That said...
It's time once again to get you all caught up on what's been happening since we returned from our final border run.
And... away we go!
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Not sure we mentioned it but right before we left on our aquatic adventure-themed border run we had to deal with ants in the damn printer yet again. Seriously, Hewlett-Packard - can you make a printer that doesn't have inviting little openings all over the bottom? We took it all apart, cleaned it out, double bagged it, sealed it up tight and crossed our fingers. And, whaddyaknow, it worked. When we got back - no ants! Except all the dismantling and reassembling we've done over the year had taken its toll on our poor HP Deskjet Ink Advantage 2515. After we gingerly unwrapped it and plugged it in - nothing. Was it beyond repair? It seemed so. Seriously, this would be a major issue and would dramatically change how we taught the remaining weeks of class. No printer meant little or no homework for our students, no vocabulary sheets, no printed dialogues and role plays - all invaluable to them for studying and practicing outside of class time. We didn't want our classes to devolve into us writing things on the board and the students copying it all down. Ugh.
There is only one place in town that makes copies, so after a very sad lunch at Caballito del Mar, we went by the guys house to talk to him and get an idea how much it would cost to make copies. This option would seriously suck. We'd have to walk to his place every time we needed copies; we'd have to hope to catch him at home; and hope he had ink. We could bring our printer paper. We went back home and decided to take one more crack at repairing the thing. The issue was in one of the ribbon cables; it was bent and damaged after repeated unplugging/plugging in. A ribbon cable is an incredibly thin and fragile thing. We decided we couldn't make it any worse, so risked cutting off the end and attempting to craft a fresh "plug". Using a pocket knife, I slowly and gently scraped the plastic coating off the foil-thin cable contacts. Push to hard and tear the foil. Oy. But slowly, gradually I made progress! I could see the foil and it was intact!
Once the work got to be too delicate for my eyes, Bex!s' younger and much better eyes took over. It was tedious work, let me tell ya. There are 10 strips that needed to be clean enough of plastic to make contact when plugged into the slot.
After a painstakingly long time and a lot of patience, it was time to see if we could resurrect our machine. We plugged the cable in, hooked up the printer - and it worked!!! We felt not like teachers but more like doctors! Drs. Frankenstein, more accurately. "It's alive!!!"
For your reference, you can repair a printer in the jungle using the following items:
- a pocket knife
- a children's glue stick
- a Leatherman Wave multi-tool
- an eyeglass screwdriver with a nifty parabolic magnifying lens attachment
- a Specialized bike multi-tool
- duct tape
- perseverance & luck
So, yeah, we field stripped our printer (again) AND a ribbon cable - and it worked!!!
Who rocks? We rock!
(Of course, none of the buttons on the control panel work. Each time we replace an ink cartridge we have to wait for it to give up on aligning the print head because we can't push the control panel button needed to complete the process and we turn it on and off my unplugging the power cable. But with these ghetto work-arounds, it's still capable of the essential functions of printing and even scanning.)
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The day we made the bike trip to view the aftermath of the landslides neat Santa Teresa was also the day before one of our good friends left the island. So of course, it was despedida time! Any excuse to have a few beers. Pedro found a great job in Panama and, along with a few other men from Merida, took off to make some money.
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| Goodbye, Pedro!!! |
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We had a couple of more nasty chayule days. We will not miss these annoying little bastards. How gnarly are these things? One night the power went out shortly after we got home. The electricity goes off almost daily, sometimes just for a few minutes, other times for much longer. We were getting ready to make dinner, too. We got the candles out and lit them up. The chayules just loved the candlelight! They swarmed the flames so heavily, they snuffed the candles out. It was unbelievable! And we couldn't fire up the cookstove because that flame attracted them, as well. So we ate crackers and peanut butter for dinner. Mmmmm…
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| This candle had been lit just seconds before! |
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Speaking of power outages, Bex! has a theory she calls the Rule of 3, wherein we only ever have 2 of 3 amenities at any given time - electricity, internet, water. Even though we've had a lot of rain, the heavy precipitation causes other, somewhat ironic, problems. The rain washes away the dirt along the road, thus causing the rocks to shift, breaking the plastic waterlines. So there we were, experiencing rain regularly and yet we had no water in the house for close to a week.
One day the water 'magically' came back on and literally within minutes, the power went out. The next day the power was back on, but the internet stayed out for more than 24 hours. Sigh.
Yep, the Rule of 3.
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There is a children's book called 'Pete's Big Lunch' that we occasionally read to our 1st graders. Pete is a cat who makes a sandwich for lunch and this sandwich has everything. Including pickles. The kids get great practice with food vocab naming everything on the sandwich - bread, mayo, tomato, apple, fish, crunchy crackers, beans, egg, 2 hot dogs, a pickle. We realized that these kids had never tasted a pickle before so we brought a jar of them back home from Costa Rica. So, yes, these were imported pickles.
