I’ll be the first to admit it; I lack a strong belief in someone upstairs watching over all of us. There may or may not be some higher being up there getting a kick out of watching us live our lives. That being said, the hypothetical higher power up there has had it in for me recently. Be it the god of bad luck, the god of technology, or whoever, someone had made up their mind to make my life a little harder recently.
It all started with Camp ALMA: A field trip of sorts that the Peace Corps volunteers put together for teenage girls in our sites. We bring together teen girls from all of our sites and teach them about leadership, women’s health, and small project management along with playing silly games and painting t-shirts. Basically a fun time to be had all expenses paid by the Peace Corps. I had one girl who told me she’d go. Her mom had signed the permission slip and we were all good to go…so I thought. Day of at 4 am her mother tells me her daughter’s not going. I was pissed. I’d spent the better half of the past 2 weeks talking the mother and daughter through this whole ordeal (the mom’s a little…we’ll say special.) making sure that there was no confusion. And to bail on me last minute and leave me girl-less at this camp—well that was just not cool!
So I show up at Camp ALMA girl-less and depressed. I was really looking forward to this camp. I made the best of it, stealing time with the boy’s girls from Bolivar (The neighboring town with male Peace Corps Volunteers), it was a camp for girls after all, so I didn’t feel bad stealing the girls from their boy volunteers. Then the unthinkable happens. Me being the klutz that I am dropped my point and shoot camera on the floor—the rock covered floor. Crack. There goes the camera. Well, okay, I’m not 100% sure it’s completely gone. It just doesn’t take pictures. I’m taking it to a guy in Chiclayo this weekend that I think can fix it…cross your fingers for me.
I get back to site, piss about the camera, and still kinda pissed about the girl not coming to the camp. Then I hear the gossip: The girl I was supposed to take has run off to Ica (a different department in Peru) with her boyfriend and is refusing to come home. Drama follows but can be all summed up with: everyone in town knows I had nothing to do with letting the girl run away from home…except for the mother. After my 5 witnesses (the 2 volunteers from up the hill, their 2 girls, and the nurse from Nanchoc) were able to support my story that the girl was not with me when she ran away, the mother finally backed down. She now knows that I had no part in her run away daughter’s flight to Ica. I can now sleep well at night knowing she won’t be attacking me with a machete. Things start looking up at this point.
We have decided at the health post to try a big project. I’ve given them enough confidence that it is possible to do. We’re going to attempt-- attempt is the key word-- a community garden in the lot behind the health post. The Idea is that all the mother with children under the age of 5 work together in shifts on a veggie garden. Those parents that work get to take home produce. Sounds simple enough, but in a town with rivalries that make Romeo and Juliet’s parents look like friends it’s a rather hard task to complete. We’re currently attempting to create working groups, not based off of where the family lives (which was my idea that was shot down), rather, based off of who gets along with who. Apparently some of the feuds in town run deep enough that there are a few people who can’t be trusted in a close proximity to each other with a pick axes. We think we have the list down, and the mothers are all bringing sticks and old sacks to fence in the area to keep the chickens out. It looks like this might actually happen.
Then today, the best news possible. The highlight of my week, possibly my month, or maybe even the year: I am in possession to the keys of the future library of Nanchoc. Yes, let me repeat that again: I HAVE THE KEYS TO THE FUTURE LIBRARY OF THE TOWN OF NANCHOC!!!!!!!! Huge break! Biiiiiiiiiiiig news here. After battling with our incompetent mayor for the past few months he has moved his stuff out of the school’s new building (yes, he had stolen the newly constructed school building from the school…) and I have the key to one of the BIGGER rooms to turn into the library. I literally jumped for joy. Rosa, my main go to woman for this project and the unofficial leader-lady of the parent’s association, deserves the biggest round of applause ever. She did almost all of the work in hounding the mayor to get these keys and deserves all of the credit. Without her hard work this first phase of the library would have never happened. I cannot thank this woman enough. Although I’m going to try to thank her in my own special way, I’m going to bake her a cake. It’s the international thank you, who doesn’t like a good cake?
Things are looking up. Let’s hope they stay that way. I’m heading to Chiclayo tomorrow to celebrate my birthday a few days early with some friends, and to buy a broom and a mop and some floor soap for the new library—first thing on the to-do list is to mop up all the rainy season mud that has encased the floor. But I’m game for a good elbow workout.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Down Time
Yes it’s that time of year again: The rainy season. It seemed to have gotten off to a late start this year but its making up for its tardiness in force. It’s rained for the past 8 days straight. I’m not kidding, a solid 150 out of 192 hours to be sure. While I’m super excited about the future prospects of corn on the cob, tamales, and corn fritters that I will be consuming the rainy season has its downside: everything comes to a grinding halt. People stop coming to classes because walking for an hour to school on a sunny day seemed nice, but walking that same distance slipping and sliding while getting soaking wet just to listen to me talk isn’t worth the effort. The meetings we plan and prepare for are given to no one; after that late afternoon downpour they all decided to stay snug and warm in their houses. So us Peace Corps Volunteers are left with some extra time on our hands.
