BABE-A BABE-A BABE-A OHHHHHHHH

We woke up early this morning to go to the church, where there was some sort of youth program going on at 6:30am.
All the kids gathered in uniform, lined up by grade (each grade had a certain color scarf), and sang songs in the church. They welcomed us in and clapped as we stood up front by the altar. I got a little teary eyed walking in there - it was a pretty special round of applause! Check out my instagram for photos of that - it was too early for the big camera! After that we had breakfast and spent most of the day resting (at least, trying to rest. I attempted to nap this morning and woke to the sound of 30 kids singing Justin Bieber - "BABE-A BABE-A BABE-A OHHHHHHH!"). I taught some ballet positions to the other volunteers (first and second positions in the feet, first, second and fifth positions in the arms, and a plié) - they will be adding some French to their multilingual skills with our little ballet lessons!

We had plans to go to a farm with some of the kids but there was a monsoon-status downpour this afternoon so we stayed inside instead. This evening we had a Skype session with our fellow volunteers up north in Hue (ETA4's other program) which already has 1,400 kids registered for classes! Tomorrow is day one of the program - we will see who shows up (and how many!), place them in the appropriate level, and go from there! We choreographed a pretty hilarious dance together to do for the kids to the tune of "YMCA" but we say "ETA4" instead - we were cracking up. We ate dinner with the Father after mass (there are three masses a day at the church), and after we finished eating he asked me (in Vietnamese, translated by Trang, one of our amazing fearless leaders) how long I sit and meditate. I guess he saw me in the pagoda yesterday! He told me (via Trang) that he meditates an hour each day and told us about a healer who meditates for five hours a day and has cured people of all sorts of ailments - she is coming to the village soon, maybe she can heal my sore throat! Time to spend some time looking at the coursework and thinking about how I want to go about teaching my first class - wish me luck!!

This was earlier in the day - later on the clouds got so thick we couldn't see the mountain any more - then the downpour came!

There are a few dogs who live at the church. One of them gave birth to the tiniest puppies recently - they can't even open their eyes yet! They live in a box next to the kitchen.