Rainy Season

Rainy Season

Rainy season started about 3 weeks ago with a shower or two, the first in several months.  But now we get daily rain, often in the afternoon and sometimes all night.  The first effect of rainy season I noticed was weeds flourishing where there had been nothing growing for months. I KNOW these weeds.  I have been yanking them out of my garden for years, the exact same varieties.  It’s like a 40th class reunion, running into the gang of the meanies you never liked in high school.  I have their number, although I couldn’t tell you their names.  Tough guys, those weeds.  They thrive in multiple climates.

Last week I bought cow’s milk for the first time.  (Leche de vacca as opposed to milk from the store.)  I’ve known where to get it for a while, but during the dry season, it wasn’t available much.  The cows were drying up, fed on dead stalks from last year’s harvest.  Their milk was thick, I was told, and there wasn’t much of it.  The milk I bought was plenty rich and creamy.  I boiled it for 5 minutes to kill any germs and had a cup of it warm with a little sugar and cinnamon—absolutely delicious.  What café con leche it makes with dark Nicaraguan coffee! Whole grain oatmeal with local honey and cow’s milk—a dream.

There are some down sides to the rain besides weeds.  My high school sits at the highest point in town. I have to climb up to it every day. On Tuesday the rain was so hard that it brought down maybe 4 inches of mud, rock and debris that covered the street just below the school.  Four days have gone by and more debris collects but none has been removed by the weekend.  With the rain come more bugs, certainly mosquitoes, but others as well. The rain cools things down but raises the humidity. It’s nice to wake up cold in the morning when I fell asleep under only a sheet, but I did enjoy the dry air during the “summer”, November through February.

But the best part of the rainy season is how beautiful my site is.  I stood at the bus stop from which I can see a hill.  I have spent hours staring at that hill, watching the green disappear little by little, but now it’s brilliant green again. This past weekend I took a hike back out to the barrio where I lived for 2 months.  I went just for the walk and to see how things are coming now that there’s rain.  I’m happy to report that the cows are eating grass, that the fields are planted and little corn sprouts are up in orderly rows that follow the curves of the hills.  Very pretty.

The rain affects classes.  If it rains heavily in the night and into the morning, some kids don’t come to school.  I see some of those kids around town so wonder if that sense of rain being bad for health is here, too, in the north, as it was in my training tow. But someone explained to me that out in the surrounding communities, the rains make the roads impassable and so kids can’t get to school.

The rains come as I am finishing my first four months of teaching and I am experiencing the first real disillusionment.  It’s an interesting process, At first I was so excited to be doing my job, full of big plans and excited to try out techniques.  But after a while the enormity of the challenge becomes apparent. It’s not even the paucity of resources that depresses me or my struggles with discipline in the classroom; it’s the habits absorbed by my students from many years of mis-education. It’s the tradition of doing little because little is expected and there appears no good use for the content school has to offer; it’s the lack of preparation for intellectual challenge.  For instance, there is no tradition of reading to children, no books in the houses of most people, even educated people. All of this influences how my students behave and what they can do. If someone had explained all this to me before I came I don’t think I would have understood. This was not within my range of experience.

What this means, of course, is that I have to start over, now that I better see how things are because of course there is somewhere to go here. 

Meanwhile, there still are some very sweet moments and they come often—today, for instance.  My 11^th graders are the most challenging, a big class with a half dozen disrupters. I started to explain to them how to use an outline, a new idea for the class, and how to convert an outline into a short essay.  I dreaded this class, figured without a sexy topic it was doomed.  As I expected the class didn’t have much patience for the explanation, but they got the idea.  We started them on making an outline on one of 2 topics, the purpose of government or gender equality.  After working for about 25 minutes the class was interrupted by a man announcing the availability of graduation pictures. (Eleventh grade is the last year in the high school.) This is a sexy topic, and the man had the students’ attention. I was standing at the back of the class, listening, too.  One by one some students turned around to signal me to their desks and held up their notebooks to have me check their progress or supply a word or answer a question.  The lesson trumped the photo man! At least for several. Made my day.

Later, during a meeting of English Club my kids wrote silly poems.  Here are a few:

Three violet butterflies                    Two brown horses             Two red chickens

Playing with a ball                          Eating grass                        Dancing to reggae

Say” Pass it to me”                         Dream of little angels          Live in the house of my mother

  

Various

Various

I read an article in the newspaper here recently that reported the results of a survey of Nicaraguans by apparently righteous public opinion pollsters.  Asked if they would move out of the country if they could, somewhere between 54 and 57 percent of Nicaraguans said they would. (The estimation results from my faulty memory for the exact number and not any vagueness in the poll results).  I am astounded by that number.  Can you imagine if between 50 and 60 per cent of your countrymen and women  wanted to move?

