Brooms to the ready!

Today the secondary department celebrated Youth Day.

"Fall in three ranks!"

With brooms, dustpans and plastic bags at the ready they set off to sweep the streets.

Football fanatics

This morning the girls football team were presented with a trophy that they won over the weekend in an inter-schools tournament. They came second in a difficult competition, so there was big applause all round.

Lively Assembly

We had a lively assembly this morning. An ex-student, Maria Antonio Gwynn, came to talk to the children and to enthuse them for studying. Maria has led a wonderful life so far, travelling all over Europe and to the United States to extend her studies. She was a gold start student. She was full of all the opportunites that she has had and she then encouraged the students to follow in her footsteps by working hard at their studies, emphasizing that English is THE international language of communication.

Also this morning the third grade entertained us with a dance from Bolivia.

Science Fair Spectacular 2010

This has been a week and a half for the staff at school. Everybody has pitched in and worked quite a few hours extra this week to try to make our first whole school science fair a success. The work paid off and the parents came along and were impressed with the work that the children had done. Here are some photos. Forgive me if there seem to be a lot but there was a whole school to photograph from the nursery classes to sixth form! There were great experiments, lots of displays, even a model of Itaipu Dam (one of the biggest dams in the world) and some very proud parents.

They start young in Paraguay!

This week the secondary department ran a football tournament for our pre-schoolers. It was run over four days after school. The standard was high and the games were played with good sportsmanship. The teams were well matched and well-supported.

Happy Gloria

Some of you may remember Gloria Morales. She was one of our teachers who was caught in the supermarket fire that took over 400 lives a few years ago. Gloria actually died, but she was resuscitated. Her lungs were full of smoke and badly damaged, she had horrendous burns and doctors did not expect her to pull through. Large parts of flesh were burned off her buttocks. She needed extensive skin grafts.

Gloria's family and all her friends and our school staff and children prayed non-stop for her and the Lord responded in a miraculous way. Gloria survived and experienced complete healing. She never expected to marry because she felt that nobody would love her with such terrible burns and scars.

Two years later she met a lovely man and she married him.

Gloria wrote a book. Somebody in the UK read the book (in Spanish) and she has now been asked to contribute part of her story to a new publication about Paraguay which will be in English and Spanish, ready for the 200th anniversary of the founding of Asuncion.

I met up with Gloria at the Annexe School. She looked radiant and she was full of what the Lord is doing in her life. She is absolutely in love with Him who saved her.

Busy, busy, busy AGAIN!

It has been difficult to find time to update my blog page. It is all systems go in school. This week we have to get reports out by Friday and on Thursday the parents are visiting for a whole school science fair. The timetabling of this is of course a nightmare as some parents have children in every department and they will want to see all their children performing their experiments.

We have all been working flat out to try and get all the displays ready and to get the children organized in time. The school sports start this week with the long jump and high jump. There is also an Inter-school football tournament starting after school hours on Thursday......... all that and writing reports at the same time raises blood pressure somewhat as the stress kicks in, but we are all joking our way through it, as only teachers can do.

Last week I experienced the delight of attending the annual Folklore Day at the Annexe school. It was a beautiful Spring day, with lots of sunshine. The staff and children had worked very hard to put together an excellent show of national dancing, songs and poems. It was wonderful. I am including some photos.

The children loved dressing up in their national costume and they love to dance.

The children loved singing the national folk songs.

Even the younger children from pre-school and first grade participated.

The audience was very attentive.

In Paraguay there are many people who try to make a living selling Chipa. That is a local cheesy corn bread, which is like a hard biscuit. The women are renowned for carrying baskets of Chipa on their heads. (Men also go round selling it.) Here the children performed a "Chipa Dance".

One of the teachers performed a sketch with the students about a local wedding.

At the end of the wedding everybody was invited to dance. Even the headmaster had a good time!