There are many ways to occupy this time. We all try to use time wisely, getting work done in advanced for post-rainy season activities and projects. We spend on average a few hours a week talking to the town population under that one part of the roof of the town store where you don’t get wet in the downpour trying to build interest in potential projects. The poster boards get made in advanced and stored for future use, the pens and paints get neatly organized, and we finally have time to organize all of our photos and other data from the past few months. But even after all of that we are left with a LOT of down time. The rainy season is just full of downtime and not all of it, no matter how much we try, can be filled with real work. So we find ourselves reading a lot, studying for the GREs, watching DVDs or downloaded TV series, doodling in our notebooks, or just taking a nap. To my credit I do spend an hour a day to studying for the GRE, but let’s face it the verbal part is going to kill me so I need the practice. I have found myself doing a lot more of one activity than I would have ever thought possible: Reading. I hated reading in high school. My loathing for this activity probably helped influence my course of study; there is a heck of a lot less reading in math text books. But until the Peace Corps I was never presented with a good 5 hour window of nothingness. It was always filled before with studying, cooking, eating, practices, classes, meetings, or just watching a few minutes of TV. Now I’ve got huge windows of time with no classes, no meetings (because no one ever shows up when there’s rain), no practices (the soccer field’s a mud pit), no TV (literally there isn’t one in the house), no cooking (my host mom likes to do that), and very little time spent eating. So what else is there to do? Well I draw some, paint a little, read Newsweeks that my Mom sent me, and have found myself picking up a few books.
The book I’m reading now has actually given me the incentive to write this blog. Jennifer Ackerman’s Sex, Sleep, Eat, Drink, Dream outlines the day in the life of your body. I’m only about a third of the way through the book, to the part where she starts talking about the afternoon. I just finished reading about that afternoon lull that we all experience. After eating that big lunch we’re good for about an hour, then the eyelids start getting really heavy and we begin cursing the no-napping policy of our job (OK, the Peace Corps aside), our classes, or our meetings. Well she makes a good point, who said naps were so bad? Well other than our bosses obviously. But she says that at this time of day, when those eye lids start getting really heavy
“There are two ways to go. Try to override the rhythm, bear down on your work…and ignore the open sleep door at your own peril. Or briefly go through it; put your head on your desk, or if you’re lucky enough to have a couch, stretch out and snatch forty winks…Catnap, siesta, forty winks, rest involving sleep but not pajamas—a nap is technically defined as a daytime sleep episode of more than five minutes and less than four hours. Considered by many to be deviant behavior, napping has traditionally gotten a bad rap, disparaged as the unfortunate artifact of an overindulgent meal, stifling midday heat, or sheer laziness…
I’m happy to report that in the past few years napping has achieved new status. Research shows that naps not only ensure a break time at a time of day when we’re definitely not at our best, they also have powerful recuperative effects on performance, out of all proportion to their duration.”
Woo! We have it, a woman who wrote a book based off the findings of scientific papers gives napping the green light. And just in case her words don’t convince you, let me throw in my little case study. I work up this morning at 6am, brushed my teeth, did a little yoga, got my lesson plans together and got dressed all before 7am. I still had 2 more hours to wait until breakfast so I prepared lesson plans for later in the week and then did some laundry (a feat that is never meant for this rainy season…nothing EVER dries). This all goes in line with the “morning rhythm” that Jennifer talks about, morning individuals (such as myself) do all of our best work between one hour after waking and noon. After battling the clothes I ate breakfast and ran out the door to classes. The door of course was no open, so I ran all around town to find the man with the key and had the door open by 10 am and was giving classes to 3 kids (a better than average rainy season turn out). By noon we’re all finished and so was I. Tired from a morning of running around I returned to the house and helped finish the skinning of a goat that was to become lunch. This signaled two things: 1. that we’d be eating really late, and 2. that there was time for a nap before lunch. So I went to my room and had a good hour and a half of sleep before the sound of clanking plates work me up. I then went out to the kitchen and ate rice, bean, and goat with the family, wide awake. After lunch I sat down and read some more and got to the lovely part of this book that told me naps were a good thing. As stated in the book napping is common in many cultures, Peruvian included. It’s just too hot in the summer after lunch to do anything other than nap. Jennifer mentions that in one culture of people living in the Cook Islands that there are more than 35 different kinds of sleep, all with varying depth of sleep and twitches of the sleeper.
And just in case you don’t believe her, Winston Churchill had a few thoughts on the matter as well, “You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner and no half-way measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed.” So who’s with me on pajama party nap time being a staple in all working environments? Okay, I know it’ll never happen. Good news for me: teachers can actually have that nap between lunch and dinner…we just have to wait till school’s out.
