*And no-one is surprised.
"You call me wetback because I crossed a river, so what can I call you? You crossed an ocean."
Carlos Loya, a Latino resident of Colorado, as quoted in The Slums of Aspen
Reached my Peace Corps goal of reading 100 books, a little bit prematurely. I guess I need a new hobby for next year. Or not. In honor my trip back to the homeland and the fast paced North American lifestyle, I'm keeping these to 140 characters or less, Twitter style. Bam.
88. Kitchen Confidential- Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Bourdain is a total tool, but oddly loveable. Totally accurate depiction of kitchen culture.
89. A Sea in Flames- Carl Safina
Trenchant commentary on the BP disaster. An extremely necessary moral voice.
90. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001-Steven Coll
Good primer on Afghanistan from POV of US agencies. A bit Bin Laden centric though.
91. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity- Katherine Boo
Not sure if her methods were ethical, but a hell of a book.
92. The Forever War- Dexter Filkins
Iraq War reporting that is simultaneously funny, depressing and honest.
93. Wonder- R.J. Palacio
Beautiful story of a child with a deformity who finds belonging at school. I cried at the end cuz I doubt it would happen in real life.
92. El Ruido de las Cosas al Caer (The Sound of Things Falling)- Juan Gabriel Vasquez
Never has a book made Peace Corps look so bad. The real mysteries never get solved in this book: unsatisfying.
93. I, Rigoberto Menchu- Rigobertu Menchu and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray
Wowza.
94. De Amor y De Sombra (Of Love and Shadows)- Isabel Allende
Never has political persecution sounded so sexy. Chilean revolutionary lover with horseback escape? Yes please.
95. In Patagonia- Bruce Chatwin
Weird book with great storytelling but conspicuous absence of the Mapuche.
96. La Conjura contra America (The Plot Against America)- Philip Roth
A real thinker of a book.
97. The Hunger Games- Suzanne Collins
Stop haunting my dreams with your terrifying creation Suzanne Collins!!
98. Cosmapa- Jose Roman (en espanol)
Banana farm owner knocks up his own daughter but then she's not actually his daughter? Also World War 2 happened? WHAT DERANGEMENT
99. Cronica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold)- Gabriel Garcia Marquez (RR, but in a new language this time)
Don't obsess about virginity or people die! Fantastically masterful book.
100. Sloppy Firsts- Meghan MacCafferty (RR)
Protagonist Jess Darling is basically me in High School with slightly more drama.
101. Second Helpings- Meghan MacCafferty (RR)
Jess Darling continues to be like me from high school until she gets romanced.
102. Catching Fire- Suzanne Collins
Saw Hunger Games 2 but I think the book was better. Basically the same actually.
103. The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America's Eden- Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow
Spot on about need to study inequality from the top down. Gets a little preachy and then doesn't propose much, because its a sociology study.
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Dangerous Mustaches, Naked Crayons and Squashzilla (Parts 1 & 2)
Word of the day:
pleito= argument (informal)
panzona- pregnant lady
arandano- cranberry
This week was pretty great
because I was actually in San Miguel for the whole week after a long abscence.
It was nice to be "home," even if classes were mostly over and not
much was going on.
Rainbow! As seen from the backyard
This knife was definitely overqualified for potato peeling
The only one to deal with a giant ayote is a football hold.
On Monday, we sort of taught
class, but stopped pretty quickly because the teachers needed to turn in their
grades.
On Tuesday, we actually
taught 1 full class, before a teacher's meeting put a halt to any educational
aspirations. We taught adjectives to 7th grade, and had kids modify a
"Boring Story" to make it more interesting using adjectives. One of
the nouns they had to modify was "mustaches." A lot of them chose the
phrase "dangerous mustaches." When I tried to get a justification
from them, they refused to admit it didn't make sense and told me "It's
dangerous for eating or it's dangerous because it will get into the food."
Never thought of it that way, but I suppose that's true.
In the afternoon, my
sitemate and I were going to make hand turkeys with a bunch of kids, but we
didn't really get to school in time to invite the kids because school ended
before 9 am. Womp womp. I'd made recycled googly eyes (from old medicine
wrappers) and everything. We did however go work at the garden in the Casa
Materna. Some of our plants didn't grow very well or at all, but we have a
squash or possibly a melon plant that is literally out of control, climbing up
a mango tree into the neighbors yard, as well as invading pretty much the rest
of the garden. It's covered with flowers so hopefully we'll get some good
nutritious fruits or veggies from the panzonas out of everything.
On Wednesday, I went to Las
Palomas, and actually taught 2 full pretty productive classes with my
counterpart Rafael. After getting a free ride home, I was about a block from my
house when my little extremely mischievous neighbors saw me. Their eyes lit up.
"Emily, can we color?" I was exhausted for no reason, but I didn't
have any real reason to say no and no real desire to spend the next few hours
hiding from them. Upon further inspection, I realized they were incredibly
dirty, having no doubt rolled about in some piles on mud or whatever it is they
do. I solved this by sticking them on the front part of our porch. Things were
gonna very smoothly until I overhead "taking their clothes off."
"Who's taking their clothes off?" I asked, concerned. I then realized
it was the crayons that were getting naked as my neighbors stripped them of
their wrappers. All over the damn porch. So much for keeping them busy and out
of trouble. An hour later, a bunch more kids had showed up, like bees attracted
to honey, and then they all started fighting and things ended in tears
surprisingly quickly. A pretty typical day at Emily's impromptu preschool.
Thursday,
Thanksgiving(!!!!), was ironically one of the best days I've ever had in San
Miguelito. It was a little bit chilly in the morning, with a wonderful
refreshing breeze, and the lake was dark blue and choppy. You could see
volcanoes of the Isla de Ometepe clearer than I've ever seen them. I had a
brief instant of never wanting to leave.
In the morning, we had our last English
teacher training of the year, about strategies for teaching vocabulary to
beginning students. Had I remembered it was Thanksgiving, I undoubtedly would
have tried to change the date, but alas, we went ahead. In retrospect, it was
probably actually really good to be busy.
I think it was the best
training we gave this year. I gave a short presentation and then two of my
counterparts, Rafael and Jonathan, presented two mini lessons using vocab
teaching strategies in Japanese and German, respectively. They both nailed it and
it was so cool to see them feeling comfortable and confident enough to do
present a mini lesson in a 3rd language. I'm really thankful that I have a
really cool town where people are very open to trainings, both teachers and
MINED administrators: it's really productive.
