Cartwheels in the Cancha

There is a cancha right near my apartment. It has a soccer field, a basketball court, and a swingset. Monday night I went to play basketball with three of the other women teachers at my school. Rebecca is the only one who can actually say she plays. The rest of us, well, we had fun. There were about 10 kids who ended up playing with us. After half an hour of playing bball, we moved to the soccer field and they were asking us if we could do cartwheels and handstands. We all could, so we attempted to show them up. After a round of gymnastics, we sang a few songs including the Hokey Pokey—each of us with a child on our shoulders. We lay down in the grass and lifted them up into the airplane position. We swung them around in circles. They dog piled me.
I am going to be teaching an English class to some of the neighborhood kids and on Tuesdays and Thursdays our school is going to join up with another bilingual school to have a running club. I think the reason some of my boys want to join is so they can say they beat Miss Gena in a race. I went running with some of them on Tuesday, and they were like, “Miss Gena, you are crazy! How can you run that much.” The reality of it is, that we didn’t even run one mile. I imagine they’ll soon be faster than me.
Please pray for me in the midst of my classroom. I don’t always know how to handle the children—how to maintain control of the classroom and keep them focused. Some days I love it here. Some days I don’t. The frustrations of translating, the petty rules a teacher has to follow, the diarrhea, the many forms of creepy creatures, the annoying rooster that crows like he is about to die every morning. But there are too many surreal moments, like the cartwheels in the cancha that drown out the bad and remind me how sweet life can be.