Taking the Slow Boat: Adventures on the Rio San Juan

Words of the Day:
los raudales­-rapids
el timon/la guia- rudder
tender un hamaca- hang up a hammock
retirar platos- clear plates









Check out this excellent letter Mark Twain wrote back home about his travels on the Rio San Juan: http://www.twainquotes.com/18670316.html Apparently he was really bitter about only having ham sandwiches to eat.

Fleeing the insanity that is a fiestas patronales celebration, my sitemate Christina and I headed down to San Carlos to meet with lots of other PCVs (peace corps volunteers) from all over Nicaragua for an 11 person, 2 day, 60 kilometer kayak trip from the department capital of San Carlos down the famed Rio San Juan to the tiny town of El Castillo, where the Spanish army was once stationed in a small fort to fight English pirates who came in from the Atlantic Coast, up to the river to attack the colonial capital of Granada.

While some things have changed since Mark Twain's travels, the Rio San Juan is still a gorgeous place, and is very much deserving of all the recent tourist hype, which is mostly geared at getting more people who are already in Nicaragua to make the trip down. While you can make it down to El Castillo in about an hour and a half if you take the fastest boat, we decided to take the scenic route, kayaking 30 km daily. This was tough on the arms, but was really cool because we got to take things slow, chat with everybody and see tons of flora and fauna up close.

The Rio San Juan is wide and muddy, but generally fairly calm with a slow, steady current. It's one of the wettest places on earth, but this time of year we had two rain free days. For the most part, there's only rain forest bordering the river, although in a lot of spots now there are cows, tiny villages and there's a giant bridge to Costa Rica being constructed, which will really create a lot of change in the region. Despite the small human presence, there are plenty of uninterrupted stretches, with trees and vines of every kind, bromeliads growing on everything, flowers tumbling from every corner.

The river is literally crawling with wildlife. Different birds stood guard over their hunting ground on every inch of the river.
In only two days, we saw:
-howler, spider and capuchin monkeys
-lizards- possibly iguanas or chameleons
-fish jumping
-parakeets
-zopaillotes (buzzards)
-kingfishers
-jacanas? I'm going by the Birds of Mexico and Central America guidebook my mother sent me...
-a few birds of prey
-great blue herons, egrets
-a roseate spoonbill
-pato chanchos (pig ducks, no idea where the name comes from)
-no crocodiles, toucans or parrots, sadly(?)

After a long first day of paddling with a late start, we arrived exhausted and sun-scorched at Grand Hotel Lodge, just in time for sunset. It was a neat place, with little rustic cabanas that were pretty clean given the location in roughly the middle of nowhere. There were plenty of dirty European hippies hanging around, but it also had the vibe of being with a Nicaragua family, with children, dogs and women bustling around, cooking over an open fire. The owner, Martin, was probably one of the most friendly and exuberant hostel owners I've ever met. If you spend any extended period of time in Rio San Juan, you will see Martin or his picture.

After a rough night due to a birthday party for the owner's brother which we were too tired to participate in and being awakened by howler monkeys at 5 am, we got back onto the water by about 7:30. There was more gorgeous scenery, especially near the town of Boca de Sabalos where there where small rapids as the current picked up a bit. Near El Castillo, things became more bucolic with cows, international aid projects relating to cacao and fewer trees. Exhausted, we became a little but anxious to know where El Castillo was, but we kept assuring ourselves that it would be "just around the next river bend." Finally, we sighted it! The old fortaleza guarded the small stilt houses below it, jutting out into the water where a series of rapids created smoothing noise. We found a cheap hostel right on the water and hung out on their porch for a while. With the power in town out, we had some well deserved fish tacos and coconut water by candle light, before getting some very necessary ibuprofen and sleep.

The morning, we got AMAZING moccachinos at Borders Cafe, made with freshly ground cacao and high quality coffee, before wandering up to the fort to take in the great views of the river and wandering more around town. There are only a few streets in El Castillo, but its charming, clean and colorful. In the afternoon, my sitemate and I opted to take the slow boat back, watching the social cohesion along the river, where everyone in the boat knew each other, passed packages or let on passengers in tiny little communities...It took 3 hours, but it was a relatively relaxing ride. We pulled into San Carlos right at sunset, on a clear enough day to see the giant volcanoes over in Costa Rica.

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Replicate our trip!

-Pro Tips: Hit the water early, and bring sleeves/hat, etc. to cover up. It's bright out there. Bring a flashlight. Light and electricity are dicey in San Carlos and south. Bring plenty of food and water, there really isn't anywhere you can stop along the way, other than Grand River Lodge, and Boca de Sabalos.