Finding a way out obsesses many people and many people make it, if not to the preferred destination, the United States, then to the next bests: Costa Rica, Panama and especially Spain. Sometimes it seems that every family has a son or daughter living abroad.  I live with a woman who has six children, two of whom now live abroad, one in Spain and one in San Francisco.  Today at the pulperia I met a woman named Maria with a son in Los Angeles she hasn’t seen in 5 years.  Such sadness in her face.   When people ask where I’m from and I tell them, they tell me about their family member in Miami or Los Angeles or Texas, sometimes New York. I ask for how long they’ve been gone.  Two, five, ten years.  Do you visit?  Never.  Do they come to visit you? They came once, maybe twice.

I have met several people who want to improve their English so they can emigrate.  For them the language is the key.  They haven’t figured out yet about visas and money and jobs abroad.  They just think if they work hard enough to speak English, doors will open.  And maybe they will.

This exodus is a killer. Not only does it deprive Nicaragua of the talents of many ambitious people, but it wreaks havoc with family life—and the family is the heart of this country. There are, of course, the grieving mothers and fathers.  But the children take a hit, too, when their parent leaves to work somewhere else.  Grandmothers raise their grandchildren and people complain that the source of discipline is absent when parents aren’t there. It does seem to me a double cruelty: Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere, and also suffers not only a drain of talent but an assault on its strongest institution.

 ( I could also write about the other problem here, the lack of financial responsibility of men for their offspring under the law.  There are laws, but as in the U.S. 30 years ago, they are not enforced.  And besides, who has a job and wages with which to pay child support?) 

Something cheerier: Avocadoes and mangoes are in high season and falling off trees.  It’s a bonanza if you happen to have the right trees in your yard.  I do not, but people share.

I tried to start a community English class but made some miscalculations and it may not work out. It has been a good experience from which I learned a lot about how to do this kind of thing.  Maybe it’s not moribund.  We’ll see.  But it has caused me to sit outside the community center waiting for students between 6 and 7 some nights. And that is the most beautiful time.  Across the street is the park which now is filled with amazing trees dripping with bright red flowers from its crown down, and from its branches hang giant black pods, like those of a locust at home but much, much bigger.  The sky darkens slowly, a few people walk in the street. The air is cool, there’s a little breeze. I secretly hope no one comes to class so I can sit a little longer.

In contrast I have started a successful English Club at my high school.  It’s voluntary for kids who want to learn more English.  It’s a pleasure to teach motivated kids without the constraints of a curriculum and the need to share the planning.  My goal is to improve the ability of the 10 to speak meaningful English, and their confidence to try to say things.  I taught them how to say “What does____mean?” and “How do you say______in English?”  With the ability to ask, they do it all the time.  What do they want to know?  What does “download” mean? A translation for “I love you” and “Love me”.  What does Black-eyed Peas mean?   Love and computers and music. I reminded them that in class they studied how to say “I want” and “I need”.  We did an exercise where each said what s/he wanted.  I started with “I want a million dollars”.  They wanted to visit Brazil, to be a doctor, to drive a big car, to speak English.  One said, no lie, “I want to kiss Elsa” (another student in the group.)  Elsa was sanguine. What a thrill to see all those dreams popping out in English!

I have my low days, but the highs are so high that I’m getting addicted to Nicaragua.

A Good Hand

A Good Hand

It’s time to try to get writing my impressions of teaching school in Nicaragua.  I really don’t know where to begin so I’ll start with 2 limited observations and try some more later.

Three mornings a week at the instituto there is formación.  All the students assemble in their blue and white uniforms in the dirt plaza in front of the flagpole, each in lines organized by grade.  Usually the assistant principle makes announcements and then she may lecture a bit about the theme of the month (the mothers of Nicaragua for May) and the obligations of the students.  Then it’s the turn of a teacher to expound upon a virtue to be practiced like “solidarity” and to harangue (my admittedly loaded , but nevertheless accurate, word) the students into behaving better.  There’s a lot of talk of “indiscipline,” lack of respect, et cetera. The students stand and listen, but they pay little attention, talking to their friends, poking each other.  One time a girl at the head of her line was filing her nails, with impunity, in plain sight.  The other teachers stand on the sidelines paying no attention to the students and to what is being said to them.  They talk among themselves also. This is a familiar scene in other contexts—people being harangued and paying no attention to the speaker, indeed talking among themselves, but accepting the obligation to submit to the lecture.  As you can imagine this is a hard one to adjust to. It may not be, but it feels like disrespect to me, because in the States people usually accept the responsibility, if not to pay attention, at least to zone out quietly.