There are many ways to occupy this time. We all try to use time wisely, getting work done in advanced for post-rainy season activities and projects. We spend on average a few hours a week talking to the town population under that one part of the roof of the town store where you don’t get wet in the downpour trying to build interest in potential projects. The poster boards get made in advanced and stored for future use, the pens and paints get neatly organized, and we finally have time to organize all of our photos and other data from the past few months. But even after all of that we are left with a LOT of down time. The rainy season is just full of downtime and not all of it, no matter how much we try, can be filled with real work. So we find ourselves reading a lot, studying for the GREs, watching DVDs or downloaded TV series, doodling in our notebooks, or just taking a nap. To my credit I do spend an hour a day to studying for the GRE, but let’s face it the verbal part is going to kill me so I need the practice. I have found myself doing a lot more of one activity than I would have ever thought possible: Reading. I hated reading in high school. My loathing for this activity probably helped influence my course of study; there is a heck of a lot less reading in math text books. But until the Peace Corps I was never presented with a good 5 hour window of nothingness. It was always filled before with studying, cooking, eating, practices, classes, meetings, or just watching a few minutes of TV. Now I’ve got huge windows of time with no classes, no meetings (because no one ever shows up when there’s rain), no practices (the soccer field’s a mud pit), no TV (literally there isn’t one in the house), no cooking (my host mom likes to do that), and very little time spent eating. So what else is there to do? Well I draw some, paint a little, read Newsweeks that my Mom sent me, and have found myself picking up a few books.
The book I’m reading now has actually given me the incentive to write this blog. Jennifer Ackerman’s Sex, Sleep, Eat, Drink, Dream outlines the day in the life of your body. I’m only about a third of the way through the book, to the part where she starts talking about the afternoon. I just finished reading about that afternoon lull that we all experience. After eating that big lunch we’re good for about an hour, then the eyelids start getting really heavy and we begin cursing the no-napping policy of our job (OK, the Peace Corps aside), our classes, or our meetings. Well she makes a good point, who said naps were so bad? Well other than our bosses obviously. But she says that at this time of day, when those eye lids start getting really heavy
“There are two ways to go. Try to override the rhythm, bear down on your work…and ignore the open sleep door at your own peril. Or briefly go through it; put your head on your desk, or if you’re lucky enough to have a couch, stretch out and snatch forty winks…Catnap, siesta, forty winks, rest involving sleep but not pajamas—a nap is technically defined as a daytime sleep episode of more than five minutes and less than four hours. Considered by many to be deviant behavior, napping has traditionally gotten a bad rap, disparaged as the unfortunate artifact of an overindulgent meal, stifling midday heat, or sheer laziness…
I’m happy to report that in the past few years napping has achieved new status. Research shows that naps not only ensure a break time at a time of day when we’re definitely not at our best, they also have powerful recuperative effects on performance, out of all proportion to their duration.”
Woo! We have it, a woman who wrote a book based off the findings of scientific papers gives napping the green light. And just in case her words don’t convince you, let me throw in my little case study. I work up this morning at 6am, brushed my teeth, did a little yoga, got my lesson plans together and got dressed all before 7am. I still had 2 more hours to wait until breakfast so I prepared lesson plans for later in the week and then did some laundry (a feat that is never meant for this rainy season…nothing EVER dries). This all goes in line with the “morning rhythm” that Jennifer talks about, morning individuals (such as myself) do all of our best work between one hour after waking and noon. After battling the clothes I ate breakfast and ran out the door to classes. The door of course was no open, so I ran all around town to find the man with the key and had the door open by 10 am and was giving classes to 3 kids (a better than average rainy season turn out). By noon we’re all finished and so was I. Tired from a morning of running around I returned to the house and helped finish the skinning of a goat that was to become lunch. This signaled two things: 1. that we’d be eating really late, and 2. that there was time for a nap before lunch. So I went to my room and had a good hour and a half of sleep before the sound of clanking plates work me up. I then went out to the kitchen and ate rice, bean, and goat with the family, wide awake. After lunch I sat down and read some more and got to the lovely part of this book that told me naps were a good thing. As stated in the book napping is common in many cultures, Peruvian included. It’s just too hot in the summer after lunch to do anything other than nap. Jennifer mentions that in one culture of people living in the Cook Islands that there are more than 35 different kinds of sleep, all with varying depth of sleep and twitches of the sleeper.
And just in case you don’t believe her, Winston Churchill had a few thoughts on the matter as well, “You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner and no half-way measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed.” So who’s with me on pajama party nap time being a staple in all working environments? Okay, I know it’ll never happen. Good news for me: teachers can actually have that nap between lunch and dinner…we just have to wait till school’s out.
The Mango’s Out to Get You
So back before Peru if you had mentioned the word mango to me I would have said it was a fruit that costs way too much fresh, is way too sweet when bought dry, and is great in juice. It was just some exotic fruit that they sure don’t grow in North Carolina though I’m pretty sure they’ve got them out in Cali and the west coast. A mango was just a mango. A fruit nothing else.
Oh was I wrong. The mango is a silent killer. When harvesting mangos a non ripe, or green, mango can fall from a very high branch and land directly on your head and cause a day-long headache. Or that same green mango can be covered in “mango milk” or the sap from the tree which causes a rash that rivals any poison ivy I’ve ever seen. Oh and heaven forbid you forgot that you had some of that mango milk on your hand and scratched that itch you had beside your eye. Forget pink eye, that’s bloodshot eye for at least 4 days and no you won’t be able to see out of that eye either for a while…might wanna head to the health post to get that looked at. Plus don’t listen to that little boy that lives beside you when he says that green mangos are delicious with salt; to me it tastes kinda like eating a banana peel and lemon peel smushed together with a little salt for seasoning. Then that little neighbor kid forgot to mention that a green mango piece can stick to the side of your intestines and cause one heck of a gastrointestinal issue if you’re lucky and possibly kill if you happen to be a tiny baby. (So that last one hasn’t been scientifically proven, but I’ll believe it after seeing the mango milk reaction…imagine that on your insides…) Not only are green mangos a cause for alarm for humans, they can kill your cow as well. Pay close attention to what those cows hanging out under the mango tree are doing. Silly things forget to chew green mangos (they don’t bother with the salt) and then get them lodged in their throats when the mango milk sticks to the sides. Puts a new spin on a hamburger with mango salsa huh?