When to Go: Depends what you're looking for. Dry season (February-April) is a nice time to go because you're not as likely to get rained on, although it is definitely hotter. Semana Santa is a nice option, because you'll still be on the water, but it won't be as mobbed as the Pacific beaches. There might be fewer birds and a few trees will be a little brown, but its still one of the wettest places on earth...You also won't be able to get the famed giant shrimp for which the river is well known. It all depends how you're going and what you're going for.

Getting to El Castillo:
Fast boat (1.5 hours)- C$140
Slow boat (3 hours)-C$90
Kayak: Kayak rentals can be somewhat difficult to get in San Carlos for longer trips. It's tempting to try and do things yourself, but you probably won't save money and you definitely won't save frustration. Going with an outfitter is worth it in this case.
The Portuaria rents kayaks hourly. Hotel Cabinas Leykos has a few boats. We got our kayaks from an outfitter for C$800, which included two day rental and transportation of the boats back up the river. Ask around and see what you get.

Great River Lodge (approximately 30km downstream):
US $3/ hammock, $7 dorm bed, $15 private cabana
Breakfast (with coffee): C$60
Free horseback rides and cacao plantation tour and chocolate
You could stay in Sabalos too, but it's about 40km downriver.

El Castillo:
*Note for budget travelers: you can find cheap hostels, but it's hard to find cheap eats in El Castillo- food is about double the going rate in other parts of Nicaragua, and most places don't have kitchens that you can use.
- Hospedaje Universal: $10 rooms with 2 singles or double beds. Nice balcony overlooking the rapids.
-Borders Cafe: Moccachino C$50. That's all you need to know.
-El Chinadegano- Nice little restaurant right on the water with C$180 fish tacos. Most restaurants on the water have similarly nice ambiance and prices.
-La Fortaleza- C$0-50 depending on how good you are at smooth talking, what you're doing in Nicaragua and whether or not you're taking pictures.
-Nena River Lodge- a blue house midway down the street- ask the owner for C$10 coconuts
-Cacao Cooperative: C$2 for locally made, 70% cacao goodness. On a small path to the left of the crossroads for Loma Nelson/La Fortaleza.

Thanks Wikipedia!

Turns out there's a fancy word for the language feature exhibited by redundant idioms such as "in your own words" "null and void" "free gift" etc: pleonasm. Coolest sounding word ever.

The Verdict on Turtle...

I had Guiso de Tortuga, Turtle Soup, for lunch today. Guisos are sort of a stew/soup hybrid, made with a base of corn masa and in the case of this particular soup, bread as well. Turtle tastes like chicken. Kind of. It was very stringy, very fatty meat. So the white meat tasted like stringier chicken. But there were dark meat chunks of it that had a rich, almost mushroomy flavor with an aftertaste of something earthy. Overall, the guiso had a hint of something gamey to it, like venison or sausage. Not sure how I feel about this particular food, but it definitely was something new.

Teaching Anecdotes, Week 5

I was done teaching for this week at 8:45 on Tuesday morning, due to Fiestas Patronales, meetings, and other various events. It's been bone dry here this week. Even in one of the rainiest parts of Nicaragua, we haven't had rain in nearly a month, which is pretty normal. When I washed my clothes today, the water immediately turned coffee brown from all the pent up dust they'd acquired. Despite the dryness, many different fruits are coming into season. Jocote, a cashew relative that can be eaten green before they ripen or once they turn pinkish orange are being sold everywhere. And the sweet yet tangy, slightly sulfuric smell of mangoes practically dripping with ripeness permeates the various sites of produce purchase. The sunsets are becoming even more spectacular as the sun inches closer to the island of Omepete day by day...So there are a lot of nice things going on, even if there isn't a lot of teaching.

Class cancelations: I don't even feel like counting there are so many.

Oops: I  accidentally asked the principal of my school to borrow a record player instead of a cd player. Can't translate that one directly.

Most fun: To have 10th graders practice talking about their likes and dislikes, my counterpart and I combined the games "Cocktail Party" (ie go around and ask other people questions) with "Taboo". We taught them other ways to say yes and no, like "Absolutely", "Yep", "Nahh" and "Nope". Then we gave them candy. They had to ask each other about different types of music they like, but if they answered with "Yes" or "No", they had to give the other person one of their candies. It sure got them talking, especially after they had been barely participating for the earlier portion of the class.

Runner Up: Teaching "Very good friend" to the 7th graders in San Miguel was a good time. This song never fails. Kids love it and it's annoyingly catchy, which is great because it helps them master verb to be.
"I am am am a very good friend....you are are are a very good friend...etc......."