In the afternoon, my
sitemate Christina and I cooked a Thanksgiving dinner for our little group of
English teachers at my house. It was quite the adventure. First, we went
shopping all over town to find a few more ingredients. We knew we wouldn't find
turkey, so we settled for chicken, but we also couldn't find any whole
chickens, so we wound up just cooking pieces. We also thought we wouldn't have
any pumpkin pie because we couldn't find any cans in Managua, BUT my friend
Kleydi saved the day. Apparently, her grandmother had a type of squash that was
too ripe and too sweet to use like they normally do. That sounded perfect and
so she hooked us up. However, we were trying to get the texture to be smoother
in the blender, the squash leaked out all over the kitchen when it got stuck
and made a gigantic mess. We managed to clean it up though and luckily we had
enough extra squash to start over.
In between some chats with
my family back home, we cooked up:
·
Chicken ("con sabor a pavo"- with imaginary turkey flavor)
·
Mashed potatoes made with cream in a
bag, one of my favorite and least healthy Nica foods
·
Cranberry sauce
·
Stuffing (made from day old pan tostado that the bakery has and some
spices)
·
Carrots (sort of kind of braised)
·
Beet and orange salad
·
Corn
·
Ayote pumpkin pie!
It was awesome to see
everyone's eyes when we brought the food out to the porch. I think my
counterpart Antonio said it best: "Do you eat like this every day?" I
wish.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Updates
Words of the day:
vago/a- short for vagabundo/a aka wanderer
pataperro/a- same thing
Howdy y'all, been a while, eh? Things have been not the greatest of late, so I've been a little bit harragana (lazyyy) about posting. Been a little sick and stuff, a little bit vaga (work related mostly) and just generally a little bit of a mess. Could be worse.
Anecdotes from the last month or so:
And that's about all.
vago/a- short for vagabundo/a aka wanderer
pataperro/a- same thing
Howdy y'all, been a while, eh? Things have been not the greatest of late, so I've been a little bit harragana (lazyyy) about posting. Been a little sick and stuff, a little bit vaga (work related mostly) and just generally a little bit of a mess. Could be worse.
Anecdotes from the last month or so:
- Salad and vegetables are necessary, but very evil.
- I had an extremely failed attempt to help the Ministry of Education edit a textbook. After eating something that was not friends with my stomach, I projectile vomited on their lawn. I was wearing a dress so naturally I got catcalled. Classy on everyone's part.
- In a rural community called Las Palomas, my soccer team played the muddiest game I've ever participated in. We lost to them even though a lot of them weren't wearing shoes at all. Then, the next week they also beat us on our home turf. At least we tied to Never Oporta last week. Victories ahead. I also went to a soccer practice that was mostly attended by 7 year old boys.
- We had another reasonably successful English training in San Miguelito on the Pre-During-Post framework for teaching Listening Activities and a shorter training on using rubrics.
- Started attending exercise class with a bunch of awesome middle- aged women. It's sort of like going to a club 2 years ago in terms of the music selection. Except when we dance Palo de Mayo.
- Learned what almond trees look like. I don't think they are the same as what I know as an almond. More intrigued by this question than I should be.
- My sitemate put on an Entrepreneurship Competition as part of the Small Business program through Peace Corps. Students create a business as part of a year long class on entrepreneurship. The winners of the San Miguelito competition were a bunch of my students in Las Palomas. Their company was called "Inconditional Love" and they made a candy to help women during their period. I also went to their competition in San Carlos which was pretty cool, where "Inconditional Love" took 3rd. The winners were cow themed, como no, a biogas for cooking made from cow manure and a "all natural" mineral supplement for cattle.
- We expertly celebrated Halloween with two volunteers from San Carlos and two nica friends.We cooked "brains" with a "blood" sauce and carved a watermelon and a squash. Then we went star gazing at the dock and threw our carvings into Lake Nicaragua. Heathens. Nicaraguans generally conflate Halloween with devil worship so there were a lot of interesting conversations that week.
- My host sister had a baby. He's very cute, except he now is living in the room next to me. I think it's time to move.
- I went to a English Conference in Nueva Guinea, a cowboy/jungle/ English loving paradise of about 100,000 people in the middle of nowhere. It was a lot of fun. I did a presentation on cognates which involved origami, como no, and modifying common classroom instructions to make them more user friendly for beginners. I also accidentally made a "that's what she said" joke and an even more awkward joke about imperalism. Coffee made me do it. It was a great time, hanging out and being weird with other PC pals. I also ended up giving someone else's presentation on teaching speaking using critical thinking because he had to go back to Managua due to an emergency. That was interesting. After the conference was over, we hung out Las Verbenas, a really cool place outside of town which has a pool and relaxing jungle huts. The pool has an amusingly phallic shape.
- I finally went to Chinandega to teach at a really cool training Peace Corps is doing with an organization called Fundacion Uno. Back to back weekends were a little brutal, but not the worst. English teachers receive 8 hour trainings on Sundays to improve their English, all expenses paid. They are awesome and really motivated which is amazing and a nice change from teaching teenagers. As a result, got to hang out in Leon, which is a beautiful and wonderful city and catch up with a lot of people, which was fabulous. Also had a nice afternoon at the beach in Las Penitas with TEFLeros Chelsea and Jamey. Also,we ate all the things, including Leon style repochetas which are essentially giant hunks of cheese and pizza and quesillo. O the dairy.
- I've tried to express the past tense of "swell" as "swolled" rather than "swelled" on several occasions now. Peace Corps English.
- I've read too many books.
And that's about all.
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Reading Reviews 7: Or, too much ekphrasis
Word of the day:
ekphrasis- a description of a piece of art, possibly imaginary.
...Self-knowledge is limited. Only a few remarkable people can sense the way early experience has built models in their brain. Later in life, we build fictions and theories to paper over the mystery of what is happening deep inside, but in childhood, the inexplicableness of the world is still vivid, and fresh and sometimes hits with terrifying force.
The Social Animal, David Brooks
"If nothing matters, there's nothing to save."
Jonathan Safran Foer's grandmother, Eating Animals
73. A Civil Action- Jonathan Harr
An interesting look at one of the first major cases in environmental law, which questions the legitimacy of how both sides of the case worked. More philosophically, it examines whether legal proceedings can ever really uncover any sort of truth.
74. Dreams from my Father- Barack Obama
This book gave me really conflicted feelings. I'm proud to have a president with such an incredible story and diverse lineage. At the same time, it's sort of scary. How could someone so aware of the concept of "power" from a sociological and anthropological standpoint have made the kind of (not liberal enough) decisions he has made in power? The book left me really cynical about the ability of anyone to change institutions from the inside. But at the same time, it's amazing to see where he ended up.
