"On another occasion"....
People here sometimes use this phrase to decline politely, ie to decline buying something from a traveling vendor on a bus, or to not give a beggar money. I think it's pretty applicable to everything. There wasn't class today, but en otra ocasion...
el mirador-scenic look out
El Dia de la Tierra- Earth Day
la sierra- mountains
el abigeato- cattle rustling
This week was a bit of an absurdity. At some of the institutos, we managed to lose nearly an entire week of classes without school actually being closed. Luckily, I've started some side projects which are a nice way to break up my week, because these are not necessarily contingent on school being open. It's also really nice to plan things on my own. Co-planning is awesome, but it can be really time consuming. Also, the side projects, in addition to school, have helped me become more integrated in the community. I pretty much can't go anywhere in greater San Miguelito without running into a student/one of my student's parents or someone calling "Hi, teacher." It's always reassuring when the kids actually use the correct forms of the greetings, contingent on the time of day, which occasionally happens.
On Monday, it was Earth Day. In San Miguelito, they held a plant and animal fair to celebrate. It was supposed to start after the first two periods of class, but after a cow was brought into the schoolyard, teaching pretty much ground to a halt. My counterpart and I gave a class, but we were literally the only ones who were teaching. I'm not sure that the feria had a very good environmental message, since mostly the students sold drinks out of styrofoam cups, and cows are the least environmentally friendly animals pretty much ever. I didn't have my act together this year, but maybe next year I'll try to promote some more environmentally friendly stuff. Over all, San Miguel is a fairly environmentally conscious municipio, though. There's recycling and an environmental NGO. It could definitely be a lot worse.
El Tule did not have an earth day fair, so my counterpart Jonathan and I had a regular day of class. We had our 10th graders create cartoons about a legend we had just read in class and we taught the 11th grade about the future tense. The students really liked class, compared to their usual reaction, which is to make grumpy faces at us and sigh a lot. I suspect this was because we used audio visual resources, had them create timelines, and because it was relatable to things they are thinking about as it gets closer to graduation.
On Monday afternoon, we had our 2nd meeting of the 7th and 8th grade English club/class. A few more students showed up. We brainstormed topics for the class, played "I'm going on a picnic" (for more diagnostic of people's level) and learned the song "Green Grass Grows all Around" because it seemed appropriate for Earth Day. One of the students taught me the version in Spanish, which was cool. Totally gonna teach it to the chavalos on the block.
On Tuesday, there was a Musa Dariana competition, which I've previously described, so we only taught one period of class in San Miguelito. In the afternoon, in El Tule, Jonathan and I had a great bunch of classes. We taught 7th grade verb to be, using, you guessed it, "Very Good Friend" and then we taught 9th grade the command form using safety/warning signs and by playing "Pin the tail on the Donkey," which was a huge hit. Especially because I messed with the kids by changing the size of the donkey on the chalkboard after the students were blind-folded, to the amusement of all involved. There are a ton of donkeys in El Tule, so this vocabulary word is pretty essential for describing daily life there.
On Wednesday, my co-teacher wasn't going to school, so I decided to go to Juigalpa, Chontales to go to the grocery store and get my cash money cash money for the month. Juigalpa is two and a half hours from San Miguelito, which is kind of a haul, but could be worse. It's a biggish city (by Nicaraguan standards) of 50,000ish, but it's the antithesis of touristy. Chontales is cowboy country, and it's right at the foot of the Sierra Amerisque, so there's lots of rough looking mountains around, and rougher looking cowboy characters, as well as some noveau riche rancher types. Especially at this dusty time of year, it's hot and dry, almost vaguely deserty. It was a long ride, but going to the grocery store was pretty worth it, for the slightly better selection and especially after I realized how much pulperias mark up the prices.
After filling up my backpack with an eggplant (OMG!!!!!!!!!!), coffee, milk, pasta, tomato paste and various other provisions, I climbed around the various hills of Juigalpa. I had heard of a restaurant that had a fabulous view of the mountains, and I wanted to check it out. I didn't want to admit to anyone that I didn't know where I was going, so I just kept walking around and going up the hill, because that seemed a logical way to get to the mirador. I eventually got to this dirt road and after asking at a hotel which was not the restaurant I was looking for, I found it, and it was pretty spectacular and well worth the embarrassing amounts of sweating involved. This is how un-touristy Juigalpa is: the road to one of the main touristic attractions isn't even paved. Who knows where that restaurant actually is. After that, I hung out in Juigalpa's central park which was very lovely, a good old Spanish town with a plaza in the center of town kind of deal. I ate ice cream for lunch, because I usually can't find good ice cream at site. I'm totally a real grown up. HA.
Unfortunately, I miscalculated the bus schedule, and ended up waiting over an hour and a half in a bus stop by the dirty, dusty highway for the next bus to come. This, however, gave me insight into a fascinating economic niche that a Juigalpa beggar has found for himself. In a country where no bus schedules are formally posted anyway, he basically serves as a bus schedule. In exchange for a few coins, he tells you when the next bus to your destination will arrive. This seemed to be surprisingly lucrative. I watched him change out coins for bills, and he had made approximately $4 by only 2 in the afternoon. Considering that teachers make about $6 a day here, that's no small feat. This was all fascinating, but of course he began to hit on me (ah the allure of the sweaty, dirty gringa with a backpack full of milk), so it was nice when the bus arrived, even though I had to travel back home on foot on a bus that was packed like a cattle car.
