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.

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.

Great Quote

"Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response" 

-Rollo May 

A good reminder for combating reactive thinking. 

Pictures from the Independence Day Parade in San Miguelito

                                   The ¨Academically Excellent¨ Students served as flagbearers

                                        Lyra Players from El Tule´s Band

                                           

                                          Dancers from San Miguelito

                                           Swag. San Miguelito´s Band

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."

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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!

#Lakenicaraguaproblems

Call em what you will, chayules or sayules, some horrible little creatures paid their annual visit to San Miguelito recently.

I went to go watch my team play soccer, because I wasn't feeling well enough to play. Turned out we didn't actually have a game, but I stuck around to watch the boys play with my sitemate and a Nica friend, Kleydi. 

Life in San Miguelito had already been pretty awful that week, hotter than verano, so hot I'd broken my "no wearing shorts outside" rule. We were watching the game as pleasantly as one can when it's a bazillion degrees with 100% humidity when sudddenly, a brownish yellow blur appeared on the horizon of the lake. Christina and I were oblivious to the impending doom until Kleydi groaned. "Chayules!!" A giant cloud of decidedly biblical proportions headed straight for the town, blown across Lake Nicaragua from Costa Rica. The chayules soon arrived in force, distracting players and onlookers alike, as we hurried to cover our mouths and eyes with our shirts.

So what are chayules exactly? They're horrible little translucent insects. They don't bite, but when they arrive in such a giant storm, they smell like fish, especially when they die or get rained on. They don't do well with the concept of personal space, getting all up in mouths and eyes and food and laundry and anything they damn please. They die and pile up on everything, like a foul, thick layer of dust.

That was my cue to get of town. Luckily, I was headed to Managua for some medical appointments and a talk about "Teaching Vocabulary" to the new group of Peace Corps volunteers. Never had more propitious timing.

Playing Soccer with the Devil

Word of the Day:

Satanas- Satan

la delantera- forward

la portera- goalie

la defensa- defense- What I've been playing mostly.

I joined a soccer team! Or more accurately, my friend Kleydi signed Christina and I up for a soccer team and then informed us about it later. I was overjoyed about it, however, because I'm desperately in need of exercise, ways to meet more people and things to do on Sundays. I really miss the Chilean slang term "Fomingo"= Fome (boring) + Domingo (Sunday) because it would be a highly accurate description of the way Sundays can drag on interminably here. 

We don't have practices as far as I can tell, but the two women's teams scrimmage against each other on Sunday mornings. I'm not sure if my team has a name, but we have pretty cool bright orange Barcelona jerseys. We're an interesting mix of people. There are two huge women on my team, not fat, just BIG, who intimidate me a little bit. One of them is nicknamed Satan. I still don't know her real name or how I should address her. A very typical problem here. The rest of the girls are very young, wispy and fast. They are mainly my students, which has created some awkwardness at school because they are not always the best at paying attention in class. Despite the differences in size and ability, we are halfway decent on the field, given that we don't actually practice together. 

The soccer field is basically a glorified mud pit strewn with pebbles, although it boasts a stunning view of the volcanoes on clear days. I fell the first day and cut my knee pretty badly although it didn't hurt. I didn't clean it for a while because I didn't notice how much it was bleeding. Hopefully this has established a tough reputation for me because my playing leaves much to desired. Maybe now I can become known as "La gringa que chorrea (The gringa that spurts blood)" instead of "La gringa que corre (The gringa that runs)". Little Spanish pun there for y'all. 

It's great that we can field two women's teams here. Considering women wouldn't have played soccer a few decades ago (probably not in the US either, come to think of it), it's a nice sign that progress can come in rapid spurts. Like bleeding knees, except positive.