Sweltering. Flies dance in pairs around the city.

Days of idleness and new friendship. October 24, 2011. Lydie and I moved this past weekend from our much loved front room, where light streams golden bands in the late afternoon, to a cool, dark, and cozy back room on the same floor. We moved in with Alex, a blonde elfin-like girl from Bozeman, Montana. She went to Thatcher and then GW, but before the start of her junior year is trying to transfer to a small college in Washington State. She and I talk about parents, divorce, boarding school, our tendencies to keep problems buried as to not upset the flow of the easiest path. In her I've found a new companion, one to share insignificant misfortunes of the day, small triumphs too. Lydie plays an out-of-tune guitar and sings softly and I read on the couch outside or in my bed, then I take turn plucking simple chords, easily remembered melodies of my childhood. I draw on the floor, posters for my classroom, of musical instruments and insects and road signs, and write out nursery rhymes to teach my children. I look forward to the time spent with all of them, even today, proctoring Fidesiana, a struggling slight girl with absent eyes and delicate features, in a Primary One entrance exam. She sat in an empty and barren classroom while her friends played on the swings and slide outside, looking to me for the answers. Aika, my ever-poised and brilliant teacher, knew she wasn't ready, but Fides was still required to take the test, one the class had taken last Friday while she was home sick. Her nose ran the entire test, the remnant of a severe cold, her doe eyed look not portraying embarrassment or confusion, but a lack of thought as she sang me the first fifteen letters of the alphabet, unable to go farther, writing twenty-one as twelve in painstaking hard pressed pencil lines on the photocopied paper. We took our porridge (uji) together, she sitting silently drinking from a cracked green mug with white apples decoding the outside, and I looking out at the empty schoolyard through colored bars, thinking of things very separate from those that occupied my mind when I first arrived. I find that I can sit without dwelling on concrete thoughts, thinking instead of ideas, concepts, novels, instead of people in the same way I used to. I don't believe that a person's mentality can change in a month, but in my free time it feels more comfortable to philosophize about war and religion than the other volunteers or the staff or myself. I read in my free time, and I'm two thirds of the way through War and Peace. I don't want it to end, but want to follow the characters though their sometimes exciting, sometimes joyful, but most often confused, lives forever. I sit on the couch all afternoon, except for an occasional trip to town. Today, I got my shoes fixed in minutes for less than a dollar on a street corner by a man missing three of his teeth, something that would have been a week long ordeal in the states, and picked up vanilla and passionfruit yogurt from an Indian grocery store called Aleem's. The day was miserably hot, comfortable only in shade and in our dark airy room. The fan shakes my mosquito net now, and drowns out the dogs howling outside.