Heat and Houses

Heat and Houses

According to everyone I meet, March and April are the hottest months in Nicaragua.  Until a couple of days ago I wasn’t sure they had that quite right.  Through the first half of March, my site up here in the North has continued to be quite pleasant with cool nights and dry, warm, but not impossible days.  I’ve been dreading not so much the heat but the start of the rainy season in May, on the theory that the rains will bring humidity, not cooler temperatures as promised.  But whatever the reason for the delay in the onset of the heat, it’s here at last, at least during the day.  (The nights and early mornings remain blessedly cool if no longer cold.)

By 8 in the morning it starts, not so much heat as solar intensity.  The sun is very close here and very strong. There is nothing benign about it.  The sky is deep blue and there are fluffy white clouds, but the sun is a demon.  For a while I walked in it unprotected except for sun screen.  Then I tried wearing my baseball hat, but women here almost never wear a baseball hats (men do) or any other kind of hat for that matter.  Instead, they carry umbrellas and look at me as though I were a little crazy without one.  So I got over my resistance to being further encumbered than I already am with water bottles and bags of necessaries like notebooks, sunscreen, insect repellant, cell phone, etc. and gave in, raising my black umbrella over my head as I walk in the sun. The black umbrella isn’t optimum.  People tell me I need a lighter color to effectively deal with sun and heat.  I’m in the market for a nice pale blue one.

By noon even the umbrella doesn’t do the job.  When I get home after school at about 12:30, the brick house with a tin roof is throbbing. There’s a rapid ticking sound that comes off the roof as it heats up. What saves me is the wind that, cooled by the shade of the house, blows through. Lunch makes me sleepy.  But a nap in the heat makes for wild dreams.  I wake up disoriented and damp.

 It’s not a good idea to walk around between noon and 4 if you don’t have to.  I’ve changed my habits to do any afternoon errands as late in the day as I can.  By 4 it’s better, there’s more shade to walk in. And by 5 the sun is low in the sky and the cool evening begins, often with a fine sunset.  I love to stand in the door of my house and watch it in the breeze. So the moral of the story is that you just need to know how to adapt.  The sun teaches that lesson effectively.

Friday I move to a new house, my third and, I hope, last in my site.  My first home was a house I described in previous posts, a really nice middle class house with roosters, dogs, kids, etc.  I lived there two months.  The house had 2 problems.  First, although in the pueblo, it was isolated from neighbors.  This made for nice privacy but not my goal of being a part of the community.  In addition one person in the house made it pretty clear that having a stranger in the house was not an arrangement that suited. (Although this time was rough to live through, I must say I understand.  It’s not for everyone to have a barely articulate stranger haunting the rooms of one’s house.)  So I moved on to another house, the only one available on short notice, out in the barrio of about 15 families, a 20 minute walk into town.  This house is really basic, government housing (rough concrete floor, shower and washroom in the kitchen, cook top but no refrigerator).  I like the family and could spend the rest of my service here despite the lack of amenities, but its distance from town interferes with community integration and makes it impossible to, for instance, give community classes at night because there isn’t a safe way from the town to the barrio at night.

And so, with the kind help of a lady in town who for some reason likes volunteers, I found the third house. And what a house!   It has cool tile floors, upholstered furniture in the living room, indoor plumbing, a small refrigerator with a freezer on top (ice!!) and—get this—an island in the kitchen! (In the barrio I have been preparing food, chopping tomatoes for instance, in the sink, there being no other space.)   There is a small porch in front where I can sit and say hello to the people who walk by all day long. Best of all we have 2 puppies.  The lady from whom I’ll be renting a room is maybe a few years older than I, with 6 children, four of whom live in town.  She lives alone in all of this splendor.  I am hoping we will be friends. (That is not a cynical comment.  I really hope to makes friends here, like I have in the States, something more than cordial friendly relationships.)

Do I feel a little guilty about moving out of government housing and into fat city?  Of course.  The barrio house is very Peace Corps.  It’s what I signed up for.  I don’t need all the luxury of the town house.  But am I glad to move into town and to leave the latrine behind? Si.  I’ll just have to deal with the guilt, sucking it up “for the sake of the mission.”  Fingers crossed it’s my last move.

