Hello, hey, hi, how ya doin? Today I woke up feeling refreshed for the first time in weeks. I got up, made myself a killer smoothie for breakfast, worked out in a way that made me sweat for the first time in weeks, the last time being when I went on a five-mile hike with this group of dope ass people and got hella sunburned because I thought it was going to be two miles and sweat off all of my sunscreen. Dope.
Today’s workout was 100 jumping jacks for a warm-up – this is my go-to exercise for when I don’t feel like exercising. I followed that up with some bodyweight strength exercises and some yoga to stretch myself out. I don’t know the technical term but it was downward dog, plank for thirty seconds, cobra, knees down to cat and cow back stretches (really work on stretching out the shoulders and lower back), and then push back into downward dog and repeat without cat and cow for three more cycles. Then, at plank, launch into warrior one, switch to warrior two and then triangle with stretching hand down to mat and up towards sky, switch and do the same for the other side. Finish by going into pigeon pose, this is my favorite pose to relax in, and make sure to stretch both sides with this. Lift back leg for extra stretch in back. This was my cool down and then I got dressed and ready for my 8:30 Introduction to Ecology class.
Thankfully today's Intro to Ecology class my main teacher was back and the sub from last week was gonza because the guy last week was wackadoodle dandy. I feel like I learned absolutely nothing in last week's classes with him which is a huge disappointment because it’s the only class I actually look forward to attending. I then had an hour block in which I tried to eat some food so that I wouldn’t be starving during my internship even though it was only 9:30 in the morning. After my brief stint of stuffing my face, I had mycology class – the projector finally worked for one class period, but today’s content was the most boring thing ever. The steps to growing mushrooms in excruciating detail.
Irene picked me up at the front entrance and from there I started my internship for the first time. We went to an urban school on the outskirts of Windhoek and took measurements of children aged 6-9 of their faces, facial features, and hand features which indicate fetal alcohol syndrome and when we finished collecting the measurements of a couple hundred subjects we returned to the Ministry of Education’s main building – a small office structure with various rooms arranged for optimal ability to work with clients. I sat at a desk for the last couple of hours and determined the placement on a normal graph of the distributions for each of the children. For instance, what percentile was their height compared to World Health Organization data? If they were below the tenth percentile, I noted it for the second stage which is psychometric testing of those subjects whose physical traits insinuate a possible case of fetal alcohol syndrome. Basically, I got to science today.
We had fried rice for dinner and got really stressed about planning our trip to Victoria Falls because the bus route that most of the Pacific Lutheran groups had used in the past had been closed in the months prior to our arrival. This means we can find a place to stay and things to do but no way to get there that isn’t either against the rules or exorbitantly expensive. One idea though, recruit a couple of our Namibian friends to drive us to and from Victoria Falls and stay with us and in exchange, we’ll pay for their accommodations and all of the gas to get there. They would only have to pay for their visas, food, and whatever activities they might dame to do.