And if you thought that just the green mangos were causing all the problems, well you haven’t seen anything yet. Careful eating that ripe mango, that juice doesn’t come out of your clothes. Oh and don’t you try to put some bleach on that juice stain on your favorite white shirt, before the bleach it was a nice yellow color but two seconds after contact with your former friend Mr. Clorox that stain turns a poop-green color that’s never to be reversed back that that sunny yellow. Now staining clothes aren’t too big of a deal, just make sure you wear the same old t-shirt every time you’re eating a mango. Also if you happen to have teeth, which most of us do, that mango’s got a beard. The inside of a mango is filled with these little strings intertwined throughout the flesh for the sole purpose of causing any mango eater at least 5 minutes of tooth-picking post-mango eating and the need for a good flossing. It’s probably all just a warning to eat just that one mango, but they’re just so dern tasty and we tend to forget and keep eating. Too many mangos, ripe as they are, cause another issue: Mango Stomach. Mango Stomach is another form of indigestion, indigestion from hell. That mango was just so tasty it seemed like a good idea at the time to eat three more, but you won’t be eating again for at least another 24 hours. It’s the mango diet.
So after much thought, while sitting out on the log underneath my mango tree eating a few mangos in my mango eating shirt, I discovered something. It was probably a MSG (Ajinomoto) induced vision, that stuff will give you some weird dreams and day dreams as it turns out. However, I believe that the forbidden fruit couldn’t have possibly been an apple; it could only have been a mango. Let’s think this through people. Every drawing I’ve ever seen of this biblical scenario there are a few key details: A red snake, a forbidden fruit, a couple wearing nothing but foliage as clothing. So let’s break this down into parts. Apples grow in moderately cold zones right? I mean I’ve never heard of an apple growing in the middle of Texas. So this statement contradicts the shrubbery as clothing detail. I can’t see Adam and Eve being nice and comfy in their maple-bikinis in the middle of a North Carolina fall. It’s just not happening. Then snakes, the snake I always see is a bright red color, which to me implies he’s probably of the poisonous variety. Since when do you see a red poisonous snake in the middle of apple growing territory? The occasional copperhead of course, and those pesky water moccasins are a given, but a coral snake? I think not. But hot zones, they have some bright colored poisonous snakes out there, and come to think of it they grow mangos out there too…and what’s more comfortable in the sweltering heat than a good foliage-string bikini for her with matching loin cloth for him? Given it’s not a wicking material the sweat just rolls right off you! That snake was a mango vendor, no doubt about it.
Ok so the heat could be getting to me, but you have to admit. I make a pretty good point.
Oh was I wrong. The mango is a silent killer. When harvesting mangos a non ripe, or green, mango can fall from a very high branch and land directly on your head and cause a day-long headache. Or that same green mango can be covered in “mango milk” or the sap from the tree which causes a rash that rivals any poison ivy I’ve ever seen. Oh and heaven forbid you forgot that you had some of that mango milk on your hand and scratched that itch you had beside your eye. Forget pink eye, that’s bloodshot eye for at least 4 days and no you won’t be able to see out of that eye either for a while…might wanna head to the health post to get that looked at. Plus don’t listen to that little boy that lives beside you when he says that green mangos are delicious with salt; to me it tastes kinda like eating a banana peel and lemon peel smushed together with a little salt for seasoning. Then that little neighbor kid forgot to mention that a green mango piece can stick to the side of your intestines and cause one heck of a gastrointestinal issue if you’re lucky and possibly kill if you happen to be a tiny baby. (So that last one hasn’t been scientifically proven, but I’ll believe it after seeing the mango milk reaction…imagine that on your insides…) Not only are green mangos a cause for alarm for humans, they can kill your cow as well. Pay close attention to what those cows hanging out under the mango tree are doing. Silly things forget to chew green mangos (they don’t bother with the salt) and then get them lodged in their throats when the mango milk sticks to the sides. Puts a new spin on a hamburger with mango salsa huh?
And if you thought that just the green mangos were causing all the problems, well you haven’t seen anything yet. Careful eating that ripe mango, that juice doesn’t come out of your clothes. Oh and don’t you try to put some bleach on that juice stain on your favorite white shirt, before the bleach it was a nice yellow color but two seconds after contact with your former friend Mr. Clorox that stain turns a poop-green color that’s never to be reversed back that that sunny yellow. Now staining clothes aren’t too big of a deal, just make sure you wear the same old t-shirt every time you’re eating a mango. Also if you happen to have teeth, which most of us do, that mango’s got a beard. The inside of a mango is filled with these little strings intertwined throughout the flesh for the sole purpose of causing any mango eater at least 5 minutes of tooth-picking post-mango eating and the need for a good flossing. It’s probably all just a warning to eat just that one mango, but they’re just so dern tasty and we tend to forget and keep eating. Too many mangos, ripe as they are, cause another issue: Mango Stomach. Mango Stomach is another form of indigestion, indigestion from hell. That mango was just so tasty it seemed like a good idea at the time to eat three more, but you won’t be eating again for at least another 24 hours. It’s the mango diet.
