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| OMG!! Did you see that!?!? |
Other random things that have happened between late February and mid-March-ish…
1) First and foremost, we (sadly) said goodbye to our volunteers. Liz and Evan left on February 17th to see other parts of Nicaragua; Kelly and her family left the following Tuesday; and The Swiss left on Saturday. These people were a HUGE help in getting our educational offerings and those of the Ometepe Bilingual School off to a great start. We cannot thank them enough, which is why I keep tooting their collective horn.
Volunteers have such a huge impact on the people here - all of these folks did, to be sure. And the four incredible young folks from Europe made some real friends in Merida. The locals asked us if they could throw a going away party for them at our house. Sounded great to us and it was quite a bash.
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| Let's get this party started! |
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| Impromptu bachata lessons for all. |
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| Chanchitos! |
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| Bex! and Ella should have traded places - Do you know why? |
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| Perhaps we should teach a lesson on slang terms for nauseated outputs |
For some reason, the bus decided it wasn't going all the way back to Merida that night. Of course, we weren't told this until we were already on the bus and on our way. When we boarded, we asked if they were going to Merida, they said 'Si, si!' and then changed their mind and only went as far as Altagracia. Hmmm… We had met another traveler on the ferry, an Aussie gal who was doing turtle research in Central America. She was going to Merida and was tagging along with us. Dropped short of our destination, we walked to the Hotel Central a few blocks away and had them call a cab to get us the rest of the way home. Poor driver was home relaxing and ended up bringing his family with him for the ride. This unexpected cab ride ended up costing us more money but split three ways, not too bad.
We've since discovered that the bus in question sometimes goes all the way to Mérida, only on week days it seems. Bex! shakes her fist at it whenever she finds it parked in town at night. Honey, let it go.
3) The next day, we got an interesting phone call from Adolpho. He is the property manager for our house and lives in Moyogalpa. It seems the driver from the night before, who lives in Altagracia, had found a credit card in his rig and assumed it belonged to us or our Aussie friend. Okay, fine - makes sense. How the driver knows Adolpho is one thing. People here seem to have a lot of contacts amongst other locals. But how the driver knew WE knew Adolpho is a mystery. How he knew to call Adolpho to contact us about the credit card - weird. (P.S. The card did not belong to either of us or the Aussie, but it did bolster our faith in the goodness of people.)
4) Bex! killed her first scorpion. Probably not her last one, either.
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| Adorable litter buggers, aren't they? |
5) Thinking about food and menus and cooking (normal for us) we wanted to buy some local honey. This would be a nice treat and we had seen a sign on the far end of town at a house - 'Se Vende Miel' (Honey for Sale). Awesome. But the next day, lo and behold, a young boy named Brian, 8-9 years old, who attends one of our classes and lives nearby, comes running down the path and slides deftly under the barbed wire fence with two 20 oz. Coke bottles full of honey! His dad had collected it and he was making the rounds to sell. We bought one bottle - we've since tasted it and we should've bought 'em both. Next time.
6) There is a family from Colorado who lives here, housesitting for a friend while building a place of their own. Jen is a dance instructor back home and offered to hold dance classes for the kids at OBS. It's pretty awesome to see the kids counting out steps! She does a great job with incorporating movement and music into an English lesson, too. As part of the warm up activities they do a stretch with the chant "Touch your toe, rainbow"; later, I heard many students chanting to themselves as they colored the rainbows in our St Patrick's Day lesson. Glad to have her here!! Her 14 year old son, Jalen, helps us with the first grade classes, too.
7) We were struggling with the high school class. The behavior of the kids was subpar, to put it nicely, with many disruptions and a lot of screwing around. It was getting frustrating, to the point where I just packed up one night and walked out. This actually helped a little because most of the kids want to be there, so they were mad at the ones who show up just to goof off. Bex! laid down the law, introducing the rules of English class, with which we now begin each and every class.
- 'Be on time' - Tough one in this culture. Now we start each class with a warm up activity and have a cut off time for students. Show up too late, no admittance.
- 'No talking' - Should be easy for kids of this age, but...
- 'No fooling around' - The classes are fairly large, usually 16-20 students, and we're holding them in the OBS preschool room, designed to comfortably hold 12 short kindergartners. So the desks and chairs are tiny. Plus there are a lot of distractions, but we do our best.
- 'Raise your hand to talk' - The technique here at all grade levels seems to be 'scream the answer out'. Now we don't call on anyone or accept an answer unless a student has their hand in the air first.