And finally for all of you who have read my whining about the slow progress of my Spanish, I finally tested into “intermediate mid” the base Peace Corps language requirement.  Not sure I’ll ever be “advanced” but I’m minimally competent.  And for those of you who talk about coming to visit, don’t be put off by the weather report above.  Everyone says the worst of it is right now.

Teaching Vocabulary

Teaching Vocabulary

Now that we are three weeks into the school year, some patterns have started to emerge.  One is that I have become the vocabulary maven.  The arrangement here is that my counterparts and I co-plan and co-teach classes.  This means that we need to agree on what we’ll do, how we’ll do it and who does what part, including who prepares material.  It’s not hard to understand that it takes some time to co-plan a good lesson, more than the counterparts are used to spending, or frankly than I would spend if I were teaching by myself.  Collaboration is time consuming.

 I have to be especially careful about dividing tasks more or less equally. After we plan a class I always ask who will do what part.  And invariably the answer is that I get the vocabulary part. This is because the teachers here have “pena” or embarrassment or shame at their pronunciation of English words.  At first I thought that this was a manifestation of a kind of vanity, but it’s not.  The truth is that English is a bitch to pronounce.  I’m really aware of this when I teach “straight’ or ‘’prefer”.  How is one to know by looking at them how to say those words?  In the university the would-be English teachers are taught phonetic symbols to help them with pronunciation.  I don’t need anything of the kind learning Spanish where each letter has its sound with a few exceptions.

Anyway, the challenge for me is how to find an interesting way to teach vocab.  A beginning principle is to teach without using Spanish vocab if you can.  And I try.  I make pictures (diagrammatic), I use actions, I use “realia” (real stuff).  I used photos from magazines my friend Pat and her mother cut out and sent to me. With concrete nouns it’s easy.  Abstractions like “hospitality” are hard, but luckily there a lot of cognates (like”hospitalidad”) that give the kids the meaning if they think about it and they do.  They often are interested to know.  Despite my efforts to make kids think a little re vocab, one of my counterparts insists on giving translations.  In one class I had pictures of a dozen barnyard animals.  After the students did their own identifying of the Spanish names of the animals, my counterpart put up a list of animals in Spanish and English.  When I ask her why, she says that the kids will just ask her for the translation if she doesn’t.  Maybe she’d right, but I think they learn the name better if they sort of have to figure it out.  But the culture of copying lists of vocab without thinking much continues.

My favorite technique so far, the one that has worked best, is to present some reading, like a dialog or short narrative, and to pull the vocabulary from the reading.  The trick is to get a reading that 1) the students care about and 2) that is on the cusp of being too hard, but is not too hard if they can learn a few words.

  For example, from the Peace Corps TEFL manual, I found a letter written from a cousin in Miami to a cousin he only just learned about in Nicaragua.  The letter recounts that the Miami cousin’s father had a fight with his Nica brother and they hadn’t spoken in years.  When the Miami cousin found out about his Nica relative he wrote asking the Nica to come to Miami to meet the family, all expenses paid.  This letter had my class rapt.  The hooks were the Nica story, the Miami connection which many Nica families have, and the word “fight” which they remembered from last year.  They were motivated to understand that story. The story was short enough – about 10 good-sized sentences--and we went though it sentence by sentence, the students identifying the words they didn’t know and me explaining meaning.  I used more Spanish than I like because there were a lot of adverbs (no cognates, no pix) but by the end the class was able—and interested –to answer questions about the meaning of the story.  I was jubilant because of the student motivation.  There is not much to motivate students to learn English, little to none tourist activity, no business to speak of where dual languages would be an employment asset. All we got here is learning for learning’s sake and that means, has to mean, excellent instruction.

Anyway, at first I didn’t like being the vocabulary maven, but now I do.  I figure I’m teaching the counterparts as they watch me get at vocab in various ways. But I think in a short time the counterparts and I should share the job so that they get past their pena and get the idea of teaching vocab without lists of translated words.

Can this possibly be interesting to anyone who isn’t doing it? I have to say that there isn’t an original idea here—ESL teachers have been doing this stuff for years.  I always taught literature and thought this language teaching dull, but it’s not and the real thrill is watching the students trying, their minds working.  What a kick.