Longest wait for transportation: 1.5 hours. I finished teaching class in El Tule at 3 pm, a town that's roughly halfway between San Miguel and the department capital, San Carlos. Usually, there's a bus going north that I can take home that comes right away. For some reason, it did not come. Nor did anything else for a looooooooooooong time. I wandered around for a while, because I was bored out of my mind and impatient. It was interesting to see more of the community, since I usually don't make it much past the school, which is right off the highway. And I ran into some of my students from Saturday school. When I visited El Tule for the first time, I was overwhelmed by the poverty I saw there. Now, I didn't really notice it anymore. El Tule is actually on the rise, growing more prosperous because its proximity to the recently constructed highway makes it an excellent point for trading and transportation. It was good to remember that you can err in your appraisals of things without careful speculation.

Best interaction with children: I taught my 3 and 5 year old neighbors how to say "Hello" and "Goodbye". They previously had known only how to say "I'm sorry" which is endlessly entertaining on it's own, but they thought "Hello and Goodbye" were the funniest thing they had ever heard, and they almost fell over they were laughing so hard.

Sugar...Oh, Honey Honey...You are my Candy Girl*: More Book Reviews

*Heard this song on the radio the other day . It's always fascinating what oldies music gets picked up down here.

My eyes lit up when I found Sidney Mintz' Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History in the Peace Corps office, because I reminded me of one of my favorite classes in college, Professor Steven Bailey's anthropology class "Food, Nutrition and Culture" where we discussed the main ideas from it extensively. Secondly, since practically every drink and snack here is sugar coated (pun most certainly intended) I was looking for some answers on why cuisine here had developed this way. Sugar laden refrescos naturales  (fruit juices) and sodas, candies, caramels and sickly sweet coffees are the norm. The extremes to which desire for sweetness manifests itself is evident the negative health effects that are increasingly rampant in the developing world, such as diabetes and tooth decay, which are not yet on the scale of the US epidemic but are sure heading that way. What factors, in addition of the evolutionary predilection for sweet things, make us crave the stuff?

Mintz' work is like a more academic anthropological cousin of books like Mark Kurlansky's Cod: A History of the Fish that Changed the World, Salt: A World History or Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, which create revisionist histories by looking at the effects of foodstuffs (mainly). Sugar happens to be an even more fascinating tale than the other consumables traced by the previously mentioned authors, because it is intimately connected to so many aspects of (dark) aspects of modernity- slavery, colonialism, exploitation, factory labor and capitalism.

Focusing particularly on European and more specifically English usage, Mintz traces the expansion of sugar technologies from the Arab world and India to the west and how demand for sugar revolutionized production systems as it tore traditional ways of life in the Americas and Africa asunder, leading to a quasi-feudal but capital intensive system relying on forced or low paid labor that he argues is just as important in the rise of factory systems and capitalism as the rise of artisan and professional guilds in Europe.

Mintz goes on to chronicle how the massification of sugar from exclusive use by elites to an everyday commodity revamped some power structures (ie the balance of power between domestic manufacturing elites and planters in the colonies) while simultaneously reinforcing other structures of power, such as class divisions within Britain.  Furthermore, he demonstrates how sugar accompanied or even protagonized (shoot, is that a real verb in English??) the shift to the industrial age, by providing British workers with cheap, rapidly available calories: tea and sugar with white bread. It's fascinating to imagine a world without sugar and then watch as it becomes a spice, a plaything of the rich, an accompaniment to exotic beverages, and eventually, as demand expanded production and drove down the price, part of almost everything we consume. Mintz wrote the book just as high fructose corn syrups, packaged foods and snacks were becoming a norm, but the argument that sugar revolutionized eating, undoing the structure of the meal over centuries is even more salient today.

Much of the hellish process of cultivating sugar remains scarcely changed in the present day. While the obsession with sweetness brought on by sugar has lead to cheaper alternatives like corn syrup, it goes without saying that sugar is still an important crop, and here in Nicaragua is very important economically. The drive for sugary profits is still killing many worldwide: particularly, young, strong Central American men. "The malady of the sugar workers,"Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD), a disease by which the kidneys fail as the tubules stop functioning,  is currently plaguing sugar workers in Central America, as well as in other sugar growing regions of the world, such as Sri Lanka and India. According to some estimates, the disease kills more men in Central America than HIV/AIDS, diabetes and leukemia combined. Unlike the usually causes of kidney disease in developed countries, which are usually attributable to deteriorating kidney function as a complication of diabetes or high blood pressure, the causes of this disease are not fully known, but there are a few theories:

• Sugar workers are literally working themselves to death, as long days of back breaking labor in 100 degree heat leave them devastatingly dehydrated and quickly leading to kidney problems. Recent research on rats suggests that re-hydrating with sugary drinks can have seriously compromising effects on the kidneys, consistent with the type of damage seen in sufferers of the disease. 
• Exposure to toxins in pesticides that are inappropriately applied, without protection or used despite bans for environmental reasons are leading to the deaths. In addition, these chemicals getting into the groundwater and increasing exposure. However, some scientists argue that this isn't the main cause because the types of damage these chemicals provoke to the kidneys are not consistent with the types of damage observed in effected populations. 

