This post will reflect on my visit with my family’s wife from two weeks ago, and later this week I will discuss what we did this past Friday…which was a fun field trip!

Two weeks ago though, we went to visit on a Wednesday because I would be heading home on Friday, which is our usual meeting day. I tried to be as clear as possible with the wife, but she might have forgot that we were coming because when we came upstairs and she answered the door she said she had been sleeping. Then she told us that she felt sick and had a stomachache. I felt so bad, but she seemed like she at least wanted to go over her English homework, as she was still frustrated by the bad teacher she had and how she didn’t really correct the students’ homework. But like usual, she did well. We helped her write out a story in the past tense about her life. It was very interesting to see what she would write. She wrote about how her father died in the late 80′s and how she stayed with her mother and traveled to school. She wrote about when she graduated and when she met her husband. And then of course, she said that now she had moved here, to Chicago. We started to talk about math and she was amazed at how we write out division problems, as they do them differently in Africa. I also pulled out a newspaper for her and went over some of the vocabulary for her, like “headline” and “byline,” which she seemed very interested in. I hope before the end of the semester I can teach her even more journalism vocabulary in English, because she described some concepts, like writing in an inverted pyramid, that are universal rules of journalism, yet she needs to know how to use these rules in English.

At the end of our visit, she looked sad that we were leaving, but then said that she felt a lot better and that because we came to visit, her stomachache was gone!