Erata: In my last post I used the term ropas americanas.  Bad Spanish.  Ropa means clothing.  It’s already plural.  So the phrase is ropa americana.

Clothes

Clothes

I have been wanting to write about clothes ever since I got here.   Before I left the States,  I was alerted to clothes as a Nica issue by Peace Corps which made a very big thing about a Nicaraguan dress code, which, we were told, required professional dress—pressed shirts, business shoes, khakis or dress pants.  Clean, neat.  Otherwise face possible ostracism and the failure of your mission.  Nicas have no respect, we heard, for back-packers with their slovenly dirty ways, their unkempt appearance.  Some of this is true.   Some isn’t true in my experience or only with qualifications.

It is true that Nicaraguans, all but the poorest, place importance on how they dress when they are outside of their houses. Older women (over 40, say) wear a kind of uniform which consists of a straight skirt, like a pencil skirt, a clean and, if necessary, pressed shirt, and dressier shoes like flats or heels or sandals. It took me some time to figure out where these ubiquitous skirts come from because they are not sold in the shops as far as I can see.  The clue comes when you look at them drying inside out on the line—the zippers tell you the skirt was handmade.  And the maker is a professional, a costurera, and there are some in every community.  They don’t hang out signs, but people tell you who is good.  You buy fabric and bring it to the costurera and tell her what you want and she makes it to order.

 For younger women the uniform is tight, tight, tight jeans almost as tight as leggings, so tight the flesh above the waist bulges over.  With this they wear tight, tight, tight tops.  (Nicaragua is a god-send for the lycra manufacturers of the world and a good place to go if you want to learn to accept your body type.  The word “fat” here is a description of fact, not an insult. )   That these  tight shirts accentuate the bulges matters not at all.  The tops most prized have some color and some bling, but t-shirts are common and especially American t-shirts, as long as they are tight.  More on that later. Shoes matter whether flats or high heels, but excruciatingly high heels are prized even by people who have to walk on impossible dirt roads or down precipitous declines.

Please note that the dress code applies outside the house.  In the house is a different story.  I lived in one house where the senora did all her household tasks in the morning dressed in yesterday’s shirt and a thigh length kind of shaper/girdle. People would come to the house to meet with her and she would receive them as described.  But when the time came to go out, she was showered, hair neatly combed and parted, dressed in the usual over-forty skirt and top.  In another house the senora ran a pulperia from her living room.  It opened at 7 in the morning and she ran it dressed in her nightgown.

Thank God I’m American because that excuses my abuse of the rules.  While I am appropriately dressed for school or other more formal occasions, on my time off,  I do go out of the house in casual hiking pants with a cool cotton roomy shirt. In the beginning, when it was so terribly hot and humid, I tried to walk in the morning in shorts.  It did not take more than 2 outings to figure out that was too much.  I was in damaging-my-mission territory, although the younger volunteers get away with running in shorts.  The embarrassment on the faces I passed while wearing shorts probably had something to do with my age and wrinkles.

What about men and children?  The rules apply to them, too, but in slightly different ways.  Men, as distinct from boys and teenagers, outside the house wear jeans or dress pants, leather (-like) shoes and clean neat shirts.  Polos are a favorite.  Teenage boys aren’t dressed up very often.  They wear baggy pants and t-shirts  and sports shoes sort of like in the States.  But hair matters to them a bundle.  Many, many men and boys look like they just stepped out of a barber shop. (Another aspect of the public appearance value.) Hair is trimmed and for teenagers worn often in a style unique to the boy and held in place by a ton of pomade.  Spikes predominate (”spikey” was one of the vocabulary words this week). Teenage girls are a little more casual than older women but tight jeans are their uniform, too. Of course the rule applies to teenage boys and girls at school where they wear a uniform of a clean white shirt and blue bottoms, dress pants for boys (not jeans) and a whit blouse, kilt and knee socks for girls.  Both wear leather(-like) shoes.

