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.
