Surprise Holidays

Okay, the spontaneous world in which I find myself cracks me up, from time to time. We started hearing that Muhammad's birthday was on April 11th about a week ago, but we didn't have the day set as a holiday on our school calendar. The students didn't really throw a fit about it or even ask about it that much about it. So we didn't plan to take off.

Then on Monday morning (April 10th), Caleb called me at 6:30 am and said, "Guess what??? We're off of school today!" This is a doubled edged sword as a teacher of ISK because last minute cancellations cannot be publicized via radio or TV. So what we do is all gather around our table, each person is given a list of about 10 names, and we start calling. It sounds like a cross between a call center and the center for operations of a large military movement. We are all wandering around the room on our phones trying to find someone in the family that we are calling who can speak English.

So after I got off the phone with Caleb, I ran to Karen's room. She's the administrative assistant, and told her the news. We stopped in mid-morning preparation to try to get the scoop from our director. He told us at 6:40 that he still hadn't decided, so we just sat around the kitchen table for another 5 minutes at which time we got the word..."We WILL have school." There were several sighs, but we sucked it up and all ran upstairs to get ready in a hurry. As soon as I'd gotten into the shower, Karen knocked on the door of the bathroom and said, "You can take your shower later. Byron decided to cancel school after all, and we need to call folks NOW." And within 20 minutes or so, we had contacted most of our families to tell them about the cancelation.

It was a beautiful day to have off. We had visitors come in from the States, and we all got to go out to eat that evening. There were still 2 days left in the week, but I'll never look a gift horse in the mouth. :)