I planned on Thursday morning with the teachers I work with on Saturday, but I didn't teach in the afternoon because of some sort of sports day. On Thursday evening, we had our inaugural meeting of our "English teachers and other people who know lots of English" club. Our topic was: "Tag Questions are fun, aren't they?" Tag questions, those mini questions we use at the ends of sentences to verify information (the meeting was last night, wasn't it?), make dumb comments (sure is hot, isn't it) or be snarky (he's a smart one, isn't he?) are a pain in the ass if you don't have the privilege of being a native English speaker, but everyone seemed to be pretty clear on how to form them and when to employ them by the end of class, which was awesome. We had 2 gringas, 1 German and 5 Nicaraguans show up, including 3 of my counterpart teachers. It was really nice to actually teach an advanced conversation class, which I hadn't really done since high school, when, to be brutally honest, I had literally no idea what I was doing, methodologically speaking or otherwise. Teaching more advanced speakers is fun, because you have to test your own knowledge of grammar and you get the opportunity to reflect on cultural and situational nuances much more than you do with beginners.
We started off by playing 2 Truths and a Lie. Then I introduced the tag question structure, which most people were familiar with, but needed extra practice, especially for some of the trickier rules. We used the 2 Truths and a Lie sentences to practice forming tag questions. Then, we played "Human Bingo," but with the variation that people had to use tag questions to complete their grid. Lastly, we finished using some vaguely silly situation cards, which helped to contextualize some situations in which the grammar might be used, for example:
-Your cousin is visiting from the United States and you want to cook her sopa de pescado. She has many allergies though, and you want to make sure she will not be allergic to the fish. What do you ask her?
-You're in the doctor's office and the doctor is checking some results from a blood test. He's frowning and talking to himself. Because of his behavior you are worried that you have a serious illness. What do you say to the doctor?
-You are gossiping with your friend about another friend named Nick. He broke up with his girlfriend last month. Ask her if Nick is still single.
-You and your cousin are sitting on your front porch on a hot afternoon. You're sweating a lot. You want to make a comment about the heat. What do you say?
On Friday, we had TEPCE, which is a teacher's planning meeting. We were supposed to evaluate our work for the last month and plan for the next one. I hung out with two counterparts, Rafael and Jonathan, which was a good time, despite the fact that the reflection questions we had to answer were really tedious. We swapped names for different food containers, different types of local industries, like tanneries and rice processing plants, the difference between "a lot" and "too much" and discussed whether it's appropriate to say "I'm really hot" to express physical discomfort in English. I decided that it's appropriate in certain contexts, if coupled with a time expression, for example, "I'm really hot right now." NOT read in a sexy tone of voice... I love my counterparts, they're good people.
In the afternoon, I had English class for the chavalos. I didn't really want to plan much of a class, so I thought we would have a mini-lesson on learning styles and pronunciation, to help them identify how they learn information best, which is an important thing when you're learning a second language. However, I couldn't find a learning styles test online that was culturally appropriate, age appropriate, (11 year olds in Central America don't go out to cocktail parties to drink wine or go to museums) OR in Spanish, so I ended up having to translate one, which was a lot of work, and defeated the purpose of me not planning a lot for class. O well. I also introduced the students to a color coded phonetics chart, because the kids kept telling me they are really worried about their pronunciation. The beauty of teaching the phonetics of vowel sounds this way is that it is fun and accessible, and you can teach it by making continuous associations with colors over time.
On Saturday, we actually had class. I taught a bunch of eighth graders the "I like to eat apples and bananas" song from Barney as a warm up for class, and accidentally told the class that we were singing the song to make us "horny" for class. NOPE. Not what I meant so much. The kids actually liked our lessons this week though, which was fun. We were talking about likes and dislikes which is a great topic because it triples their ability to have a conversation, and it's relevant to them.
After school got out, I went wandering to visit some other PCVs in nearby parts of Rio San Juan/the RAAS (Southern Atlantic Autonomous Region). First, I went to celebrate the fiestas patronales in El Amendro (The Almond Tree) with a bunch of other PCVs from Rio San Juan. Even though it is probably only like 30 minutes away by private car, it took me over 2 and 1/2 hours (including a bunch of walking because I'm an idiot) to get there due to terribly timed connections. It's always cool to visit other people's sites though and we had a lot of fun eating scrumptious frito (fried chicken and plantain strips) and dancing (by which I mean attempting to dance with any grace whatsoever) to cumbia while surrounded by cowboys on a baseball field in the moonlight. We might be few, and isolated, but everybody in Rio San Juan is super cool and a lot of fun.
Early on Sunday, I went over to Nueva Guinea to visit some TEFLeras from my training group. Nueva Guinea is really big (Nicaraguan standards so we're talking 100,000 people, max), but there's not very much to do. It's as if a bunch of evangelical Christians had built a cowboy agricultural paradise in the middle of the jungle. It does have a super market though, which is pretty exciting. I only got to see my friend Natalie for a little bit because she had to return to her site in central Nicaragua, but Isabel and I hung out for a little while and wandered the town. I made it back to San Miguelito early in the afternoon to discover that ants had eaten holes in the milk that I bought on Wednesday, and that it had gone bad in the interim. So I cleaned up that giant mess, and went to church. And so it began.
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