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