 What is notable is the way children, particularly little girls, are dressed. People seem to take a special pride in their little children’s clothes.  Nearly all little girls have long black hair which is arranged in pigtails or ponytails with nice straight parts and hair ornaments color- coordinated to outfit. .  A mom in her straight skirt and t-shirt walks next to the princess in a dress perfectly pressed with matching socks and polished shoes.  Some parents express this urge to glorify their girls by dressing them in the most fancy party dresses, often hot pink, loaded with frills and rosettes and bling.  I can’t say this is every day or all the time but little girls have and wear these dresses.  The feeling I get is that the little girls reflect back on the family, their status, their values, their hopes maybe.

A good question would be how all the emphasis on a consumer item like clothes is possible in a country reputed to be the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere. One answer lies in the example of a person I know who barely makes  enough to cover the expenses of the three people she supports.  She lives in a two room house with no furniture except for 2 beds and a kind of wardrobe.  Her family lives on rice and beans, but she doesn’t think of herself as poor (she doesn’t think she makes enough money, but that’s different from poor).  After all she has enough jeans and t-shirts and high heels to fit in with everyone.

How could that be?  A pair of new jeans costs $10-15.  And they are cheaply made.  To the rescue comes ropas americanas, used clothes from the States.  They come in giant tightly wrapped bales which can be bought, sight unseen, for $25-50. The purchaser opens the bale and with any luck there are enough clothes there he can actually sell that the investment was a good one.  The clothes are shaken out, hung up or stacked and sold in little shops in any sizable town.   The clothes come from the contributions of folks in the States.  Some of them have already been for sale by a charity like Good Will because sometimes you can see the charity price tag still on them. The good thing about ropas americanas is the generally pretty good quality of the clothes. Also, like everyone else in the world Nicas like name brands.  And ropas amiericanas are cheaper than new, e.g. a pair of jeans for $5.

At first I had a pretty big head of steam about this situation.  You mean the clothes I donated to charity are for sale in a poor, poor country.  I had in mind people getting them for free! Ok, OK it costs something to ship them here.  But everyone along the distribution chain makes a little (or a big) profit from my charitable donation (even me, now that I think about the tax deduction). But ropas americanas provide livelihoods here, another way to make a few bucks in the informal labor sector on which so many depend for survival in a country with a 50% under/unemployment rate. I bet someone has written about this trade in donated clothes.  Might be worth a google.

The presence of so much American clothing here makes for some good reads—of t-shirts. People don’t understand what they put on their bodies.  So a poor old woman with sagging breasts wears a shirt that says, in two strategically placed circles, “hot” “spot”. Or it might say “Hands off!”  My favorite t-shirt story, though is this:  I was jammed into the back seat of a microbus on the way back to my site.  A guy got on with a T-shirt with the logo and name North Hanover Grill, a small restaurant in my small town.  How many of these shirts could have been printed? How many could have gotten to Nicaragua as used clothing? And on my microbus?!  While I was on it?!! I was going to try to get to the guy to explain what he was wearing and then I thought 1) would he understand my impaired Spanish explanation and 2) would he care.  I sat back down I my seat.  But it was an amazing moment.

P.S. I don’t want to leave a false impression.  While the emphasis on how you look and clothes is important to –I’m guessing—middle class and lower middle class people, there are still many really poor people who haven’t the luxury of such a concern.  But it’s also true, as in the example above, that you can gave the concern even when you actually have very little.  There is nothing new about trying to look better off than you are.

P.P.S. Sometimes Nicaragua reminds me of the States 50 years ago.  My mom wore house dresses which never saw the light of day outside the house.  My aunt had a dog who knew the smell of her lipstick, a sure sign she was leaving the house.  So the in the house/outside the house divide isn’t unique to Nicaragua.  

Thanks

I cannot tell you how much it means to know someone is reading these posts.  I’m keeping a diary here also, but I can tell you that there is a big difference to me between recording thoughts which no one will likely ever read, beneficial as that is, and writing for an audience, even a little bitty audience.  People have been kind enough to post a comment or shoot an email and so I know someone is reading.  As I go about my business I am talking to a collective “you”, mostly people I love but maybe a few strangers who read these thoughts.  It’s a delight to have someone to describe things to. 