We read the book, the kids loved it (again) and then we asked if they were hungry. We started with 'crunchy crackers'. They, of course, loved these. Then we moved on to pickles. Now, as a teacher it's important to model an activity so the class sees it in action. I gladly ate my pickle and answered the query 'Do you like pickles?' with a hearty 'Yes, I like pickles!'
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| Yes, I like pickles! |
Bex! does not like pickles. At all. But we need to lead by example, sooo…
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| Hesitant… |
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| … confused... |
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| … in agony. |
A picture is worth a 1,000 words, they say - so there are 3,000 words that show just how much Bex! does not like pickles. Haha! Okay, so she was playing it up a little to get the kids engaged and giggling. Still awesome, though!
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| Daren likes pickles. |
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| Jesner really likes pickles. |
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| Dilan, about 5 seconds before discovering he does NOT like pickles. |
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| The kids' teacher, Julia, enjoyed her pickle. |
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| Even the kids' teacher from last year stopped by to try a pickle. |
Since the Kindergarten students are so young, they're still learning lots of basic things - like letter and number recognition, counting, gross/fine motor skills, etc. When we can, we like to combine basic skills that will help them in both languages with our English lessons. And thus, we had two weeks on vowels. In one class, we played a chair switching game with vowel bracelets. In another, we brought worksheets and students colored in a path of vowels to get a dog to its ball. And in this one, we got physical and traced the vowels with our feet.
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| Profesor David is always willing to be silly with the kids! |
As our departure grows imminent, it seems all of our mascotas (pets) have been stopping in to say farewell. There are the daily visitors - chickens, pigs, horses, cows. We hadn't seen Lobo, our adopted dog, in a while but he's visited a few times recently. We've seen our iguanas, too. We hadn't laid eyes on them since we'd been back and feared the worst - that they had met an untimely demise via slingshot and ended up as someone's dinner while we were gone on the border run. Nope, they are alive and well.
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| This one is the ringleader. All fluffy, we dubbed it 'Sweater Chicken'. |
The first day we noticed they had returned, we were sitting on the porch and saw them staring at us from a small tree about 20 feet from us. As soon as we made them, though, they moved on to a taller tree.
Oh man, we saw them do the craziest thing! They were way up in one of the huge mango trees at our house and apparently they really wanted to get to the next tree - one about a third of the height and not within reach. How did they do it? Well, I looked up when I heard a huge crash in the branches and just caught Cornelius as he was grabbing hold in the smaller tree. Suddenly Milo, the baby, just… jumped from way up high and fell, fell, fell until he hit the shorter tree and snagged a branch. Then came Zira doing the same thing!! Holy crap! Free falling monkeys!
We also had a new monkey visit. This guy was traveling solo and he had a cold - or a hangover. He had what we guess was a cough and when he tried to make the standard howler monkey grunts and growls, his voice cracked and sounded hoarse. It was pretty funny!
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Doña Clara and Don Jehu, proprietors at our favorite produce stand in town, invited us to their granddaughter's birthday party. Luvianca was the birthday girl and we had a good time! We were honored to be invited to her fiesta!
Like every kids party here, the highlight was the piñata! A Nica party is different than other piñata parties I've seen. There is Latin dance music played, the kids are blindfolded and then have to dance to have the piñata lowered. No dancing, the piñata stays up. It's hilarious to watch, especially the boys who are too cool to dance. So they shake their butts a little, lift a corner of the blindfold and shoot a glare at the piñata rope operator. "Dude, be cool - you were 6 once, remember. Don't make me do this."
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| Not her first piñata, Luvianca could dance AND swing the stick simultaneously! |
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| Really? You missed again?! Would one of you kids hit the damn thing, already?! |
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| One… and two… and cha cha cha! |
We welcomed new volunteers! Tim and Tania are from Australia and on the tail end of a one year trip all over North and Central America. They spent two weeks with us, teaching the OBS kids as well as the primary school kids in our after-school English class. They did a great job and the children really took to them immediately. We think it was because of the cool Aussie accents.
Part of our protocol for new volunteers is to be with them the first day so we can introduce them to the kids. It's comforting for the children if someone they know and trust is introducing them to new people. This practice has served us well all year. We had prepped the 1st graders ahead of time and had them greet Tania and Tim with a rousing "G'day, mate!" The volunteers loved it and thus the bond was formed!
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| Tim already hard at work helping the after school kids class practice emotion words. |
Rock star students Ricardo and Deymar stopped by the house to show us the tiniest tortuga! They had found him up the trail a ways and were returning him to the lake.
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| "Be free, little tortuga! You are not yet big enough for soup." |
Boo!
It was Halloween time and this made for some fun classes. We did lessons on ghost stories, Frankenstein, and myths with our adults. With the younger groups we did arts and crafts, making construction paper ghosts and pumpkins. We helped Tim and Tania with the OBS kids when they made Halloween masks, too.