The talking while authoritiy figures are talking extends to the classroom.  During a conversation with a counterpart about the abysmal discipline in our classes of 7^th graders (ages 11 to 16, believe it or not) she told me that paying no attention was a cultural trait about which we could probably do little. (I don’t believe that because I have observed classes where there is no talking over the teacher, but I do think that there is a lack of indignation, a kind of resignation that many teachers have in the face of what is, maybe, based on my limited experience, a pretty widespread attitude.  I also think the tolerance for noise, which I noticed and wrote about soon after arriving here, is part of it. People put up with all kinds of noise which Americans wouldn’t tolerate as invading their own right to silent surroundings.  We have a word for it—“noise pollution”—but it is apparently the right of Nicas to make what noise they will.  No one tells anyone to pipe down. It also occurs to me that maybe there is no intention of disrespect which we norteamericanos associate with talking while others are presenting something. However, that still leaves the behavior, value-free, to deal with. 

The formación ends with three songs: the national anthem, a national song for students and the song of my particular instituto.  Students are then dismissed to class which, on the three days of formación, is shortened by the 20 minutes or so formación takes.

In the classroom, I can usually get everyone’s attention to start, but as the long (hour and a half) class wears on, it’s hard to keep.  The best technique is to keep them busy.  We try all kinds of innovative techniques to keep the learning interesting but the one sure-fire way to quiet the class and focus the students is to require that something be copied.  Understand that in my school there are no textbooks, no copying machine, obviously no power point, video or audio equipment.  Nothing, nada (The entire school has 6 miserable, small and inaccurate Spanish/English dictionaries which inspire sentences like, “The boy similar the girl” when the student wanted to say, “The boy likes the girl.”) The students have notebooks and the teachers have a whiteboard and large sheets of paper on which they can write out a reading, for example, or a practice dialogue. That’s it.  Therefore, there is a lot of copying of material into notebooks. 

The students are so used to copying things, tedious as it would be to you or me, that they are actually avid about it.  I sat to the side of class the other day and watched them copy, their bodies bent over their work, faces anxiously raised to the board and back down to their notebooks with what I can only describe as the eagerness of full engagement.  They really like to copy and most do so with precision and flair.  For instance, most students carry a pencil case with multiple colors of pens, erasers and white-out pens.  The work needs to be perfect and it needs to be pretty.  Students actually decorate the page on which they copy with curlicues—and not just girls.  They use multiple colors of ink.  God help us if we teach vocabulary with pictures.  They copy not just the word in English, supplying the Spanish, but they copy the picture! For this reason copying takes a lot of time.

For what it’s worth I’ve developed some theories about the copying, the emphasis on a   beautiful page and decoration in general. One is that in a country with few photocopiers and computers for word processing, a “good hand” as my mother used to call it, is prized.  When I was small, we practiced penmanship, but my children didn’t.  And when my mother was a child, a good hand indicated an educated person, a mark of good character.  How writing looked mattered because clarity mattered.  The teachers here are, I suspect, a little appalled by my scrawl when they look at my notes.  They spend a fair amount of time painstakingly copying a new plan for classes every two months, because the plan is submitted to the principal and the superintendent.  It better be good, clear and even artful.  For that reason they sell a lot of rulers and white-out here.

 Like many requirements, the requirement of a good hand has become internalized so that the students get a kick out of a perfect page.  I can feel them wince when I ask for their pencil or pen to write a correction or translation on their pages.  I try to use pencil.  I suspect they erase my offensive note, apply white-out to the error, and copy the correction.

I want to end by saying how poignant I find the perfect page to be.  It seems to me like other small islands of precision and beauty in this impoverished world, like the perfectly combed, gelled and adorned hair of my students, like the carefully planted flowers and plants in front an adobe-floored house, like the photos of a friend with her baby, photo-shopped onto a photo of a luxurious hotel room, nothing like the humble home in which she actually lives. What’s not to admire about people making what little they have as beautiful as they can?