So after much thought, while sitting out on the log underneath my mango tree eating a few mangos in my mango eating shirt, I discovered something. It was probably a MSG (Ajinomoto) induced vision, that stuff will give you some weird dreams and day dreams as it turns out. However, I believe that the forbidden fruit couldn’t have possibly been an apple; it could only have been a mango. Let’s think this through people. Every drawing I’ve ever seen of this biblical scenario there are a few key details: A red snake, a forbidden fruit, a couple wearing nothing but foliage as clothing. So let’s break this down into parts. Apples grow in moderately cold zones right? I mean I’ve never heard of an apple growing in the middle of Texas. So this statement contradicts the shrubbery as clothing detail. I can’t see Adam and Eve being nice and comfy in their maple-bikinis in the middle of a North Carolina fall. It’s just not happening. Then snakes, the snake I always see is a bright red color, which to me implies he’s probably of the poisonous variety. Since when do you see a red poisonous snake in the middle of apple growing territory? The occasional copperhead of course, and those pesky water moccasins are a given, but a coral snake? I think not. But hot zones, they have some bright colored poisonous snakes out there, and come to think of it they grow mangos out there too…and what’s more comfortable in the sweltering heat than a good foliage-string bikini for her with matching loin cloth for him? Given it’s not a wicking material the sweat just rolls right off you! That snake was a mango vendor, no doubt about it.
Ok so the heat could be getting to me, but you have to admit. I make a pretty good point.
Summer School 101—Let the Battle Begin
At some point in October I thought it would be a great idea to have summer school classes. I got some key parents and teachers onboard with the idea then began the battle; the greatest battle that any Peace Corps Volunteer is faced with when offering to give classes: The battle against teaching English. It’s just wrong. I can make a list of 5 people off the top of my head who know I should NEVER, EVER, be allowed to teach English (my mom, Mr. Lang, whatever my college English teacher’s name was, Robyn, Tania). That’s just the 5 I thought of right now…if given enough time I can definitely think up more. Here’s how most of the conversations with interested parents went:
Me: Hi, I just wanted to let you know that I’d be giving summer school classes starting Jan. 15th from 10am-12pm for primary school students. We will have math on Mondays, science on Wednesday, and art on Friday.
Parent: Oh that sounds nice, when is the English class?
Me: umm. There isn’t English class.
Parent: What? No English class? How can you teach math and science and art and NOT English?
Me: Well [insert name of parent], you see I have my major in math, and I love art and science. These are the classes I feel comfortable teaching.
Parent: What? You don’t feel comfortable speaking English? How is that possible?
Me: No I speak my version of English fine. But I can’t teach it. It would be like me asking you to teach me Spanish. Do you think you could do that?
Parent: Yes, I speak Spanish. [Occasionally the added jab that they did help teach me Spanish]
Me: You may speak it, but can you write and form lesson plans, make up homework assignments, and figure out a way for the kids to retain that information?
Parent: No but that isn’t necessary. Just tell them what they need to know and they’ll write it down.
Me: Well I want these classes to be fun. If they’re not fun, then the kids won’t come. And I cannot make English fun because I hated English class when I was in school. So I will be teaching math on Mondays, science on Wednesday, and art on Friday if you are interested in sending your kid[s] please let me know. Thank you
Parent: When’s the English class?
Me: see you around. [Start walking away]
So as you can see it is a hard uphill battle to avoid the plague that is teaching English classes. Now I know that there are a ton of Peace Corps Volunteers around the world and in Peru that love teaching English—it’s the most rewarding thing they’ve done in their whole lives. Well that’s nice, but this Peace Corps Volunteer would rather have her tongue chemically burned again than have a structured English class. Note that I added a word there, a STRUCTURED English Class. I am, in my own way, teaching these kids some English. It was my compromise with the parents. While I would rather not, I have decided to teach the kids a little English. I’m using the English as a Second Language teaching approach. Teach them the words that are relevant to what we’re doing. So in math class we learned the number 1 to 10 in English and how to say plus, minus, and equals. In Science we learned how to say some animal names (and that being said I finally learned some new Spanish words). And In art we learned the color names.
It may not be the class that the parents wanted. But it’s the class that I wanted to teach. I’m getting a kick out of these kids, who thankfully, seem to be enjoying themselves. So much so that word has spread and my original class of 4 kids had doubled to 8 by the 3rd day of classes and I was told to expect 7 more students today which would put us at 15 students on the 4th day of class. Guess we’ll see how many are there when I show up for math today. We’re covering area. Well that wasn’t supposed to be a pun. I’m going to teach them about area as a different way to reinforce their multiplication skills, but it works. We’re covering area, making progress, moving along, and all that jazz.
