We Lucked Out Afterall!!

A new LDS English Teacher showed up at church about 3 weeks ago and since that time we have been able to go over to his apartment and talk with him a bit about the experience that he is having so far. And I have got to tell you he has got it rough. We have had it so easy with our whole situation compared to what he’s got, and we feel so bad that we have been thinking that we may have gotten it bad by having a boss that is a little hard to deal with at times. Our apartment is about the same size as ours, but his front room has no furniture and he only has a mini fridge/freezer in his kitchen, so pretty much he can’t really do much cooking at home, and you can only barely see out his windows. I’m pretty sure I would have most definitely gone into some sort of deep depression if we had to live somewhere like he has for a year. Our apartment has pretty wallpaper and is just so much brighter and home-ier. He is getting paid less than us and he has been at work for the last few weeks from about 8am-8pm everyday and his first Saturday here because it was parent-teacher conferences; whereas we have our whole morning free and haven’t had to work any Saturdays. He isn’t supposed to start until 11 something but his boss wants him coming in early this first little while so he can observe other teachers. He has to write these long lesson plans for each class and he said his boss has been really getting onto him about making them long enough; he’s had to re-do a lot of them. She wants him to write down every single question that he is going to ask the students during class. We barely write down about 2 sentences for each class in our log book that we have every day. We are pretty worried about him, because he is getting pretty fed up with everything and he is working with about 6 other foreigner teachers who aren’t members of the church and go out to drink a lot. He’s told us how they’re always pressuring him to drink and saying that he’s going to be drinking before he leaves here. We really want to get him heavily involved in doing stuff with the members of the military branch before we leave, so he can have that support and good friends to do things with like we have had. It would be really hard to come over here single. Pretty much we are really grateful for the experience that we have had.