Anyway, a friend sends an email asking what I’m doing.  I thought I’ve given a pretty good account in the blog posts, but maybe the question really is, “How are your days?”  So here goes:  Just like in the states I get up early, 5 o’clock if I have to be at school at 7, otherwise 6.  I head for the latrine.  The latrine is not a great experience, but walking across the back yard to reach it is OK.  I like to check out the morning here.  If it’s early enough I can see stars and a little slip of a moon, which is, incidentally waning and I am looking forward to darker nights and mornings, ergo more stars.  If it’s a bit later I can see the mists on the mountains. 

Next I brush my teeth in the lavendero and make coffee.  I do that by scooping two tablespoons of coffee into a cloth bag affixed to a handle.  The bag goes in the mug.  I boil water in a tin can that someone has made a bit safer by attaching a small tin handle.  I grab the handle with a piece of torn t-shirt and pour carefully so I don’t scald myself. Then I let the bag steep in the cup for 5 minutes or so while I set up my room for a good morning read.  I have to borrow a chair from the front room which contains. In addition to a television, only a classic Nica rocker, 2 chairs made out of rebar and one of those ubiquitous plastic lawn chairs.  I usually go for that one.  I raise the mosquito net over the bed, gather up my blanket, grab my book and a flashlight if it’s early, my pills, and a watch to keep track of time. I open the window and pull back the curtain so I can see out.  I read and drink coffee snuggled under the blanket until I need to get going for the day. Then I make oatmeal with reconstituted dry milk. I take a shower—cold but thank God not as bad as it could be by some miracle that renders the water more tepid than icy, maybe the sun from the previous day. I dress and, God help me, put on make-up, a habit I haven’t been able to shake in 6 months here, although I don’t use the blow dryer I stupidly brought.

I fill my water bottle and I’m out the door for a 15 minute hilly walk through the campo to the high school.  The walk is strenuous but I love it.  I go past fields, cattle grazing, houses with giant outdoor ovens, shaped like bee hives, for baking rosquillas, and yards where people are making bricks just as the Isrealites must have done in ancient Egypt, packing mud into forms to dry in the sun.   I sometimes pass people on the dirt path, men and boys carrying enormous loads of wood on their backs or shoulders, men with machetes, mothers and kids.  Everyone politely bids me “adios”. At the high school I teach and maybe co-plan with one of my three counterparts.  School is over at noon.

The afternoons differ.  Sometimes I came back to my house and eat lunch, usually a tortilla warmed and spread with peanut butter, and fruit if I have it.  Since school started, I’ve been taking a short nap in the early afternoon. Once a week I walk 15 minutes to the cyber in town to post a blog and read emails. I often stop to buy a thing or two at a pulperia.  I walk through town and maybe buy an Eskimo. Sometimes I have to shop or take a Spanish class in Somoto, a 15 minute taxi ride. away. Sometimes I meet a counterpart to plan lessons or tutor.

In the evening I usually have the house to myself.  I live with a family comprised of a mom, her 7 year old daughter and her brother.  It is a really nice decent family.  They are evangelical and I’d say about 5 out of 7 nights a week they are either at church or visiting at the house of their mother.  So I have the house to myself.  I usually read or work on Spanish till 6 when I make myself dinner.  I put on some music from home while I cook and eat.  I make simple stuff.  Tonight, since I shopped today and the bakery had whole wheat bread, I made open faced sandwiches of tomato, onion and avocado with tea and a bakery cookie.  Good meal.  Sometimes I sauté onions, garlic, carrots, squash and tomatoes.  I can turn this into spaghetti sauce, soup or stew.  The last time I did this I added cilantro which grows outside my back door and a single really small hot pepper which added more heat than you’d think, but it was still good.  I make eggs with hash browned potatoes.  I make rice and vegetables.  I have a hard time with meat—I just don’t want to buy it here, and this house doesn’t have a refrigerator to keep it safely, but sometimes I use soy to add protein. I can make a kind of quesadilla with tortillas and queso.  In about a month I’ll be moving to another house with a refrigerator and I hope I’ll expand my eating options.  I’d like to include more Nica food but a lot of it is starchy or saturated with oil.  Sill I think I could learn to make it a way I’d enjoy it. The soups are great.

