Friday 12 October 2018. Sofia, Bulgaria.
6:00 am Wake up in the room I share with 3 of my teammates. Grab my backpack with my bible & journal and sneak to the kitchen. Make sandwiches and peal a carrot for a packed lunch.
Throw some headphones in and have a lil’ worship dance party with Jesus while waiting for the water to warm up for my oatmeal. Mix in some left over honey from neighbor missionaries in Romania that we took across the border, peanut butter, banana and maybe a splash of milk.
Spend the morning hanging with Jesus. Praying, reading the Bible and a little bit of journaling typically.
7:15 am Leave with Summer, my teammate, for the bus. Maybe do a little sprinting and a little jaywalking as our bus pulls up a minute early.
7:30 am 10 stops later, hop off and head to the Metro. Scan the unlimited transport card we have for the whole month (without even taking it out of my wallet- like a local). Hop on the Metro heading for Business Park for 7 stops.
8:15 am Arrive at the stop. Take a wrong turn but recognize one of the students of the missionary kid homeschool co-op I’m currently substitute teaching for (as the Literature & Science teacher) and follow them out of the metro. Walk to school and wait for a parent to unlock the school.
8:30 am Take shoes off at the door and head to the 2-4th grade room, where I’ll begin my day. While waiting for school to start, check over the lesson plan for the day and use the baller school wifi to send an email.
8:45 am Upper Grammar with the 2nd-4th graders. They start with a page of handwriting then split with the two 4th graders heading with another teacher for Grammar. The remaining 3 students of 2nd and 3rd grade have a test that they silently work on.
In my sub notes I’m directed to ask them instead of the last question to write a story about Crystal Ella Zanzibar the Rainbow Unicorn and her adventures in Unicorn land. We correct it together and the students demonstrate they really know the material.
9:40 am Literature Time! The 4th graders return and we discuss the Epic of Gilgamesh. They’ve just finished reading an adaption of it, split into three picture books. Questions include comparing the protagonist to Jesus, how does the flood tale in the book compare to the one we find in the Bible and what was the main lesson. We mix it up and pass a ball so that whoever has the ball is the one talking.
10:40 am Snack Time. Grab the carrots from this morning and head for the back table. Ask the students to summarize the book the teacher’s been reading to them so far “The Theif” while chowing down on carrots. Read another chapter of the book while they snack.
11:15 am Head to the K-1st grade room down the hall. Find the three students playing with blocks and chatting about the lesson they just had about the 5 senses. Play with them for a moment and then help with clean up. Begin a Grammar lesson on adverbs.
11:30 am After running quickly and talking loudly we grab our desks quietly (all adverbs) and begin handwriting. The students have handwriting books that they do a certain number of pages in each day. While they are working on that, I come around and 1-on-1 work on reading.
(Super grateful for that literacy class I took in college that I didn’t think would be that important because I was going into secondary ed- hoping to work with high schoolers. Well it sure is coming in handy now.)
12:30 am Lunch Time! With all 12 students of the school, the teachers and I walk to the park down the road and eat lunch there. I sit on the bench and ask questions about Bulgaria.
1 pm Find the middle schoolers, all four of them, and head back to school. While waiting for the school to be unlocked, review with one of the kindergarteners the sound that “x” makes.
1:15 pm Ask about the Bulgarian on the whiteboard in the middles school room and talk about the lesson they had before lunch while erasing it. Begin checking the science homework that was due that day.
A student asks a question about chloroplast and mitochondria that I don’t quite know the answer to. We discuss potential answers as a class and I promise to look it up once the students start their lab for the day.
1:40 pm Begin the microscope lab! Students need to look at two animal cells and two plant cells, draw them and write observations. There’s a bunch of plant cells in the desk. Students are encouraged to get creative when it come to animal cells. Help students tap hair and figure out how to add food dye to a cheek swab to look at it under the ‘scope.
2:20 pm Interrupt the lab for a mini-lesson on mitochondria and chloroplast after some serious googling and reading in their textbook. Talk about how to find answers to questions we wonder about and why wondering & asking questions matters.
3:00 pm Clean up the lab & clean the school. Talk with students about weekend plans, what missionary life is like in Bulgaria and the World Race. We also talk briefly about an assignment due Wednesday where they need to teach the class from a lesson plan they create.
3:15 pm Students stay for an art lesson after school. Summer and I get picked up by our host with our teammate Nicole to head to a baby orphanage.
3:30 pm Mini-stop at an apartment our host rents out to drop something off for the tenant.
4:00 pm Arrive at baby home. Help with feeding some of the babies dinner! Play with babies in the yard. This include a couple games of peak-a-boo, being slide cheerleaders for the 2 year old and getting creative with different incentives for one of the babies to crawl.
6:00 pm Help with evening routine. Feed bottles to babies and help change them into pajamas.
7:15 pm Roll out of the baby home with tired smiles and a few more stains on our shirts than we started with and ride in a car driven by our host to our host.
7:45 pm Walk home from the main street we get dropped off at. Unlock both the gates and the door to the home we live in. Walk upstairs to be greeted by the lovely smell of homemade chili and baked potatoes prepared by the four teammates that were home.
8:00 pm Eat dinner together as a team and chat about what’s been going on in our lives that day. Share logistics for the weekend and ways we seen the Lord working in our lives and through this ministry. Give each other feedback, a thing we do on the race. It’s basically holding a mirror up and calling each other higher. It’s a time to encourage each other and point out blind spots that we’ve noticed.
8:45 pm Clean dishes. Store leftovers. Grab the bags of popcorn. Movie Night with the girls. All 7 of us pile into the room that 4 of us share to watch “She’s the Man” (that someone had on their hard drive so it’s totally cool we don’t have wifi at the moment in our house)
10:30 pm Finish the movie. Clean up all the popcorn crumbs and head to bed. I read “The Hobbit” by headlamp for another hour or so.
?Everyday on the Race looks a little different but this is what my October 12th looked like.
Love these what the Lord is doing here in Bulgaria and what I get to partner with while here.
So appreciate my team, Shalom Sisters, that I get to do life with on the World Race.
Love you guys,
Caitlyn Louise