75. 2666- Roberto Bolanos
One of the saddest and yet most creative, fulfilling and profoundly human books i've ever read, and certainly out of the books I've read in Spanish. Divided in 5 parts, the book is as immense in its pages as in its subject matter, taking the reader from Europe to America Santa Teresa, Mexico, a stand in for the town of Juarez, while loosely exploring forms of desire and existential questions about our responsibility to others. Undoubtedly, the most difficult section to read was about the murders of women. Every woman is given a matter of fact description of how she was found, like a slightly more detailed police report, no matter how little information existed. Every description listed the items the women were wearing or not, which I think this was intentional on his part, given the way Latin American culture is (generally) very focused on making judgments about people based on their appearance. In the way, Bolanos brings to mind the cynicism of societies that say women are expendable and got what they deserved for being putas, whores, or poor women who worked in maquilas, enslaved by something much larger than themselves. Bolanos protests the sinisterness of modernity, from Nazi war crimes committed in the name of following orders to maquilas to drug crime. He also exposes the absolute rule of machismo in institutions like the police, the impotence of a government women's organization, til it comes to be reflected in culture, down to the jokes that policemen tell about women.
One thing I did find a little disturbing is that almost all of the women in the book, even the strong female characters (and arguably there were many) became tied into the story as men used them for pleasure. I don't know if Bolanos was doing this to make a point or because he doesn't write female characters well.
A harrowing, but worthwhile read.
76. The Social Animal-David Brooks
While I didn't always agree with Brooks' cultural commentary, he created a very enjoyable story anchored by the life span of two fictional characters, while exploring two hypotheses: that we are more greatly influenced by our unconscious than we realize, and that modern life is leading people to be increasingly estranged from each other and a larger purpose in life.
I didn't appreciate how Brooks basically blamed Erica for being more "successful" and not having children, because that seems extremely blase and lacking in empathy for women who are trapped in a culture that doesn't give them a lot of flexibility. I also don't know how much I agree with Brooks' hypothesis that we've fallen out of contact with each other. Living in a society now where there is relatively little non- religious social organization, maybe i'm seeing things in a favorable light.
77. The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care- T.R. Reid
A simple, eloquent and moral global overview of different health care systems, presenting a simple understanding of the trade offs different systems have decided to make and how differently the concept of medical care is understood in different cultures.
78. Eating Animals- Jonathan Safran Foer
With a title doubly exploring what it means to be animals that eat, but what the practice of eating animals means. The book features similar arguments to those I've read elsewhere (ie Michael Pollan), but they're constructed in classic quixotic Safran Foer style, dealing with central philosophical difficulties and bringing interesting characters to the conversation like vegetarian ranchers, vegan slaughterhouse designers, his Holocaust survivor grandmother and his young son. I think the best part of the book is the Words/Meaning (essentially a dictionary) which is hilarious, horrible and dead on. After reading it, I had a commitment not to eat meat, which lasted for like a week, until my values were sacrificed for some "table fellowship" at the fritanga stand (grilled meat) with my sitemate. Oops.
79. The Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England- Brock Clarke
Oh Massachusetts, how I miss you. Funny characters, and themes that cut deep without detracting from National Bestseller type readability.
80. Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead- Sheryl Sandberg
Preach. I think men need to read this book more than women do. It's nice to think about how far we've come (which is very evident from my perspective on life here) but it's a little depressing how much farther we've got to go for equality in the workplace to be meaningful.
81. The Marriage Plot- Jeffrey Eugenides
Exploring a love triangle of recent Brown University graduates in the 1980s, I found this a hilarious and just slightly painful jab at how completely lost modern relationships can make us. Do well educated women get in love triangles hoy en dia though? Because I know plenty of sexy, self assured, liberal arts major ladies who can't find one equally educated guy interested in them, never mind 2! Ah, the wonderful world of fiction.
82. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time- Jeffrey Sachs
Finally got around to reading the "optimist" version of economic development, in the very simplified Sachs vs. pessimist Bill Easterly debate. I didn't agree with everything in the book (ie role of governments or international organizations) and his sole focus on extreme poverty, but I do think that Sachs is dead on about one thing: we shouldn't let the supposed lack of money in the world keep us from stopping extreme suffering. There is plenty of money, just as there are plenty of hardened hearts that can't bother to think outside of a very small circle of caring.
83. The Vagina Monologues- Eve Ensler
Not everyone's cup of tea, certainly, but I'm so glad this book (theatre piece?) exists.
84. The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined- Stephen Pinker
I pity the underlings who probably looked up all the information for the probably at least 100 graphs that appear in this book. While Pinker's argument that violence has declined is intriguing and probably right on some counts, it was way too Eurocentric, full of contradictions, and made some very big statistical leaps.
This was what we had decided in one of my classes last year when he was invited as a guest speaker, but I still read the book anyway, because I was a little down after 2666 and wanted to believe the species is capable of better. Pinker sort of kind of convinced me that maybe we are, even though his arguments weren't very scientific.
85. The Bean Trees- Barbara Kingsolver
Clearly this was Kingsolver's first novel, but a very moral and heartwarming story.
86. Fire from the Mountain (La Montana es Algo Mas de Una Imensa Estepa Verde)- Omar Cabezas
Really wish I had read this is Spanish because it was very clear a lot of the poetry was lost in translation. I mean look how much cooler the title is in Spanish: The Montain is Something More than An Immense Green Expanse...so much better!! Describing Omar Cabeza's journey from student revolutionary in urban Leon to his time as a guerrilla in the mountains, this book is full of honesty, although not without poetic moments or attempts to connect with a bigger struggle.
87. Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle- Ingrid Betancourt
This very different jungle odyssey blew me away. Harrowing, heartbreaking and reflecting on the best and worst of human nature, this was definitely a page turner, full of intrigue, surprising pettiness, horrible cruelty and small victories. On a literary level, having read Gulag Archipelago a few months ago, I found the language of jungle imprisonment really fascinating, in terms of the euphemisms and convictions of righteousness.
ekphrasis- a description of a piece of art, possibly imaginary.
...Self-knowledge is limited. Only a few remarkable people can sense the way early experience has built models in their brain. Later in life, we build fictions and theories to paper over the mystery of what is happening deep inside, but in childhood, the inexplicableness of the world is still vivid, and fresh and sometimes hits with terrifying force.
The Social Animal, David Brooks
"If nothing matters, there's nothing to save."
Jonathan Safran Foer's grandmother, Eating Animals
73. A Civil Action- Jonathan Harr
An interesting look at one of the first major cases in environmental law, which questions the legitimacy of how both sides of the case worked. More philosophically, it examines whether legal proceedings can ever really uncover any sort of truth.
