I met for the first time with Hope and her family this week (7/15/17). I began the day with an hour bike ride to their apartment, so I had to take a moment to make myself presentable before I met with Rachel, Hope's mother. She and the rest of their family are from Uganda and only recently moved to Tallahassee.
They are a family of 7: Rachel and her husband, and 5 children. While I was tutoring Hope, a FSU psychology professor by the name of Liz played games with the four younger children.
I brought a mini whiteboard with me and asked hope to draw me pictures of houses, boats, animals etc. and then spell the names of the things that she was drawing. She is very intelligent and reads every night I learned! At the age of 11, she is the oldest of her siblings and has on the role of assisting them in learning english which she takes very seriously. I was humbled to spend time with their family. I literally cannot imagine being a parent and making the decision to uproot from my home country and leave to a foreign country where my children have a better understanding of the local language than I do.
At the end of the tutoring session, we played the iPhone game "Heads Up", which was a huge hit with the kids. At the end, they watched the video of themselves and laughed. It was hard to leave after that game because they wanted to keep playing. To an extent, I obliged, but I eventually had to go.
Until the next time.
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