Hokey Pokey Homework

A fun and funny thing happened the other night. Our "building guard" lives on the roof of our building in a very small apartment with his family (they are not locals, they are from the country we lived in before). His job is multi-faceted--he does everything from cleaning the stairwell weekly, to running errands for residents in the building, to collecting the money for the generator from all the tenants, to taking everyone's trash down the street to the dumpster and so much more. He is very helpful and kind (any time he sees any woman carrying anything, he stops whatever he is doing and insists on at least getting you loaded into the elevator, and he always helps unload groceries from our car up the stairs to the elevator, and then helps unload from the elevator into our apartment). He and his wife and family are not seen as being of the same class as the people who live in our building and many times I have seen the wife especially be snubbed by the women who live in the building, but we really love this family (probably because they are so much more friendly than most of the people who live here) and we have visited in their home and they have visited in ours. All that to say, recently we had a fun opportunity to be helpful to them in a way we've never helped them before. The dad and his oldest daughter (we'll call her princess because that's what her name means) and his little boy rang the doorbell, and we discovered that they had come asking for help with Princess's English homework. (kids here usually study in either a French language school or an English language school, or at the very least, study English as a subject from the time they are very little, and school is very hard and very demanding and sometimes parents do the homework for the children) When we looked at the pages they were having trouble with, we were very surprised to find that the lesson was the words to the Hokey Pokey! So, matt started out reading through the lyrics (many, many times) while guard man and Princess learned to pronounce any new words (and I tried to keep the little boy from destroying my house or injuring me--he's a bit of a tornado). After about 15 minutes of going over the new words over and over, and having Princess read the words over and over, it was time to teach them the dance. One of our American friends was over at the time, and she happily joined in the fun with us as we all did the hokey pokey (except guard man, who followed along reading the words from the book). We discovered that between the 3 Americans, we all had learned different hand motions to the line, "That's what it's all about". I ended with a snap, Laura ended with a double high five to the person standing next to you, and matt ended with something else that I can't remember at the moment (oh, it just came to me--it involved a clap under the leg somehow). Wish you could have been there. Wish I would have thought at the moment to take a video clip instead of just pictures. It was fun to be needed in a place where we are usually the ones who have the need, and to be needed for something as fun as the Hokey Pokey!