- 'Go directly home after class' - The school is located on the site of a hotel, so it's tempting for kids to hang out in the hammocks, run around the buildings and generally disrupt what little peace and quiet one might find here. We added this rule after a couple kids got into trouble with their parents for after-class shenanigans. We've also seen scowls from guests and heard of complaints, so we make sure kids leave the grounds when class is wrapped.
We're learning.
8) Attendance at some classes has been disappointing. Part of having their kid in the bilingual school is that parents will support the schools' initiative at home. So we thought it would be a great idea to hold a class for parents. We would teach them the same English their kids were learning so that they could converse at home, thus reinforcing it for everyone. No go. Maybe it was a timing thing, although we talked with the parents to determine the best time of day for the class. Attendance was sporadic, at best. Usually, no one showed. We've since dropped that class and added a beginners class to the early morning. This class grew quickly and is a huge success. Plus it's nice for us because we hold it at our house on the porch!
The intermediate adults have been an issue, as well. There are a few that show pretty regularly but others that rarely do. But it's the high season here and many of them work as guides or in the hotel/restaurant, so they're making money while they can. We're confident attendance will improve as soon as the rains come!!
9) We had some very unwanted guests trying to move into our house. A colony of large ants was building a nest under the kitchen counter. Bad move on their part. Home pesticide sprays rock!
10) A church group from South Carolina showed up for their annual volunteer trip. They stay at Hacienda Merida but do work at a school for the deaf in another town on the island. This time around, Alvaro agreed to let some of the high school kids in the group volunteer in the bilingual school. We, the Volunteer Coordinators, had no knowledge of this before the deal was struck. Kelly and Liz, with Bex!, had JUST finished drafting the documents for OBS stating the rules and policies for volunteering and spending time with the kids. And none of those are 'you can just volunteer at the last minute, with no vetting or orientation'. Plus, volunteers are asked to donate at least two weeks, preferably longer, so they can build an actual relationship and have a real impact. This group was only here for four days. The school does not have a drive up window for drop-in do-gooders. The children are not tourist attractions, either. The primary take away from the OBS mission statement, philosophy and other documentation is that the single most important thing is 'what's best for the children'. Drop in volunteers are NOT good for the children. It's disruptive, scary and confusing to them.
Unfortunately, Alvaro had said yes to the church group, so we went to the hotel to meet with them, explained the situation and made it clear that we were there to look out for the kids. We explained that the children needed routine and stability, that we wanted no more than two volunteers per classroom, and that we wanted the same people for the entire week. The leader and other adult volunteers were nodding in agreement the entire time "Oh, yes. Absolutely. The children are the priority. We agree. That is entirely correct." Blah blah blah. After shining us on, they pretty much blew us off and tried to send in different people every day they were there. We talked them down and met in the middle, with a couple of the people remaining consistent throughout the week.
For this situation the children were indeed just another attraction on the island. 'Climb the volcano! Kayak to the swamp! Spend a day with the cute children! Feed the monkeys!'
'Frustrated' and 'pissed off' doesn't begin to describe our feelings.
11) Our shelf arrived! Our shelf arrived! Our house has no closets or shelving for storage so we commissioned a local guy to make a huge shelf unit for us. It's gorgeous, hand crafted from local wood, two meters tall by a 1.5 meters wide with deep shelves - and cost a whopping $180. It swallowed up all our belongings and left the floor much easier to sweep and mop.
12) We are getting better at lesson planning! It's a real struggle for me; Bex! is a natural. Still, it takes some serious scheduling to make each week work. We use a whiteboard to lay out all the classes, fill in the class topic for each level, location and time slot, then figure out which one of us is teaching which classes. Then we start making up lesson plans. It's getting easier, thank goodness!
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| Week 1: Lines, arrows, colors, chaos |
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| Week 10: We are a well-organized machine |
13) One thing that makes lesson planning easier now is that we finally got internet run to our house! Hooray! Cindi, the owner, has a wifi tower at her place nearby and had paid for the line to be run to our place. You know how much of a hassle it is to schedule the cable guy to come to your house? Well, imagine trying to schedule the 'cable guy' to get here!! The company is based in Managua = a two hour drive south to Puerto San Jorge = an hour on the ferry = another hour+ drive to Merida, part of which is on the crappy road = then you have to do the job you came to do. Yoinks! After many promises of 'we'll be there tomorrow' they finally actually did show up!
Another interesting thing about this: If you've traveled in places like this before, you've seen crazy things with power lines and electricity. People just run lines from the road and drape the line through tree branches and fence posts. There is no 'code'. Usually just live wires running from the power pole to the house by whatever means gets the line there. Wire nuts are seldom used - usually just electrical tape. But for the internet line, they actually dug a trench all the way from the tower to our place (80-100 meters) and buried the line in plastic conduit!! We were amazed! And grateful, of course.
