Gifts from the USA!

What an exciting day! I received four packages from home. I felt overwhelmed, thankful and blessed. I was given lots of construction paper I will use for mounting. Also, I am now a happy owner of power bars, Vitamin C, lavender soap, and lots of decaf tea. It appears that one of the packages was opened :-), but I am hopeful most everything remained inside. How kind of friends and family to think of me and spend the time to mail me art supplies and lots of good things to eat and drink. I felt very much loved and cared about with the pile of packages I received today. 

I set up the birthday card, that my daughter Annie sent me, right on my desk. You can see a picture of my daughter, Katie, with my grandson Calvin, as my screen-saver on my computer. This is my art world at school. I have to go here tomorrow to record grades. I just don't have enough hours in the day for all the artmaking and set-up needed for my job.

The sixth graders worked long and hard on the still life oil pastel drawings, although a few students were checked out because art is their last class of the day. They kept wanting to be done, but I said they had to cover all the white of the paper. (I'm into completing work...I know, it's crazy.) I even pulled out the cotton balls  for them to use for blending; someone had given me them at the beginning of the year as an art room donation! Amazing! God knew.


After school and a post-school meeting, Jill and I went to the gas station cafe for dinner. This lovely meal was about $6.00 US dollars. You see the real Moroccan mint tea that I have come to love. The salade is called Moroccan salad, and it is really yummy topped with tuna.

Here are also some photos from the gas station cafe.....the mosaics are great fun to see and enjoy. I  see that the warm colors and the cool colors are next to each other. I have been telling the students that warm colors pop out and cool colors seem to go back. I gave up on using the word "recede". The children understand French the best, and I throw it in more as I can. So, no landscapes to speak of here, but lots and lots of tiles.

Another day has come and gone in my Morocco neck of the woods. Receiving the packages this morning made me long for home. Being in another culture that is really very different has its moments of being overwhelming. Some of us, if not all of us new teachers have struggled with culture shock and home sickness. I miss coffee in a paper cup with lid, PCC, Whole Foods, the Valley Campus, wood chips in my shoes after playing at recess at Valley, hugging my grandsons and wrestling with them until it hurt, talks with my girls and all my family, walks with Vickie, making art every single day, the dearest of friends.......


 However, I am trying hard to trust I am here for many good reasons. If nothing else, the children are enjoying making art., some for the first time. That just must make their Maker smile.

Every act of creativity is, directly or indirectly, an intuitive response to offer to God what He has given to us. We twist this intuition and may create something transgressive and injurious, but this creative impulse originates from the Creator.  - Makoto Fujimura