74. Dreams from my Father- Barack Obama
This book gave me really conflicted feelings. I'm proud to have a president with such an incredible story and diverse lineage. At the same time, it's sort of scary. How could someone so aware of the concept of "power" from a sociological and anthropological standpoint have made the kind of (not liberal enough) decisions he has made in power? The book left me really cynical about the ability of anyone to change institutions from the inside. But at the same time, it's amazing to see where he ended up.
75. 2666- Roberto Bolanos
One of the saddest and yet most creative, fulfilling and profoundly human books i've ever read, and certainly out of the books I've read in Spanish. Divided in 5 parts, the book is as immense in its pages as in its subject matter, taking the reader from Europe to America Santa Teresa, Mexico, a stand in for the town of Juarez, while loosely exploring forms of desire and existential questions about our responsibility to others. Undoubtedly, the most difficult section to read was about the murders of women. Every woman is given a matter of fact description of how she was found, like a slightly more detailed police report, no matter how little information existed. Every description listed the items the women were wearing or not, which I think this was intentional on his part, given the way Latin American culture is (generally) very focused on making judgments about people based on their appearance. In the way, Bolanos brings to mind the cynicism of societies that say women are expendable and got what they deserved for being putas, whores, or poor women who worked in maquilas, enslaved by something much larger than themselves. Bolanos protests the sinisterness of modernity, from Nazi war crimes committed in the name of following orders to maquilas to drug crime. He also exposes the absolute rule of machismo in institutions like the police, the impotence of a government women's organization, til it comes to be reflected in culture, down to the jokes that policemen tell about women.
One thing I did find a little disturbing is that almost all of the women in the book, even the strong female characters (and arguably there were many) became tied into the story as men used them for pleasure. I don't know if Bolanos was doing this to make a point or because he doesn't write female characters well.
A harrowing, but worthwhile read.
76. The Social Animal-David Brooks
While I didn't always agree with Brooks' cultural commentary, he created a very enjoyable story anchored by the life span of two fictional characters, while exploring two hypotheses: that we are more greatly influenced by our unconscious than we realize, and that modern life is leading people to be increasingly estranged from each other and a larger purpose in life.
I didn't appreciate how Brooks basically blamed Erica for being more "successful" and not having children, because that seems extremely blase and lacking in empathy for women who are trapped in a culture that doesn't give them a lot of flexibility. I also don't know how much I agree with Brooks' hypothesis that we've fallen out of contact with each other. Living in a society now where there is relatively little non- religious social organization, maybe i'm seeing things in a favorable light.
77. The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care- T.R. Reid
A simple, eloquent and moral global overview of different health care systems, presenting a simple understanding of the trade offs different systems have decided to make and how differently the concept of medical care is understood in different cultures.
78. Eating Animals- Jonathan Safran Foer
With a title doubly exploring what it means to be animals that eat, but what the practice of eating animals means. The book features similar arguments to those I've read elsewhere (ie Michael Pollan), but they're constructed in classic quixotic Safran Foer style, dealing with central philosophical difficulties and bringing interesting characters to the conversation like vegetarian ranchers, vegan slaughterhouse designers, his Holocaust survivor grandmother and his young son. I think the best part of the book is the Words/Meaning (essentially a dictionary) which is hilarious, horrible and dead on. After reading it, I had a commitment not to eat meat, which lasted for like a week, until my values were sacrificed for some "table fellowship" at the fritanga stand (grilled meat) with my sitemate. Oops.
79. The Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England- Brock Clarke
Oh Massachusetts, how I miss you. Funny characters, and themes that cut deep without detracting from National Bestseller type readability.
80. Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead- Sheryl Sandberg
Preach. I think men need to read this book more than women do. It's nice to think about how far we've come (which is very evident from my perspective on life here) but it's a little depressing how much farther we've got to go for equality in the workplace to be meaningful.
81. The Marriage Plot- Jeffrey Eugenides
Exploring a love triangle of recent Brown University graduates in the 1980s, I found this a hilarious and just slightly painful jab at how completely lost modern relationships can make us. Do well educated women get in love triangles hoy en dia though? Because I know plenty of sexy, self assured, liberal arts major ladies who can't find one equally educated guy interested in them, never mind 2! Ah, the wonderful world of fiction.
82. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time- Jeffrey Sachs
Finally got around to reading the "optimist" version of economic development, in the very simplified Sachs vs. pessimist Bill Easterly debate. I didn't agree with everything in the book (ie role of governments or international organizations) and his sole focus on extreme poverty, but I do think that Sachs is dead on about one thing: we shouldn't let the supposed lack of money in the world keep us from stopping extreme suffering. There is plenty of money, just as there are plenty of hardened hearts that can't bother to think outside of a very small circle of caring.
83. The Vagina Monologues- Eve Ensler
Not everyone's cup of tea, certainly, but I'm so glad this book (theatre piece?) exists.
84. The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined- Stephen Pinker
I pity the underlings who probably looked up all the information for the probably at least 100 graphs that appear in this book. While Pinker's argument that violence has declined is intriguing and probably right on some counts, it was way too Eurocentric, full of contradictions, and made some very big statistical leaps.
This was what we had decided in one of my classes last year when he was invited as a guest speaker, but I still read the book anyway, because I was a little down after 2666 and wanted to believe the species is capable of better. Pinker sort of kind of convinced me that maybe we are, even though his arguments weren't very scientific.
85. The Bean Trees- Barbara Kingsolver
Clearly this was Kingsolver's first novel, but a very moral and heartwarming story.
86. Fire from the Mountain (La Montana es Algo Mas de Una Imensa Estepa Verde)- Omar Cabezas
Really wish I had read this is Spanish because it was very clear a lot of the poetry was lost in translation. I mean look how much cooler the title is in Spanish: The Montain is Something More than An Immense Green Expanse...so much better!! Describing Omar Cabeza's journey from student revolutionary in urban Leon to his time as a guerrilla in the mountains, this book is full of honesty, although not without poetic moments or attempts to connect with a bigger struggle.
87. Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle- Ingrid Betancourt
This very different jungle odyssey blew me away. Harrowing, heartbreaking and reflecting on the best and worst of human nature, this was definitely a page turner, full of intrigue, surprising pettiness, horrible cruelty and small victories. On a literary level, having read Gulag Archipelago a few months ago, I found the language of jungle imprisonment really fascinating, in terms of the euphemisms and convictions of righteousness.
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Darling, don't you go and cut your hair
There's one rather major occurrence that I haven't blogged about yet, mostly because its only starting to be funny now.
I had an emotionally interesting period of time back in April and May where I wasn't sleeping very well, because I had stopped running for a variety of reasons and my body hadn't adjusted to the lack of endorphins. A lot of late night soul searching led me to the conclusion that Peace Corps was turning me into an old lady who is wasting away her 20s lounging about having the same conversations every day about weather and reading thousand page novels instead of getting a good paying job somewhere, going out and taking risks and dancing on tables or whatever it is 23 year- olds are "supposed" to do.
