Shake That Booty That Jesus Gave You; Shake That Booty In the Name of the Lord.

That was perhaps the funniest Ghanaian gospel song I have heard since I’ve been here. I wanted to laugh so bad when I was in the taxi, but I didn’t want the driver to get offended that I was making fun of what might have been his favorite song.

Today, I began teaching in one of the primary schools near the office. I will be teaching in a total of 5 different classrooms about once a week about a wide range of health topics. Today we talked a little bit about self-esteem and the importance of loving your body so that you can take care of it and stay healthy. I had each student draw a picture of himself/herself with different parts of the body representing different things. The brain is something they have been thinking about; the eyes represent a dream or hope for the future; the heart is something you love; the stomach is something you are passionate about; and the legs are your roots or background. After they were done, a few of the students shared their drawings in front of the class. They were so cute and had such awesome things to share. One of the boys’ dreams was to build a house for his parents. I had a great time watching them write/draw what was really important to them and learned a lot. Afterwards, we went outside and took a picture of the whole class holding up their self-portraits. Their teacher even came for one of the pictures and wants a copy of the file so he can blow it up and hang it in the classroom. I am repeating this lesson next week in the other classes and have some tweaking to do as far as instructions go, but overall I think it went really well. It was nice to actually do something today that I was pretty comfortable with and made me feel like I accomplished something. With a lot of the other things I have to do at the office or am getting ready to do, I feel really inadequate and I think that my coworkers have overestimated my skills and experience related to public health. Teaching these kids, though, is something that I can handle. Here’s a picture of the class:

Another volunteer who is working for the Ikando website came to take pictures of what we do at DIF to put on the Ikando website. Basically, I’m going to be famous on the interwebs. Sweet.