Sitting in Class

Do you ever just kind of day dream in class and forget where you are? That happens to me a lot when I got to my Thursday school in Susuli. Technically it is not part of my required activities and due to that I take it a little less seriously. It involves no planning, no preparations, and me just sitting there speaking English. I have offered to help one of the English professors, but he often forgets I am there or is doing other themes in Spanish. This last week I was sitting through one of his Spanish classes where the kids were presenting skits they had prepared when I heard a distant thumping. It was gradually getting louder and I had never heard it before. Perhaps I was just dozing off, but I noticed the looks on several of the kids faces that told me they were as curious as I was. Finally I noticed the thumping was not in perfect time and that the thumping was in fact the marching feet of students. As I turned to look out the window I notice a group of 30 kids marching by in lockstep. Not a normal thing you expect to see during school hours. Well this throws the class into an uproar and they proceed to forgo their skits and run outside to join the marching. Where were they marching you might ask? Oh, just around the building in preparation for the Independence Day festival coming up where they will march 100m down their dirt street and back again. This alone may not seem too odd, but compounded by the fact that half the school is under construction while classes are going on and most classes have either been relocated to people’s houses or local bars and you get the idea… we aren’t in America anymore.