This general "God, I'm so boring" train of thought indirectly led me to debate cutting some bangs, since I hadn't changed my general look in quite some time. Also, I think I've had a repressed desire to do so since preschool when I tried to cut my hair in school and was stopped. I'd read enough fashion magazines to know that curly haired people should not cut straight bangs but still had an urge to try any way.
One particularly insomnia filled night, I'd given up on trying to fall asleep and was watching TV in my room. I've never mentioned the fact that I own a TV before, because I have pena about it because it seems like the kind of thing that is way too fachenta to have while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I didn't buy it, it was there when I moved in, but still. I never owned a TV in the US, and probably never will. I rarely even use it, because there's only so many telenovelas, Caso Cerrado and 12 Corazones that one can take. OK, so fine, the TV (and my house) are pretty fachenta for Nicaragua, but not by American standards. For instance, I shower next to a parrot and bunch of chickens behind a plastic sheet. Peace Corps' definitely gotten cushier since the 60s, but that doesn't make it that cushy.
Anyway, there I was, changing channels at 2 am or thereabouts when I randomly chanced across an Italian movie that improbably featured Penelope Cruz. I didn't really know what was going on, she was involved with a married doctor or something, but in one scene she cuts off her hair, and of course, because it is a movie and she is Penelope Cruz, she looked really edgy and cool. "This is the sign I've been waiting for! The time for big risks is here! I should totally cut some bangs! I will look glamorous and elegant!" I decided, and proceeded to hack off a lot of hair with my handy dandy all too available pair of scissors. Right around the time I finished, the movie got really sad because Penelope Cruz' character dies from the complications of a back alley abortion. I might not have interpreted Cruz' haircut the way I did if I had watched the movie to the end....
The resulting bangs did not look particularly great. I should have known that glamorous and elegant, despite what taxi drivers have to say about me, are not adjectives that are very applicable to me. At least I did get a great adrenaline rush from doing something so ballsy. Once this wore off, however, I was pretty embarrassed for the next few months. Luckily, I have a reasonable sense of humor and self deprecation is my forte. For instance, one day in class, I was teaching sentence stress (ie what words in a sentence we emphasize to change our meaning) and I was using the sentence "I said, she might want a new haircut." I was using part of a lesson another PCV had developed out of laziness, but all my counterparts started laughing at me, thinking that the sentence was about my life. Unintentional, but true.
The bangs are still a bit of a mess, but they are finally growing out better. Unfortunately, they are a huge nuisance in the sweat inducing climate. Phrases I never want to see on a weather forecast again: "Real Feel 46 degrees Celsius."
There's a fine line between whimsy and madness, a boundary which PCV service often drives you to cross. Part of the problem, I think, lies in determining which rules from back home "apply" or don't, and which new rules are actually important. I think I've finally learned my lesson about scissors though.
I had an emotionally interesting period of time back in April and May where I wasn't sleeping very well, because I had stopped running for a variety of reasons and my body hadn't adjusted to the lack of endorphins. A lot of late night soul searching led me to the conclusion that Peace Corps was turning me into an old lady who is wasting away her 20s lounging about having the same conversations every day about weather and reading thousand page novels instead of getting a good paying job somewhere, going out and taking risks and dancing on tables or whatever it is 23 year- olds are "supposed" to do.
This general "God, I'm so boring" train of thought indirectly led me to debate cutting some bangs, since I hadn't changed my general look in quite some time. Also, I think I've had a repressed desire to do so since preschool when I tried to cut my hair in school and was stopped. I'd read enough fashion magazines to know that curly haired people should not cut straight bangs but still had an urge to try any way.
One particularly insomnia filled night, I'd given up on trying to fall asleep and was watching TV in my room. I've never mentioned the fact that I own a TV before, because I have pena about it because it seems like the kind of thing that is way too fachenta to have while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I didn't buy it, it was there when I moved in, but still. I never owned a TV in the US, and probably never will. I rarely even use it, because there's only so many telenovelas, Caso Cerrado and 12 Corazones that one can take. OK, so fine, the TV (and my house) are pretty fachenta for Nicaragua, but not by American standards. For instance, I shower next to a parrot and bunch of chickens behind a plastic sheet. Peace Corps' definitely gotten cushier since the 60s, but that doesn't make it that cushy.
Anyway, there I was, changing channels at 2 am or thereabouts when I randomly chanced across an Italian movie that improbably featured Penelope Cruz. I didn't really know what was going on, she was involved with a married doctor or something, but in one scene she cuts off her hair, and of course, because it is a movie and she is Penelope Cruz, she looked really edgy and cool. "This is the sign I've been waiting for! The time for big risks is here! I should totally cut some bangs! I will look glamorous and elegant!" I decided, and proceeded to hack off a lot of hair with my handy dandy all too available pair of scissors. Right around the time I finished, the movie got really sad because Penelope Cruz' character dies from the complications of a back alley abortion. I might not have interpreted Cruz' haircut the way I did if I had watched the movie to the end....
The resulting bangs did not look particularly great. I should have known that glamorous and elegant, despite what taxi drivers have to say about me, are not adjectives that are very applicable to me. At least I did get a great adrenaline rush from doing something so ballsy. Once this wore off, however, I was pretty embarrassed for the next few months. Luckily, I have a reasonable sense of humor and self deprecation is my forte. For instance, one day in class, I was teaching sentence stress (ie what words in a sentence we emphasize to change our meaning) and I was using the sentence "I said, she might want a new haircut." I was using part of a lesson another PCV had developed out of laziness, but all my counterparts started laughing at me, thinking that the sentence was about my life. Unintentional, but true.
The bangs are still a bit of a mess, but they are finally growing out better. Unfortunately, they are a huge nuisance in the sweat inducing climate. Phrases I never want to see on a weather forecast again: "Real Feel 46 degrees Celsius."
There's a fine line between whimsy and madness, a boundary which PCV service often drives you to cross. Part of the problem, I think, lies in determining which rules from back home "apply" or don't, and which new rules are actually important. I think I've finally learned my lesson about scissors though.
The Sound of Olive: School Anecdotes, September 23-28
Words/phrases of the day:
machaca- a type of fish that you can make "fish sausage" out of
payasada- clowning, tomfoolery. There's never any shortage of this.
perdida como una perra en una procession- lost like a dog in a procession- ie really really confused. I definitely have this feeling a lot.
un enmendamiento- Ammendment- tried and failed attempt #2 to explain the NRA lobby
Como tela si no hay arana?- How can you spin a spider's web without a spider? i.e. can't spend any money if none is coming in
After a few weeks of feeling rather bored, I finally had a busy week of school and other activities. Since I was working on two teacher training workshops, it felt a little bit like college actually: staying up late, typing and writing things, thinking hard, jamming with some good tunes, getting things done...the only major difference being that here there is approximately 1000% humidity, and so I try to do work while wearing as little as decently possible whereas in Boston, I was usually wearing sweat pants and a sweatshirt and also swaddled in a giant blanket. Not sure if being too hot or too cold is better, but I certainly wouldn't have wanted to do Peace Corps service somewhere cold.