Editor’s Note: So I only had 7 students in today’s class, but I will blame that on the rain…
Me: Hi, I just wanted to let you know that I’d be giving summer school classes starting Jan. 15th from 10am-12pm for primary school students. We will have math on Mondays, science on Wednesday, and art on Friday.
Parent: Oh that sounds nice, when is the English class?
Me: umm. There isn’t English class.
Parent: What? No English class? How can you teach math and science and art and NOT English?
Me: Well [insert name of parent], you see I have my major in math, and I love art and science. These are the classes I feel comfortable teaching.
Parent: What? You don’t feel comfortable speaking English? How is that possible?
Me: No I speak my version of English fine. But I can’t teach it. It would be like me asking you to teach me Spanish. Do you think you could do that?
Parent: Yes, I speak Spanish. [Occasionally the added jab that they did help teach me Spanish]
Me: You may speak it, but can you write and form lesson plans, make up homework assignments, and figure out a way for the kids to retain that information?
Parent: No but that isn’t necessary. Just tell them what they need to know and they’ll write it down.
Me: Well I want these classes to be fun. If they’re not fun, then the kids won’t come. And I cannot make English fun because I hated English class when I was in school. So I will be teaching math on Mondays, science on Wednesday, and art on Friday if you are interested in sending your kid[s] please let me know. Thank you
Parent: When’s the English class?
Me: see you around. [Start walking away]
So as you can see it is a hard uphill battle to avoid the plague that is teaching English classes. Now I know that there are a ton of Peace Corps Volunteers around the world and in Peru that love teaching English—it’s the most rewarding thing they’ve done in their whole lives. Well that’s nice, but this Peace Corps Volunteer would rather have her tongue chemically burned again than have a structured English class. Note that I added a word there, a STRUCTURED English Class. I am, in my own way, teaching these kids some English. It was my compromise with the parents. While I would rather not, I have decided to teach the kids a little English. I’m using the English as a Second Language teaching approach. Teach them the words that are relevant to what we’re doing. So in math class we learned the number 1 to 10 in English and how to say plus, minus, and equals. In Science we learned how to say some animal names (and that being said I finally learned some new Spanish words). And In art we learned the color names.
It may not be the class that the parents wanted. But it’s the class that I wanted to teach. I’m getting a kick out of these kids, who thankfully, seem to be enjoying themselves. So much so that word has spread and my original class of 4 kids had doubled to 8 by the 3rd day of classes and I was told to expect 7 more students today which would put us at 15 students on the 4th day of class. Guess we’ll see how many are there when I show up for math today. We’re covering area. Well that wasn’t supposed to be a pun. I’m going to teach them about area as a different way to reinforce their multiplication skills, but it works. We’re covering area, making progress, moving along, and all that jazz.
Editor’s Note: So I only had 7 students in today’s class, but I will blame that on the rain…
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
The Schwartz’s Hit Lima
So for those of you who know my family you are pretty sure of one thing: we never really travel. Sure we head to the beach or the mountains for a getaway just like the rest of you. The only thing is…we never really go anywhere else. I’ve heard stories of my parents’ younger days; my dad’s backpacking trip through the Rockies and my mom’s trip to Europe to put that high school French to good use. But since then…we’ll the Schwartz’s have been rather, well, stationary. I’m not sure if it was intentional, the not going anywhere more than a few states away from North Carolina, or it was just the lack of incentive. Either way, when I chose to come here to Peru it was a pretty big step in the Schwartz family travel log. So when my parents and my brother decided that they wanted to come to Peru to visit me I was rather surprised. That’s a lot of travel to log for us.
We kept it simple. We could have shoved a trip to Cusco in the week long period that my parents were here. Or we could have tried to go and visit my site (but from the weather report I got today it’s probably for the best that we didn’t go that route). But since I’m a boring person and lacked the vision to figure out something close to Lima to do for the holidays we just explored Lima. I know I’ve said before how much I hate Lima, and that fact still stands; but I can honestly say that Lima is way better when you’re sleeping in a super sweet hotel that your parents are paying for and not the hostel that I usually frequent. Don’t get me wrong, I love my hostel-home away from home (away from home), but it’s not quite 4 star quality.
As my mom put it we basically ate our way though Lima. I got them to try all of my favorite dishes: Aji de Gallina, Lomo Saltado, and some good seafood dishes. They liked almost all of it. Although my brother might not be the biggest fan of Chifa (Peruvian Chinese food) seeing as how it wasn’t the biggest fan of him (eww GI issues). But the food seemed to go over well with them. There was Inca Kola drunk, campo-turkey eaten and Peruvian desserts inhaled.
We did do a few touristy things; we went to the national museum and they got a few history lessons on Peru, or at least some of Peru’s more famous exports--namely, the potato. Yep, all of those tubers are direct descendents of a Peruvian papa. We also went to go see some of the parks in Lima, the lovers park (featuring a huge statue of two people making out), Kennedy Park and Larco Mar (the both of which were full of plastic cows), and the water park. I think the water park was the highlight of my time in Lima. Now this isn’t the type of water park with big slides and splash mountains, nope, this one’s full of fountains. Sounds boring, but since seeing is way easier than writing, here are a few pictures:
To top off the cool water effects, there were laser light shows and on New Year’s Eve there were fireworks!