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| Maria and Ariana |
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| Ashly shows off her ghost. |
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| Donaldo! |
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| Youth torn paper mosaics - plump pumpkins and spooky ghosts. |
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| OBS Kindergarten monsters! |
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| The OBS 1st grade monsters just chillin'... |
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Since Halloween fell on a Friday night, we had told some of our young students to come by so they could use the new English we'd taught them, namely 'Trick or Treat!' Many of them had heard of trick or treating but none of them had done it. It's not a 'thing' here. So the kids were quite excited! Unfortunately, we got sidetracked that evening and didn't get home in time. More on why we were delayed later.
You can guess what happened next. The kids let us know the following Monday that they had come by only to find no one home! Yikes! We felt really bad. As Tania jokingly put it when we told her we had disappointed the kids: "You are horrible people!" But… we made it up to them the following Friday! Besides a one week postponement in a once-a-year holiday seems about right when you run on Nica time, right?
The following Friday we were waiting for our little 'ghouls and boos' to arrive. We caught them sneaking up on the house! They came to the back door and rattled it, trying to scare us! We just assumed it was a tarantula.
The little monsters all came around to the front and shouted 'Trick or Treat!' when we opened the door, right on cue! And, man, we set 'em up with all kinds of candy! Okay, maybe we felt a little guilty about missing them the previous week.
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| Too adorable to be scary but not for a lack of effort on her part! |
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| Monsters, all! Except for that handsome guy in the middle. |
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We had a stellar week of classes! We mostly have good classes - rewarding, lively, fun. But each week there are always a couple that have us scratching our heads, trying to figure out what happened. Did we just screw up? Were the students simply not engaged? Could we have done something different? But this week - wow! - by the end of the week we were riding high. During our weekly download session at Margarita's we were both beaming!
The highlights:
- We had the Aussies attend classes with our adult beginners and high schoolers. The students nailed it! They were rock stars! Tania and Tim praised them for how well they did interviewing them, remembering details and simply holding up an English conversation. So proud of both classes!
- Bex! did a lesson at the Lorio's covering sweet, salty, bitter, sour. She brought foods so the kids could try them. They bravely tasted and the results were clear: they all loved strawberry jam; they all hated mustard!
- We have 3 different classes with high school-aged students and we were fortunate enough to arrange PenPals with a class of high schoolers in Allendale, Michigan, USA. It's a pretty special thing for the kids. With no mail service, obviously, we scan and email the correspondence back and forth. Ah, the wonders of modern technology! This week our kids did great with their letters and we were able to get photos of our students to send along to their new friends! The kids were pretty excited about this!
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| A few of those penpal portraits. |
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Okay, so why did we miss out on Halloween Trick or Treaters at our house? Why did we disappoint these wonderful little kids?
Beer-pocolypse, that's why.
Let me provide a little perspective first, before telling the story. A while back we said goodbye to our new friends from Argentina, Gabo and Juan Pablo. Great guys and we hope to cross paths again some day. In fact, Juan Pablo is a huge NBA fan and I told him if he ever gets to Portland, we'd go see the Blazers play!
To give them a proper sendoff, we went out for beers. And we drank a fair amount that night. But nothing - nothing - like Beer-pocolypse.
We did the same with TnT (Tania and Tim). I am here to testify that these Aussies can drink, man. Holy hell.
We went to Margarita's, as is tradition on Fridays. Tim and Tania had completed their first week and we like to check-in with our volunteers. See what's working, find out what's still a challenge, all so we can continue to improve the volunteer experience. So it started as a legit meeting. Really, it did.
And then day turned to night…
It didn't help, either when Jody and Perry, friends of TnT and fellow Aussies, hit town. Suffice it to say that we went through a large amount of cerveza. To wit:
I'm still in shock just thinking about it.And then day turned to night…
It didn't help, either when Jody and Perry, friends of TnT and fellow Aussies, hit town. Suffice it to say that we went through a large amount of cerveza. To wit:
Gabo and Juan Pablo - when we meet again, we'll have to make a run at a new record.
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So this is what winter in Nicaragua feels like? We had a few days with lots of wind and a lot of rain. Why, it even got chilly enough at night that we would pull the blanket over us. And by 'blanket' I mean 'top sheet'.
The lake has risen substantially, too. It's a very short walk to the water, in fact. Another couple of feet and it would be in the yard!
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| And our path is a mini-river. |
With the clouds comes the Season of Beautiful Sunsets. This may be a good spot to end Part I of these Loose Ends posts. We'll leave you with a few pictures from the amazing sunsets we've enjoyed right from our porch.
Um, wow! It has been a show most every night. It's like Nicaragua is enticing us to stay!
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Look for Loose Ends, Part II soon!
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