiot now because on the cover of the book it says “stories by Jhumpa Lahiri.” Haha! The book was enjoyable nonetheless.