Usually I’m in bed by 9, but I admit to being tired enough to want to be there by 8.  The night ritual consists of my applying 2 creams my Nica doctor prescribed for skin, a last dark visit to the latrine, arranging the mosquito net, getting my flashlight and Kindle set up for a fall-asleep-read, and  brushing my teeth.  That’s it.   

Thanks

The First Week of Classes

School has started in the most confusing way, but confusing to no one but me.  The first day I was ready to go.  No one had a schedule or a lesson plan, but I was assured that on Monday all would fall into place and that my counterparts and I would have time to plan for Tuesday, the actual first day of classes.

 At the end of previous week we had learned that there was a big change in the routine occasioned by the smaller enrollment over the last two weeks.  As a result, a decision was made to cancel the afternoon session at the high school.  All students and teachers would be in class only for 5 hours in the morning.  There are 2 consequences (probably more, but two I see right away).  One is that students from the 23 communities which feed students into the high school will have to leave very early, in many cases, to get to school by 7. These students used to enroll in the afternoon session.    There is a kind of school bus, a small jitney, which serves one or two communities, but the other students need to find a way to get to school.  Walking is an option for some, especially if they can start in the afternoon.  Others can take a bus, but that starts to be expensive.  For instance the fare from one large community one way is 3 pesos or fifteen cents.  Round trip is 30 cents or $1.50 per week, $3.00 for a family with 2 high school students. A teacher’s monthly salary is about $200. So you can see the investment a family makes to get a child to high school.  Consider the hit if the family makes less than a teacher which most do. My guess is that change in the schedule will result in some students just dropping out of school. (Since I wrote this I saw 2 other transportation possibilities.  Bikes, of course but on the highway.  See below for downside. Also I saw maybe 9 students stuffed into a cab.  I’d guess someone has worked out a deal with a taxi driver because usually a cab would be way to expensive.)

The second effect is obvious: classroom space.  Even if there are fewer students, you still need a certain number of math classes, for example.  Answer: the first year students will remain at the elementary school along with one section of second year students.  What about the elementary school students?  They now go to school in the afternoon.  Irony:  The elementary school only draws from the town, not from surrounding communities.  I don’t get it, but then I’m new to this system.

Back to the first day: I arrived at the school at the appointed hour.  Teachers were busy sweeping the cement court which serves for all sports.  The students had gathered l dressed for the first day in their blue and white uniforms, many with new shoes and little fancy touches like bows on their knee socks.  The high schoolers hung out being cool outside the fence but the elementary kids (yes, everyone is together for the first day) with new book bags and pens and virgin erasers and slick notebooks were happy to be with their little friends—lots of hugging and hand holding.  After an hour sweeping and decorating the court with slogans and balloons, the officials started to assemble: a lawyer, a priest and finally the delegado, the representative of the government, a kind of superintendent of schools.  The sound system blared. Another half hour passed.  There were many parents to observe this important day in their children’s lives. Finally the children, including high schoolers, lined up to sing the national anthem and listen to the invocation and the remarks of the delegado (not sure why the lawyer was there). He reminded the kids of the great opportunity given to them by the government.  He reminded them of the sacrifices their parents made to give them this opportunity to learn.  Later I asked the teachers about the sacrifice.  They all agree it is great, that there is a big bite out of the family budget to buy uniforms and supplies and back packs—and—as mentioned above—bus fare. Everyone sacrifices here.  One teacher lives about 20 miles away.  He rides his bike for an hour to school every morning on the Panamerican Highway, a two lane thoroughfare.  I guarantee he is not safe doing that with 18 wheelers blasting by him.  School is serious stuff, for the parents at least.  That night on the news the first day of school was the lead story.

Later that morning, we learned about the change in the structure of the day, but no one had a  teaching schedule.  They were still being worked on.  I planned for a class with one of my teachers who has 4 sections of first year students.  We knew that she would need a plan sooner or later and sure enough, the following day we were assigned to teach a section, three actually.  She and I did a great job in both our opinions.  The plan was sound and lively and interesting and we made a great start with the first years.  The best part was that one of the other English teachers sat in to observe and after class said to me, “ I want a plan like that plan.”  And so I planned a class with her in the afternoon, which we still have not given.  No one knows when his/ her classes will be taught.  With a third counterpart, I planned a class for third year students.  We’ll teach it tomorrow, I just found out via text from my teacher who just received a text from the principal.  Is this any way to run a school? Nope.  But this is how it is and everyone is adjusting, even me, as I sit in on classes and help out where I can even without formal planning.  Will we have a complete schedule by Monday, a week after the first day?  The teachers think so.  I’m betting no.