We kept it simple. We could have shoved a trip to Cusco in the week long period that my parents were here. Or we could have tried to go and visit my site (but from the weather report I got today it’s probably for the best that we didn’t go that route). But since I’m a boring person and lacked the vision to figure out something close to Lima to do for the holidays we just explored Lima. I know I’ve said before how much I hate Lima, and that fact still stands; but I can honestly say that Lima is way better when you’re sleeping in a super sweet hotel that your parents are paying for and not the hostel that I usually frequent. Don’t get me wrong, I love my hostel-home away from home (away from home), but it’s not quite 4 star quality.
As my mom put it we basically ate our way though Lima. I got them to try all of my favorite dishes: Aji de Gallina, Lomo Saltado, and some good seafood dishes. They liked almost all of it. Although my brother might not be the biggest fan of Chifa (Peruvian Chinese food) seeing as how it wasn’t the biggest fan of him (eww GI issues). But the food seemed to go over well with them. There was Inca Kola drunk, campo-turkey eaten and Peruvian desserts inhaled.
We did do a few touristy things; we went to the national museum and they got a few history lessons on Peru, or at least some of Peru’s more famous exports--namely, the potato. Yep, all of those tubers are direct descendents of a Peruvian papa. We also went to go see some of the parks in Lima, the lovers park (featuring a huge statue of two people making out), Kennedy Park and Larco Mar (the both of which were full of plastic cows), and the water park. I think the water park was the highlight of my time in Lima. Now this isn’t the type of water park with big slides and splash mountains, nope, this one’s full of fountains. Sounds boring, but since seeing is way easier than writing, here are a few pictures:
To top off the cool water effects, there were laser light shows and on New Year’s Eve there were fireworks!
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Merry Christmas to All
Sweating in my room at 7:45 at night fighting the invasion of crickets, moths with rash-enduing dander, and the frogs determined to help remedy the situation it doesn’t feel much like Christmas time. The official countdown is 2 days on the American clock, 1 day on the Peruvian. Here we celebrate more the 24th. Well, to be more specific, we stay up until midnight, toast to Christmas with a “champagne” like substance, eat paneton (sweet bread with dried fruit inside, like a good fruitcake), drink hot chocolate, and devour a turkey. Yes, just as you are all thinking to yourself, no that’s not the most conducive to then going to bed and getting a good night’s sleep; so of course we then spend the next few hours drinking (for those who drink, I do not at site), talking, laughing, and all around remembering what a good year it had been.
While the signs of a Peruvian Christmas are starting to show up, here in the campo there’s none of that commercial crud to ruin Christmas. People have put up cardboard decorations on their doors. The most comical to me are the ones depicting a fir tree (we most defiantly don’t have anything even remotely resembling a fir growing near Nanchoc) and the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. When I asked the family with our red nosed friend on their door if they knew who it was, their response, “a rare breed of deer that live in New York City,” oh yes, I’m not in Kansas anymore…not that I ever was. My family’s one up-ed the neighbors thanks to having kids living in Lima, we have a fir tree that LIGHTS up. Yes, it’s red and green with lights that flicker in different patterns. I thought it was just a little to tacky when it first showed up…then my Peruvian campo side came through and now thinks it’s the coolest thing in the whole town. I’ll let ya’ll decide on your own if my Peruvian campo goggles have tainted the coolness:
PICTURE
This Christmas is going to go by a lot faster than last Christmas for a few reasons. The main one of which is that the rainy season has been slowly starting, rather than dumping on us like last year. So this means I’ll more than likely (now watch me go and jinx it) have electricity this year to celebrate the big day! Also, I’m counting down to more than Christmas, the 28th of December my parents and my brother, yes the rest of the Schwartz family, is flying to Peru to see me!!! So while I’ll be spending my second Christmas away from home, I’ll have the good fortune to celebrate the New Year with my family in Lima--A New Year in a new country for them. I’ve almost forgotten how much I hate Lima (especially after how much time I’ve spent their recently) because I’m so excited for their arrival.
Now I just have to decide if I trick my brother into eating food that he’d not normally eat…
Graduation Day
Today marked a very special day in the lives of the kiddies I work with. It was a day of great importance, grand celebrations, and as with all childhood rituals, a healthy pinch (or rather heap) of embarrassment. Today the 6th grade class graduated. Now I had never been to or seen what a Peruvian graduation ceremony is like…so needless to say I had no idea as to what I was in for.
Peruvian Graduation Ceremonies can only be described as a combination of a Quiensienera (Mexican rite of passage for women on their 15th birthday) and the prom from Hades. All the girls were dressed in matching Barbie doll dresses (just wait for the photo) with their hair done by a Dolly Parton-inspired hairdresser who lives in my town. The boys were all dressed like boys should be dressed for a graduation, black pants, dress shirt and tie. Simple. Go figure that they’d make the girls look like bad Barbie dolls and the boys get to retain some sense of self respect. Then again, my point of view could be skewed by the fact that I hate anything pink and frilly. Some of the girls actually seemed to have liked the dress they were wearing.