Yapered and Papered: This week, my counterpart Antonio and I taught vocabulary about American money to our 7th graders. They went crazy because I brought real pocket change to class. Then they kept laughing at this one student named "Nicole" because they couldn't distinguish the pronunciation of her name from "nickle." Poor Nicole was nearly in tears by the end of everything. I tried to get them to pronounce it correctly, but it was a lost cause, mostly because they didn't want to.
ECRIF Workshop: My counterpart Rafael attended a month long training in Costa Rica to receive a TEFL teaching certificate. As part of his scholarship agreement, he needed to give some workshops to teachers in his community, so we organized a teaching circle.
Organizing a good teacher training workshop is always a lot of work, because to do it well, it's good to have the teachers practice whatever skill you're teaching, which usually requires materials and a lot of advanced planning. It was an excellent opportunity to co-present a workshop with a counterpart teacher (even better, he took the lead for most of it), from perspective of the sustainability, credibility and solidarity, but as always, things take longer with two people than with one. I spent about 4 hours at Rafael's house in Las Palomas on Sunday (although we ended up just chatting about #farmlife for a long time, and then nearly 6 hours working with him on Wednesday, although he did have to leave for a while because his neighbors' cows were getting onto his land. He was sick too, which was definitely hard for him while he was putting everything together.
After all this, it looked like the workshop was going to get cancelled because of a march to celebrate the police, but the delegado said we could have the workshop anyway, because he's awesome. Then, the march got postponed until Friday, so we were in the clear.
The workshop itself was very interesting. To start, many people came an hour late, which was not surprising, but was still frustrating. We knew we would have varying levels of English ability at the workshop, but due to the way I phrased the invitation, 2 school principals attended, who knew basically no English. This wasn't the worst thing, because it's good for them to know what's going on and especially since the workshop was focused more on pedagogy than on English. So we gave a lot more of the workshop in Spanish, and Spanglish, and some in English. It was pretty fun though. After we had explained the concept, to demonstrate the idea of how ECRIF works in practice, I taught a short lesson about English slang for describing people: nerd, cool, cheapskate, shopaholic, slob and put- together. We unfortunately weren't able to get through everything we had planned for the workshop, but we got close enough. ECRIF is a really helpful way of thinking about how language is learned, or anything else! For more information, check out: www.ecrif.com/
The Sound of Olive: On Friday, we had another mini workshop on vowel pronunciation, after TEPCE, a monthly teacher planning meeting. We warmed up by playing "Silent Categories": you give a category and then partners work together to silently and exaggeratedly mouth words from these categories to each other.
We talked about some of the difficulties Spanish speakers have learning English vowel sounds: they don't know how words sound because they've never heard them before and some English sounds are hard to produce because they don't exist in Spanish.
Then, my counterpart Jonathan and I presented one strategy for teaching phonetics to students: the color alphabet! By using colors, most of which are familiar to students, teachers can create associations between the sounds of these familiar words and new vocabulary. We finished off with a listening activity and "Run to the Board," a game in which participants race against each other to identify the correct word on the board. I'd planned to practice more strategies, but I'm finally learning how much you can get through in a TEPCE workshop.
La Manada de English: My counterpart Jonathan came up with a new name for our English Circle- the English pack! Like a 7 person wolfpack of nerds who like grammar and new vocabulary. It was a joke, but I like it.
I'd noticed that the teachers sometimes struggle with when to use the infinitive (to + verb) and , so I suggested it as a class topic. When I looked into the topic further, I realized that it is one of the most difficult topics in English grammar. There are quite literally around 30 rules that govern the use of the infinitive vs. gerund. In the end, I decided to teach infinitives and gerunds to describe purpose. It worked out pretty fun. After we did some practice, I had the teachers select everyday items out of a bag at random. I told them to pretend I was from a completely different culture and to describe what the object's uses were, using both the infinitive and gerund. For example: This is a ball of yarn. It's used for knitting. I use it to knit blankets. People love realia in class. I don't know why, but it always makes things fun.
Twenty dinner guests: On Thursday night, I'd just eaten a hastily put together dinner and was putting the finishing touches on the pronunciation workshop when my neighbor Kleydi stopped by: "Em, let's go eat!!" I had completely forgotten- we were going to eat fish sausage hamburgers with Christina in honor of her return to San Miguelito. When we arrived at her house, there was a small glitch. There were literally at least 20 people sleeping on the floor of Christina's living room, where her stove is. Christina had not been warned about this in the slightest. Because San Miguelito's Patron Saint celebration is this weekend, people from rural communities come to the church here to celebrate, as a "promise" to the saint. We staged a rescue operation for the stove and lugged it up the stairs to eat in peace. Despite the fact that I had already eaten, the fish sausage was delicious- flavored with cilantro and onion. I'm curious to see if anyone will show up on our living room floor soon, since my host family is also Catholic.
Cow thieves- During Saturday class we finished up an activity with 4th year to review questions with "did" and the past tense. We did a crime solving activity, to resolve the following crime: "A thief stole a cow from teacher Xiomara's farm last night!" We divided the class in half, into police officers and suspects. The suspects wrote alibis, while police officers wrote questions about the activities they had done the night before. Today, the police officers interviewed the suspects to find out who was guilty (ie whichever group couldn't remember their alibi). Some of the kids got really into it, picking up brooms to use as "guns" as they were going to question the suspects. Questionable justice. It was a really fun and communicative activity, and I'm glad we got to try it in the irregular school, because I have a better idea of how to do this type of activity before the topic of past tense comes up in the curriculum for the regular school.
machaca- a type of fish that you can make "fish sausage" out of
payasada- clowning, tomfoolery. There's never any shortage of this.
perdida como una perra en una procession- lost like a dog in a procession- ie really really confused. I definitely have this feeling a lot.
un enmendamiento- Ammendment- tried and failed attempt #2 to explain the NRA lobby
Como tela si no hay arana?- How can you spin a spider's web without a spider? i.e. can't spend any money if none is coming in
After a few weeks of feeling rather bored, I finally had a busy week of school and other activities. Since I was working on two teacher training workshops, it felt a little bit like college actually: staying up late, typing and writing things, thinking hard, jamming with some good tunes, getting things done...the only major difference being that here there is approximately 1000% humidity, and so I try to do work while wearing as little as decently possible whereas in Boston, I was usually wearing sweat pants and a sweatshirt and also swaddled in a giant blanket. Not sure if being too hot or too cold is better, but I certainly wouldn't have wanted to do Peace Corps service somewhere cold.