Your moment, if not of Zen, then of Reader’s Digest: I was sitting next to a student just as class ended.  She turned to me and said” Quien es Shakespeare?” Who is Shakespeare?  I told her that like Ruben Dario, Nicaragua’s most famous poet, he was a great playwright and poet.  She was happy to know.

P.S On the Spanish front, I have progress to report.  My counterpart teachers, the other day, were commenting on how much better my Spanish had gotten since I first met them last November.  That made my heart sing.  I think it’s true.  When I teach, the students understand me.  I don’t plan what to say.  I just say it.  I still am way behind the Spanish majors and the volunteers who lived for a semester in Spain or Latin America, but I now pick out “modernismos”, colloquial phrases, when the teachers talk and ask them what they mean.  I am pleased that I hear them at all.  It is a source of a lot of hilarity that I try to look up modernismos in my dictionary. 

The First Week of Classes

Amazing Stories

My post about the amazing sights I’ve encountered in Nicaragua got such good reviews I thought that I’d try to set down some of the stories I’ve heard.

 I was on the bus on the way to Mangua from my site when we stopped at Esteli to take on passengers.  I noticed a rare sight in the northwest of Nicaragua, a black man, headed down the aisle.  Another black man was seated just behind me and I figured he was from the Caribbean Coast.  But the man in the aisle looked American to me.  I was hoping he’d sit next to me so we could speculate about which was rarer in Nicaragua, an old gringa or a black man from the States.  But he sat behind me, and the other man and he got into a conversation in English, so of course I eavesdropped. (FYI English is spoken on the Eastern coast of Nicaragua, along with creole and some indigenous languages.)

 The man I thought was American explained that he was in Nicaragua in search of his father.  He hadn’t seen his dad in some years.  He thought he lived on the Atlantic Coast in Bluefields, and so had gone there.  He hadn’t been able to find him, but some people told him they knew his father and that he had moved. So the son started traveling.  He went to the next place where he was told his dad had moved on. Ultimately someone told him his dad was in the north of Nicaragua, and so that’s where he went.  He had no luck.  He was traveling to Managua in hopes of finding out something in the capital city.  The other man suggested that what he should do is take out an ad in a Managua newspaper.  He thought someone who knew the father would read it and tell the father.  The son agreed.  He explained that he liked Nicaragua, had a small business here dealing in computers and cell phones which his girlfriend was minding while he traveled around tracking down his dad. He hoped to find his dad so he could stay in the country.  He doubted he’d want to stay if he couldn’t locate his father. He wanted to live in Nicaragua near his dad. I can go for days without hearing a word of English, never mind an English speaker on a bus, never mind such a story. 

I can relate another, very different story.  As I wrote earlier I am helping one of my counterparts study for a very big English test.  We work for two hours at a time, usually three times a week.  I described this counterpart before.  She is a noisy kind of person with a big laugh.  Anyway, it’s not hard to imagine that sometimes we get off topic.  That happened one day recently because something big fell on the metal roof over her patio.  She jumped and looked scared. “What was that,” I asked.  She said she was afraid it was a bruja, a witch.  She lives in fear of brujaria.  I asked her to explain.  There are witches, she said, many of them all around us, who put spells on people they don’t like.  They can cause all kinds of damage. They are especially feared for turning people into monkeys.  A man in Somoto died during the war years here, killed in action according to his family, but it widely believed that a witch turned him into a monkey and the family concocted the war story to cover up absence.

 I thought she was probably kidding.  She is, after all, a teacher, but she was dead serious.  She has direct experience of the harm they can do.  She lived in El Salvador with her mother for 10 years when she was young.  They witnessed a woman, cursed by a witch, vomit snakes and spiders.   Brujas are a part of Nicaraguan and I guess Central American folklore. But I had no idea how current is the belief.