14) There was a group of journalists from France traveling through Nicaragua. They arranged to make a stop in Merida to visit the bilingual school. Since Bex! speaks French, Alvaro called on her to help with the tour. As is usually the case, she rawked and we had a good time and got a free lunch. The group consisted of writers and photographers from some big publications, like National Geographic (French edition). Pretty cool - hope they used some of what they got here.Another interesting thing about this: If you've traveled in places like this before, you've seen crazy things with power lines and electricity. People just run lines from the road and drape the line through tree branches and fence posts. There is no 'code'. Usually just live wires running from the power pole to the house by whatever means gets the line there. Wire nuts are seldom used - usually just electrical tape. But for the internet line, they actually dug a trench all the way from the tower to our place (80-100 meters) and buried the line in plastic conduit!! We were amazed! And grateful, of course.
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| Electric spaghetti |
Learning Spanish is hard enough for us. After Bex! dug deep into her brain and spoke French for the afternoon, we went home and a short time later her head exploded.
15) We settled into a nice routine with our first graders and kindergarteners. We start each English lessons with a story book. Then we sing some songs. After that we do whatever activity we have planned for the day - a farm tour, a nature walk, games, coloring, drawings - then we wrap up with a couple of more songs and that's it.
Sad to say that kids here don't have access to books, so they LOVE stories! When we first introduced our routine to the kids, it took a while for them to get into it. We had to wrangle kids to get them to sit down for story time. But now, we simply hold the book up and most of them hustle over to sit; they all want to sit in the front row. Sometimes they even bring a chair for us to sit in for reading to them. And when the story is finished, we are met with a rousing "Thank you, Profesor!" It's been a fun transition to see. Like I said, we're figuring this teaching thing out, slowly but surely.
16) We showed up one afternoon to work with the first graders - part of the normal schedule. We teach English to them from 1-2 PM, which works well because Julia, the teacher, has to leave at 1 PM. Except this day she was still there, and stayed after we finished. Turns out that for reasons still unbeknownst to us, the Tuesday class was now being held from noon to five instead of 8-2 like every other day. [Note: Recently it switched back to the regular schedule. Who knows - we just show up.]
17) We swim whenever we can. Our place is on the lake, so it's easy access. Our schedule during the week is pretty busy so there are days when we just can't dip in. But weekends are for swimming, for sure!
18) We took a day trip to Moyogalpa, just to get out of the village and see what the port city had to offer other than boat rides to/from the mainland. There are certain foods we miss and one of those foods is a nice, big sandwich on good bread. They have bread here but it's dry, bland, and usually not very good. But the Cornerhouse Cafe is fantastic! Run by an ex-pat Brit named Gary and his Canadian wife, they bake their bread fresh daily and offer amazing food and fresh fruit smoothies, plus great coffee. It's now a definite stop each time we pass through, time permitting.
We also bought a plastic table for the porch. Makes working outside in the breeze and breeze. Plus we hit the grocery store in town and scored some great food items!! Crunchy peanut butter, soy sauce, spices. Magic!
19) A group of students from the University of Virginia showed up. They were here to volunteer their time in building the new schoolhouse. A couple of the students expressed an interest in the school, and were exploring the options for returning to spend some time there. Awesome!
There was also a small group from Cornell University that was doing some sort of research project. And Cornell absconded with one of the school's whiteboards which made teaching a little difficult. They returned it when they left.
The biggest problem was the rearranged class locations for OBS. The first grade schoolhouse is under construction, so their classes were being held in the courtyard of the hotel. Not ideal but it's the only place. But Cornell took that over so the kids were shuffled to the kindergarten classroom, which pushed the youngsters out into an 'open air' setting. But the noise from construction on the new school was too much, so all the kids were moved to the downstairs apartment of Alvaro and Esther's place. They run the hotel and the school and live right across the road. For us, we played the game of 'where are the kids today?' each time we showed up that week. Poor kids were rattled after the moves. The first grade teacher shared with us that the day of the first move the first grade kids showed up in their normal space (the courtyard) and several of them said "Profa, where's my desk?" in a very worried tone.
20) Having fully settled into our place and figuring out the food shopping thing, we thoroughly enjoy our time at home. Teaching and planning lessons is hard work. I know that now. But it is rewarding and makes our down time feel even more special.
Meals are especially fantastic, now that we can cook for ourselves!!
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| Red, Yellow, Green - The colors of our flag (Our being Playa Gringo, not Nicaragua) |
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| Hasta Pronto!! |
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