Weekends go so fast

Sunday night of another weekend... the weekends so far have gone by so fast. I think it's because the weekends are when I do my laundry and actually cook, work out, bathe, you know, those types of things. And all of those things take A LOT longer here! Yesterday I was supposed to have my soccer club in the morning, but no kids were there at 9:30am... turns out there was a movie showing at the culture center, so that trumped soccer. Such is life. But no worries, the kids came and found me at my ger and we played in the afternoon. My nose hurts today, as one of the kids nailed me with the ball in the face and gave me a bloody nose... and while I was busy wiping away the blood they scored the winning goal... we will need to have a re-match! On Friday night my haasha brothers taught me how to chop wood. Everytime I would chop a piece they would scream and cheer for me; it was ridiculously halarious. I loved it. Some Peace Corps staff came and visited me on Friday; they do these site visits with all volunteers to check in and see how things are going. Which overall things are going great, and my site is wonderful. The thing that concerned them is just how packed my schedule is with so many different kinds of things so soon. My school has me teaching my five classes, and then team teaching a bunch more, then running all these other English clubs, plus doing language classes for primary teachers, secondary teachers, solo-English lessons, and these other seminars with primary teachers.... it's a bit much! Which was exactly what the people who came to visit me said (which was a relief for me that they understood my overwhelmed feeling). Typically they like TEFL volunteers like myself to teach 10-12 hours a week, then have other hours dedicated to things like resource development and staff development. Because really behind everything is the idea of capacity building and sustainable development, so really anything I do here, I should be doing with other Mongolian teachers. Anyways, they met with my school people and we all discussed everything. Tomorrow they are going to look at my schedule again, and I believe revise it, which will be really nice. The point is that I want to do all of these things, but I can't do everything right away. I need to be able to see how things are here, spend some more time on the language and just learn more about Mongolia. Which really they say the first year is kind of like that, just figuring things out, then the second year is when you really get a ton of things done... So we will see what happens with everything now. Hopefully it will work out to just put some of these trainings and clubs and what-not off for a little bit so I have time to prep. for my lessons and actually feel like I'm doing a good job. It was encouraging though that the lady from the Peace Corps was really impressed with my lessons. She was like, Allison what is your background? And I told her Elementary Ed. and she goes, "Oh yes, well that explains it." And she said that my classroom management was so good, which was nice to hear. Considering some days here I feel the complete opposite. I think I had six different kids crying in my one seventh grade class the other day. Kids just hitting each other and what-not. I couldn't turn around to write on the board without something happening, muchless get much "English teaching" accomplished. I'm getting better at not being bothered when some lessons don't go very well like that. And for now I'm still hopefully optimistic that if I plan interesting, fun lessons they will be more inclined to pay attention.