My personal journey with pena

Word of the day

pena- shame, embarrassment, awkwardness

"En la profe Emily, no existe la pena."- (essentially, nothing makes Teacher Emily feel ashamed)- My counterpart trying to explain to my students that I will try to make them do weird things like pronounce words in English, and that they should just go along with it. 

I've been thinking a lot about how I've changed during my service lately, and the first thing that comes to mind is that I have pretty much no pena anymore, well, at least in certain situations. 

I've always been an introvert but Peace Corps forces you to get over that pretty quickly. I remember during training being petrified of giving teaching trainings or other presentations or basically anything where I would have to put myself out there more than necessary. I think it's evidence of how much I have changed that I volunteered myself to participate in a dance-a-thon on the beach by the lake during Holy Week in front of basically everyone in my e entire town. The verdict according to local gossip: I can't dance for ****, but I have really impressive endurance. I also got violent food poisoning after, which has luckily given me enough bad memories to prevent me from further making a fool of myself. Who knows what crazy thing I'll do next. 

Anyway, the thing I love about teaching is that you get to put on this classroom persona that can be separate from your real persona, and it's kind of liberating. In my personal case, I am a complete weirdo when I get in front of people. But as an English teacher, that's basically ok. Lady on the Street and Freak in the Classroom. It's helpful to be able to make weird faces, gestures and terrible stick figures and not be embarrassed by them. I was giving a presentation to a bunch of teachers today from Nueva Guinea (The New Banana) and I was really loud and weird and did a little bit of the Nick Miller "Panic Moonwalk" from New Girl and it was totally fine. Another theory about this is that I like living in another country because people can choose to attribute my craziness to my foreignness. 

Another fun shock treatment for pena is to cold call random Nicaraguan universities and awkwardly explain (my Spanish goes to hell when I get nervous) that someone from there should come to a fair to explain opportunities for future study to high school students. This is actually going oddly well, and it's good Spanish practice. 

So basically, friends and relatives be warned, I will probably be completely weird and far to honest when I eventually come home.