Yapered and Papered: This week, my counterpart Antonio and I taught vocabulary about American money to our 7th graders. They went crazy because I brought real pocket change to class. Then they kept laughing at this one student named "Nicole" because they couldn't distinguish the pronunciation of her name from "nickle." Poor Nicole was nearly in tears by the end of everything. I tried to get them to pronounce it correctly, but it was a lost cause, mostly because they didn't want to.
ECRIF Workshop: My counterpart Rafael attended a month long training in Costa Rica to receive a TEFL teaching certificate. As part of his scholarship agreement, he needed to give some workshops to teachers in his community, so we organized a teaching circle.
Organizing a good teacher training workshop is always a lot of work, because to do it well, it's good to have the teachers practice whatever skill you're teaching, which usually requires materials and a lot of advanced planning. It was an excellent opportunity to co-present a workshop with a counterpart teacher (even better, he took the lead for most of it), from perspective of the sustainability, credibility and solidarity, but as always, things take longer with two people than with one. I spent about 4 hours at Rafael's house in Las Palomas on Sunday (although we ended up just chatting about #farmlife for a long time, and then nearly 6 hours working with him on Wednesday, although he did have to leave for a while because his neighbors' cows were getting onto his land. He was sick too, which was definitely hard for him while he was putting everything together.
After all this, it looked like the workshop was going to get cancelled because of a march to celebrate the police, but the delegado said we could have the workshop anyway, because he's awesome. Then, the march got postponed until Friday, so we were in the clear.
The workshop itself was very interesting. To start, many people came an hour late, which was not surprising, but was still frustrating. We knew we would have varying levels of English ability at the workshop, but due to the way I phrased the invitation, 2 school principals attended, who knew basically no English. This wasn't the worst thing, because it's good for them to know what's going on and especially since the workshop was focused more on pedagogy than on English. So we gave a lot more of the workshop in Spanish, and Spanglish, and some in English. It was pretty fun though. After we had explained the concept, to demonstrate the idea of how ECRIF works in practice, I taught a short lesson about English slang for describing people: nerd, cool, cheapskate, shopaholic, slob and put- together. We unfortunately weren't able to get through everything we had planned for the workshop, but we got close enough. ECRIF is a really helpful way of thinking about how language is learned, or anything else! For more information, check out: www.ecrif.com/
The Sound of Olive: On Friday, we had another mini workshop on vowel pronunciation, after TEPCE, a monthly teacher planning meeting. We warmed up by playing "Silent Categories": you give a category and then partners work together to silently and exaggeratedly mouth words from these categories to each other.
We talked about some of the difficulties Spanish speakers have learning English vowel sounds: they don't know how words sound because they've never heard them before and some English sounds are hard to produce because they don't exist in Spanish.
Then, my counterpart Jonathan and I presented one strategy for teaching phonetics to students: the color alphabet! By using colors, most of which are familiar to students, teachers can create associations between the sounds of these familiar words and new vocabulary. We finished off with a listening activity and "Run to the Board," a game in which participants race against each other to identify the correct word on the board. I'd planned to practice more strategies, but I'm finally learning how much you can get through in a TEPCE workshop.
La Manada de English: My counterpart Jonathan came up with a new name for our English Circle- the English pack! Like a 7 person wolfpack of nerds who like grammar and new vocabulary. It was a joke, but I like it.
I'd noticed that the teachers sometimes struggle with when to use the infinitive (to + verb) and , so I suggested it as a class topic. When I looked into the topic further, I realized that it is one of the most difficult topics in English grammar. There are quite literally around 30 rules that govern the use of the infinitive vs. gerund. In the end, I decided to teach infinitives and gerunds to describe purpose. It worked out pretty fun. After we did some practice, I had the teachers select everyday items out of a bag at random. I told them to pretend I was from a completely different culture and to describe what the object's uses were, using both the infinitive and gerund. For example: This is a ball of yarn. It's used for knitting. I use it to knit blankets. People love realia in class. I don't know why, but it always makes things fun.
Twenty dinner guests: On Thursday night, I'd just eaten a hastily put together dinner and was putting the finishing touches on the pronunciation workshop when my neighbor Kleydi stopped by: "Em, let's go eat!!" I had completely forgotten- we were going to eat fish sausage hamburgers with Christina in honor of her return to San Miguelito. When we arrived at her house, there was a small glitch. There were literally at least 20 people sleeping on the floor of Christina's living room, where her stove is. Christina had not been warned about this in the slightest. Because San Miguelito's Patron Saint celebration is this weekend, people from rural communities come to the church here to celebrate, as a "promise" to the saint. We staged a rescue operation for the stove and lugged it up the stairs to eat in peace. Despite the fact that I had already eaten, the fish sausage was delicious- flavored with cilantro and onion. I'm curious to see if anyone will show up on our living room floor soon, since my host family is also Catholic.
Cow thieves- During Saturday class we finished up an activity with 4th year to review questions with "did" and the past tense. We did a crime solving activity, to resolve the following crime: "A thief stole a cow from teacher Xiomara's farm last night!" We divided the class in half, into police officers and suspects. The suspects wrote alibis, while police officers wrote questions about the activities they had done the night before. Today, the police officers interviewed the suspects to find out who was guilty (ie whichever group couldn't remember their alibi). Some of the kids got really into it, picking up brooms to use as "guns" as they were going to question the suspects. Questionable justice. It was a really fun and communicative activity, and I'm glad we got to try it in the irregular school, because I have a better idea of how to do this type of activity before the topic of past tense comes up in the curriculum for the regular school.
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Great Quote
"Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response"
-Rollo May
A good reminder for combating reactive thinking.
Friday, September 20, 2013
Pictures from the Independence Day Parade in San Miguelito
By bus, by train or by ox: September School Anecdotes.*
*Except there was almost no school.
Word of the Day:
camioneta- pick up truck
chinear- to sit someone on your lap. No, not a
lap dance.
I returned to San Miguelito from a week in Managua on Saturday. It was the
worst ride ever. Being that it was a holiday, not that many buses were running,
so our bus was already filled to the gills before it even left Managua, and
then proceeded to stop every hundred feet to pick up more people. The bearable
four and a half hour journey on the relatively "express" bus turned
into a scourching six. The young child standing in the aisle next to me was too
shy to let me chinear him, but he proceeded to scream intermittently about the
fact that he had to stand. It should not take six hours to travel 150 miles.
