May 12, 2020, Wow, well yesterday marked 2 months in Albania. I miss the boys like crazy. They are doing good. Their dad was home with them for like 3 weeks so that was nice. I started teaching some local kids a little English and it has been an adventure and I have enjoyed it. The children have showed me a lot of love. Some days I have had 11 or 12 children come. Now most do not come but it is easier to teach less students because they can pay attention better with less. They have drawn me a couple pictures its so cute. It has certainly been interesting interacting with the families and not being able to understand each other. But being able to describe things with my hands and learning more words makes it interesting and we laugh a lot. Today I showed them connect the dots game and we had a lot of fun with that. We celebrated my hosts mothers birthday last week so that was a lot of fun as well. I have been looking for tickets they are very expensive. There was a flight on April 30 and May 7 to go to America but New York City and mandatory quarantine from the airport. So I will continue to wait. Borders to Greece might be opening next week. Most of Albania opened up On Monday May 10th after being closed for 2 months most things. However about 6 cities including Durres, Tirane, Shkoder, Fier, and maybe Vlore and 1 or 2 others are not open. I continue to learn more Albanian although slowly. It is very difficult to learn how to put sentences together. And in Albanian one word like me, ne, nga, ata, ato can be used many different ways. And they have masculine and feminine cases and words. We do not have this in English so it has been challenging. But amazing. There are days I feel so alive and on top of the world. And then there are days that I struggle with and cry. But overall I am doing pretty well. I am looking forward to working again. I do miss that. But teaching the children here has helped to make time go by easier. As I prepare lessons every day for them that I teach. It is amazing to see each child learn differently because they are from age 7 to 15 and they all learn at different levels. It has been interesting and beautiful to watch them learn and teach them English. I have learned to cook a few different things. Not really anything Albanian hahaha things that I can cook at home that will help me to save money. I have learned an Albanian game and I have taught the children a couple of games I grew up playing, connect the dots, uno, go fish. They taught me a ball game. I am still learning. We have gone on walks and went to the beach once. But we lost some of the boys and they had to walk home. In Albanian there is this word Shit meaning to sell it can be spelled a couple of different ways. Today the children's mother said "ajo shit" basically telling me "she sells" talking about the ice cream we had talked about. I lost it and couldn't stop laughing because it was just hilarious to me and I had discovered this the other day. Well I have a few things that I need to do. Thank you for reading all my love Teela Love Dashuri