All of the girls except Jenny that is(Second girl from the left). If you read the earlier blog then this should not be a surprise, but just in case I’ll fill ya’ll in: Jenny is a now graduate from the 6th grade who is basically the Peruvian version of me, a tomboy at its finest, anything but girly, and extremely awkward in a pair of heels. She is a girl after my own heart. So as you can imagine, she was less than happy to be the in the new “my sized Barbie” dress. She takes the credit for the quote of the night: “Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, one of the plagues shows up.”
So what had happened was, about 30 minutes into the ceremony, right when we’re getting into the full swing of things, the crickets show up. Apparently every 4 rainy seasons or so we have a slight problem with our chirping friends, they appear in such amounts as to confuse them with rain. It started out as slightly bothersome. A cricket would land on a girl’s foot, she’d squeal and then it’d move on the bother the next guest until someone finally caught it and slammed it into the ground (the preferred Peruvian method for killing a cricket). But soon it because evident that there were far too many crickets to smash. I, as the resident photographer, had at least 5 climbing down my shirt while I was trying to take pictures of the poor girls in Barbie dresses posing with their families attempting to smile while screaming on the inside because there were 5 crickets crawling down their dresses. Next thing you know our little chirping friends are crawling in and around the snack food, the cakes, and getting trapped in the Pepsi bottles of the little ones causing both a ticked off 6 year old and an even more so ticked cricket. For those of you are thinking well “this sounds like when the party died down and everyone went home”…you’d be mistaken.
I was just waiting for when the guests would get tired of fighting the crickets. We fought the crickets through the ceremony. We fought the crickets through the picture taking. We fought the crickets through the required dancing (photographer not included in the dancing). We fought the crickets through the eating. And then this here gringa-photographer decided that she’d fought the crickets long enough and headed home to the safety of her room (cricket-less as of this moment…knock on wood). I figured everyone else would soon follow suit. You know how it goes, no one likes to be the first one to leave a party, but I figured maybe I’d have started a trend of surrendering to the cricket army and calling it a night. Well 2 hours after my departure they’re still blaring cumbia music, probably slamming crickets into the pavement with the beat in an exaggerated dance move. I may have been the only one who surrendered to the little chirping ones…but at least I still have my pride. I wasn’t in a pink frilly Barbie dress.
Peruvian Graduation Ceremonies can only be described as a combination of a Quiensienera (Mexican rite of passage for women on their 15th birthday) and the prom from Hades. All the girls were dressed in matching Barbie doll dresses (just wait for the photo) with their hair done by a Dolly Parton-inspired hairdresser who lives in my town. The boys were all dressed like boys should be dressed for a graduation, black pants, dress shirt and tie. Simple. Go figure that they’d make the girls look like bad Barbie dolls and the boys get to retain some sense of self respect. Then again, my point of view could be skewed by the fact that I hate anything pink and frilly. Some of the girls actually seemed to have liked the dress they were wearing.
All of the girls except Jenny that is(Second girl from the left). If you read the earlier blog then this should not be a surprise, but just in case I’ll fill ya’ll in: Jenny is a now graduate from the 6th grade who is basically the Peruvian version of me, a tomboy at its finest, anything but girly, and extremely awkward in a pair of heels. She is a girl after my own heart. So as you can imagine, she was less than happy to be the in the new “my sized Barbie” dress. She takes the credit for the quote of the night: “Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, one of the plagues shows up.”
So what had happened was, about 30 minutes into the ceremony, right when we’re getting into the full swing of things, the crickets show up. Apparently every 4 rainy seasons or so we have a slight problem with our chirping friends, they appear in such amounts as to confuse them with rain. It started out as slightly bothersome. A cricket would land on a girl’s foot, she’d squeal and then it’d move on the bother the next guest until someone finally caught it and slammed it into the ground (the preferred Peruvian method for killing a cricket). But soon it because evident that there were far too many crickets to smash. I, as the resident photographer, had at least 5 climbing down my shirt while I was trying to take pictures of the poor girls in Barbie dresses posing with their families attempting to smile while screaming on the inside because there were 5 crickets crawling down their dresses. Next thing you know our little chirping friends are crawling in and around the snack food, the cakes, and getting trapped in the Pepsi bottles of the little ones causing both a ticked off 6 year old and an even more so ticked cricket. For those of you are thinking well “this sounds like when the party died down and everyone went home”…you’d be mistaken.
I was just waiting for when the guests would get tired of fighting the crickets. We fought the crickets through the ceremony. We fought the crickets through the picture taking. We fought the crickets through the required dancing (photographer not included in the dancing). We fought the crickets through the eating. And then this here gringa-photographer decided that she’d fought the crickets long enough and headed home to the safety of her room (cricket-less as of this moment…knock on wood). I figured everyone else would soon follow suit. You know how it goes, no one likes to be the first one to leave a party, but I figured maybe I’d have started a trend of surrendering to the cricket army and calling it a night. Well 2 hours after my departure they’re still blaring cumbia music, probably slamming crickets into the pavement with the beat in an exaggerated dance move. I may have been the only one who surrendered to the little chirping ones…but at least I still have my pride. I wasn’t in a pink frilly Barbie dress.
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