More stories when I hear them//

Amazing Stories

GETTING READY FOR SCHOOL

I’ve struggled with a bit of a writer’s block, but now that school is ready to start in one week, I can fill everyone in on what I’ve learned about the system here.  Teachers have had a 2 month “summer vacation”-- if they were lucky.  My counterparts have been going to school during the vacation, usually half days, to try to secure their position as English teachers.  Many of them studied something else in college and if they want to teach English they need, quite justifiably, to learn enough English to be effective.  Three of the four use no English in their classes.  English is taught in Spanish.  Needless to say there’s a lot of rote teaching of grammatical rules and lists of vocabulary and very little practice speaking. The courses these teachers take are more of the same.  I’ve tutored two teachers during the vacation and I can say that they are not learning much that would help them with the job. No wonder, they teach as they were taught.

Two weeks before the students show up, the teachers appear daily at the instituto.  What do they do?  They had a full day presentation on interfamilial violence sponsored by the national police and an NGO.  After that day, though, each morning half of the teachers register students and half prepare the classrooms.   No one knows what classes they will teach because no one knows how many students will enroll for the year.  That’s why the registration.  There is no support staff except for one secretary and one lady who sweeps the hallways and waters the plants outside and monitors access to the bathrooms—no guidance department, registrar or administrative assistant,  And so half of the teachers sit at tables outside and register any student who shows up with proof he passed the previous grade.  This goes on for two weeks and then the business of forming classes and assigning teachers can begin.  That should happen by the 10^th and classes start on the 13^th.  For me this means I have been unable to work with my teachers to prepare a schedule for myself or even to start preparing for the 13^th.  I am told that the class assignments we receive on the 10^th aren’t final at any rate.  There will all sorts of changes until mid-March.

The other half of the teachers are preparing classrooms.  This means they literally wash them down, ceiling to floor.  They take down last year’s bulletin boards and replace them with new touting the virtues of the socialist state as last year’s did.  Nicaragua has a moral and political base to class and curriculum.  The kids are taught politically and socially articulated values, like the value of community and solidarity. I’ll be interested in watching how this plays out this year as we teach.

The teachers assigned to classrooms have another job as well. It is apparently hard to flunk out because there are always other chances.  The school offers tests to any student who failed a class.  Moreover, the teachers post what will be on the test and are available during the first two weeks to help students prepare for it.  I’ve sat in on a few of these sessions—all of them the same half hour review of the time and what people do in the morning-- and I’ll be interested to see if the test is a duplicate of the exact material reviewed.

No one complains. No one articulates disdain for the jobs assigned.  I can sit and have a conversation with a math teacher who is patiently cutting out letters he’s traced for the bulletin board slogans.  He’s happy to talk, but then again he’s happy to cut.  One day last week someone brought in ingredients for soup and while all this registration and classroom work was going on some people broke away to build a fire, set out a pot of water to boil and start the cutting up of meat and vegetables. People looked happy to be doing that as well.

I make school sound like an island of camaraderie and it is.  The teachers appear to love sitting and talking with one another.  But I also hear complaints about the “chisme” (gossip) which is also a part of the school world.  The complainers recite that what they say is repeated and that others are eager to bad things about the others.  This belief is widely held.  It makes me so careful about what I say.  Any hint of discontent on my part with a person or a system will spread, I’m afraid, like wildfire.  It’s hard, too, because once I’ve established “confianza” (confidence) with a teacher, as I am happy to say I have with 2 of my counterparts, and after they have confided in me about their difficulties, it’s hard not to be candid about my own.  But it’s a bad idea, especially if anything connected to the school is the source of my problem, or anyone in the community for that matter.  Even an apparently neutral remark, like my observation that the principal of the school works very hard, is an opening.  Why doesn’t she hire help?  She makes more than they do.

The net result of all the uncertainty, after is caused me some discomfort, has been to make me relax.  I’ll be ready when I need to be, whenever that is.  No use stressing about it.  I’m off to the instituto now.  Maybe someone will let me cut out some letters or make crepe paper ruffles for the bulletin board.  If not, I’ll head on down to the cyber to post this blog.  Am I already a little Nicaraguense?  Hope so.