Week 3/4
Granted, there are worse consequences to days of endless rain than the unfortunate decision with which I was faced this morning: is it better to wear dirty but dry underwear or a soggy but clean pair? Still, at six-thirty am, when the reality of my circumstances dawned on me, I was hard put to think of any more devastating example of the power of rain—including the flooding/mudslides that have put Peace Corps Nicaragua on ‘Standby’ mode of our Emergency Action Plan (and doubled the price of beans in the country since last week due to crop failures).
Besides my early morning moment of truth however, the rain has been a pleasant break from the series of sunny hot days that led into last weekend. Days when the fact that I couldn’t leave the house without becoming drenched was due to my own overactive sweat glands (as opposed to the present fact that now I am drenched wherever I go because of the rain). Masatepe sits on top of an ancient volcano called el Ventarrón which means that we are at a relatively higher elevation than the majority of the western part of the country. Thus, while Managua in particular has been slammed with floods in the wake of last weekend’s tropical storm, we’ve faired relatively well (again, excepting the underwear).
My first class, already a week ago, went well (this sentence was amended from “my first class could have gone much worse”). In fact, I think that it went very well. Maybe it was the fact that the jitters that I’d been harboring for the 48 hours leading up to the session finally receded as I began to call roll, thereby leaving me in a great mood, but to me the kids, 11th grade, were respectful, interested, and made up for their shyness with enthusiasm in the lesson’s drawing exercise. The topic of the class was ‘the household’ and ‘parenthood’ so, following a brief self-introduction, I showed the class pictures of my family, and of my mother’s old house in West Hartford before asking the students to draw pictures of their households, the family members living their, and discuss the differences between their families and mine.
Today will be the second class session, a double period, for which my co-teacher and I have decided to give the students a break from harping on the same subject (apparently household and parenthood are themes that they’ve been stuck with for the past month or so) and instead to give them a chance to practice working in groups. We’re hoping that a nifty combination of reading BrainQuest questions to groups of students will be an enjoyable learning activity whilst also sneaking in a listening exercise.
Perhaps you will have heard of the Nicaraguan consular agent that was found dead in the Bronx last week. (Here, it has been the main story on the nightly news for the past several days). The case has been of particular interest of the people of the town that I am currently living, Masatepe, as the agent is a native of here. As a result, it was reported that at 3 o’clock today the funeral ceremony will be held at the town’s cathedral. It was further reported that Daniel Ortega will be in attendance. Although I intend to post this blog before heading to the ceremony, if later I slap up pictures of a short mustachioed man, the reports will have been proven true.
Otherwise, the time seems to be flying by. I am already poised to close the fourth week of my training, my Spanish classes have been over with since last week, my training group’s youth group has only gotten more and more fun (on Tuesday, we played bingo and talked about why it’s important to learn English), and otherwise I am working on other projects to keep me busy and give me practice in facilitating workshops, translating websites, and editing video.