Just saying.
However, it was nice to be back. On Sunday, there was a giant parade for
the Fiestas Patrias, a two day celebration of Nicaraguan Independence and the
Nicaraguan victory in the Battle of San Jacinto, in which Nicaraguan fighters
defeated invading American filibusterers. I went to go watch the various
marching bands from the different institutos in the municipality. It was a nice
slice of culture and it was great to see my students perform. In the evening,
my host sister had a baby shower; she's expecting her first child, a baby boy.
I tried to help everyone set up, but was inevitably kind of useless. I inflated
some balloons for the giant baby bottles made out of balloons (cute idea!) and
served as official pizza advisor to my host mother, who was cooking pizza for
the first time. It turned out pretty darn well, as did the shower.
Since the teachers had to work over the weekend, Monday and Tuesday were
holidays for the teachers. More vacation wasn't something I particularly needed
or wanted, but hey, gotta take advantage when you can, eh?
On Monday, I cleaned my room with an extreme degree of throughness and
washed all my clothes. I had smelled mold, so I figured there must be something
that was molding a lot. Both to my relief and chagrin, nothing was molding like
crazy, but all the things were slightly covered in mildew. #rainyseason. I soon
exhausted myself before anything was really clean or organized. I took a lot of
breaks, but finally got things relatively together. In the afternoon, I went to
check on the garden at the Casa Materna to see how much work it needed. Lots,
it turned out. Upon returning home, I realized that it was my counterpart
Xiomara's birthday. I went to her house for a birthday dinner with some of her
friends and her very large family. It was really nice, although it made me a
bit nostalgic for family parties at home.
Tuesday was more of the same. I went to go buy vegetables and ended up
chatting with my sitemate's host mom for an hour or two. My sitemate is in
America for a wedding, and her host mom definitely misses her. In the
afternoon, when it finally stopped raining, I went to go weed in the garden in
the Casa Materna for a little while. I really like the people there, its a nice
break from my normal routine. I came home and actually studied Spanish, which I
had been meaning to do for several months now.
Wednesday was more productive in an American sense. I went to the Casa
Materna in the morning to stake some bean plants which were growing completely
out of control. To do so, I carried some
sticks through the entire town, which attracted a lot of confused stares from
people trying to figure out what in God's name the gringa was doing was a whole
bunch of lena. The absurdity was worth it though, because some of the giant
plants were starting to flower! In the afternoon, I went to talk with the
Ministry of Education Delegacion about some upcoming trainings, stopped by the
Mayor's office to chat about an English class, read some more of Roberto
Bolanos' epic masterpiece 2666 (I'm about 600 pages deep), and
worked on a workshop for next week and a project to help teachers with the
Saturday curriculum.
Thursday was a shockingly real day of work and it felt so good. I taught an
early morning 11th grade class with my counterpart Antonio in San Miguelito,
before going to Las Palomas to plan some classes and trainings with my
counterpart Rafael. We had a really fun class with 9th grade, teaching means of
transportation and focusing on speaking activities. By the end, students had
really mastered the phrase "How do you get from ________to _____?,"
which was encouraging. I planned more classes with my counterpart Xiomara in
the evening and cooked her dinner: my Nicaraguan adaptation of pasta with
sauce, accompanied by quesillo as a stand in for mozzarella. Glad quesillo is
expensive because otherwise it would be the only thing I would ever eat and I
would die very prematurely.
Today's pretty free of committments as well. Working on some more workshops
and planning this afternoon. Trying to keep busy, as always.
Gardening Attempts
Words of the Day: Gardening
edition! Should have asked my parents for help with this.
el huerto- a vegetable garden
el acedon- hoe
la pala- shovel
el rastrillo- rake
la carretilla- cart
las hileras- rows
la estaca- stake
Casa Materna- A place where pregnant
women from rural areas are brought about a month before they give birth to have
better access to medical care
"Canas arriba, ganas
abajo"- The woman in charge (encargada) of the Casa Materna
told me this hilarious saying after she remarked at how I have so much white
hair for someone so young. My best attempt to render this in English is
"White hair up above, still wants to make love."
==============================================================================
About a month ago, my
sitemate started a garden at the Casa Materna- the idea being to improve the
nutrition of the pregnant women and encourage them to start small huertos
at their homes, if they don't already have them, using seed saving techniques.
It was her idea and she's done most of the work, but I've helped out here and
there.
On a great tip from the encargada
at the Casa Materna, we rented tools from the Mayor's Office. You know you're
in Central America when the Mayor's Office owns gigantic scimitar shaped machetes! Christina was working in a town that's really
far away, so I helped her out by picking things up. This was an amusing
experience for several reasons. First off, I didn't have the best handle on
gardening vocabulary. Stubbornly not wanting to admit that I had no idea how to
ask for what I wanted, I accidentally informed the man that I needed 3 carts,
thinking this was the word for hoe and then proceeded to contradict myself,
saying I didn't want any carts at all. Oops. Then, I carted the tools all over
town, which attracted some confused looks. Watchya doin, Teacher Emily?
It turned out that a group
of kids we wanted to help with the garden weren't around to help on the weekend
we were going to start the garden, but an awesome agriculture volunteer
visiting from Chinandega named Brittany helped Christina clear the area of
weeds, form rows and plant some seeds. Despite being the site of an old bar,
the soil is pretty good, with a nice number of earth worms, although there's
not a lot of it. The area is also protected from drunks and chickens by a lot
of fences and concrete, which is certainly in its favor.
We weren't sure what would
grow, given that some of the seeds were of questionable quality and that it's
rainyyyyyyy season right now, but a surprising number of things didn't drown
and in fact germinated quite nicely. There are about 20 bean plants growing
completely out of control, a few melons, some straggly lettuce, squash,
radishes, 3 very sad corn stalks, a jamaica plant (used to make a tea),
3 moringa trees (a "miracle" tree that is used in reforestation
efforts in Africa and has leaves that are full of vitamins and miracles), and
some mango sapplings.
The gardening project isn't
currently very sustainable, given that we don't really have too many community
members involved in its day to day maintenance. Part of the problem is that
there is constant turn around at the Casa Materna. Besides, the women are VERY
pregnant by the time they get there, so they can't help much with the
gardening, given that they've got their own watermelons to deal with.
Therefore, what we would need in order to maintain the garden, is a group of
people who are food secure, have a lot of spare time on the hands and don't
mind getting down and dirty.
However, hopefully over
time, we can get more people (particularly kids) involved in its upkeep, use it
as an example of a huerto to encourage community members to have small gardens
at home, or send seeds/saplings with women when they return to their
communities. We'll see what this little seed grows up to be!
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