To me, it seems like these deaths are over-determined, in a region of the world where finding legitimate ways to support a family are scarce, and that it's likely that a lot of factors are responsible.
Here are a few articles to provide more information:

• An excellent series of articles at Public Integrity.org
• The Guardian's take
• A photo series in Nicaragua's sugar growing regions, in the New Yorker

On the subject of hiring out dirty work to others, I also recently finished Sebastian Junger's War, a book intimately exploring the war in Afghanistan, from the perspective of a platoon of infantry soldiers fighting in the Korengal Valley, near Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. The author was embedded with these soldiers for approximately a year (on and off). With troop levels finally drawing down in Afghanistan, there's no better time to reflect on what the war meant and what it means for the future. Will Afghanistan be the last time America fights such a war in such a way? Or will counterinsurgencies in foreign lands continue to be the way of the future? Will we continue to entrust war to a slimmer and slimmer margin of the population, allowing them to be damaged physically and psychologically to ensure our foreign policy priorities? Overall, Junger lets the reader draw conclusions about the larger significance of the war and focuses on the psychology of battle and of brotherhood. I found the book much easier to follow than the film version of the same events, Restrepo, produced by the recently deceased journalist Tim Hetherington, which we watched last year when I was a member of EPIIC, an intensive year long exploration of various themes put on by Tufts' Institute for Global Leadership. We also got to met Colonel Ostlund, the commander of the platoon featured in the book, and ask him questions during the course of our symposium, which was a fascinating opportunity. So reading this was sort of full circle and really interesting.

Tortoise, It's What's for Dinner

Word of the Day: tortuga- turtle, tortoise

I was putzing around the kitchen early on Saturday morning, getting ready for school, when my host mom came in. "Did the tortuga scare you?" she inquired. Given that I was still attempting to convert myself into a functional human with my morning coffee, I wasn't sure that I had understood her. But no, my Spanish comprehension in this case was accurate, and she took me to see the tortoise that was currently residing in our shower. I should preface this by explaining that this was in our indoor shower, which is your regular, standard issue shower with sliding doors. For practical purposes, we almost never use this shower because we don't usually have running water at most times of day when one would want to shower. Instead, we shower outside, pana y barril style: bucket baths.  Far more eco-friendly, efficient and preferrable on chilly (relatively speaking) mornings when you don't want all the parts of you to be cold at the same time.

 I have no idea how I didn't notice when a turtle was brought into our home, because was rather large and I was home the entire day when it supposedly appeared. Regardless, it quickly became very clear that turtle would  become food, and soon. Yesterday, someone from my host family, or maybe a bunch of them, were responsible for killing it.

An instinctual American reaction to this might be, that's sort of barbaric and foreign, why eat a defenseless turtle? And killing it yourself! ?! I wasn't home for lunch yesterday, so I didn't actually eat it, but I may have to soon. And maybe it's especially delicious. After my initial mental freakout, however, I forced myself to take a step back and be critical of my own culture. Is the hypocritical American charade of pretending that there is no killing involved in meat, eating things raised in cages, slaughtered in factories, served without bones or feathers or fins out of plastic packages any more noble? It's an essential question that I've wrestled with, in my on- again, off- again vegetarianism. Do I deserve to eat meat if I'm unwilling to partake in its production, essentially foisting my morally problematic work onto someone else? Of course, this type of dilemma is admittedly a very fachenta problem, only an issue for someone who, gracias a Dios, has enough food to eat and income to make choices. As foodie Anthony Bourdain bluntly put it in an episode of No Reservations about Mozambique "Much of the world already is living a vegetarian lifestyle, and they ain't too $%&#*^%  happy about it." It's true, I've never before seen so much aspiration towards meat eating as I have in Nicaragua, where most of the population can only afford meat de vez en cuando.

The majority of Nicaraguans, especially in rural areas, have some connection to the meat they eat. Not so much for most people back home. The tendency of post-industrial societies like America (by no means new but increasingly exaggerated)  to outsource our morally problematic tasks is explored in a fascinating book by Timothy Pachirat, "Every Twelve Seconds: Industrial Killing and the Politics of Sight". Through anthropological work undercover in a slaughterhouse, he draws connections between the way we produce (most) meat in America and other macro-trends in politics, such as our willingness to outsource fighting wars to a tiny majority of Americans, increasingly, drone operators.  We've grown too squeamish to confront so many of the things that make and so we make sure this work falls to invisible populations, compartmentalized from our daily lives.
In my next post, I'll connect this "Politics of Sight" to recent reading a staple of modern eating: sugar. Sweet, sinister, sugar.

Cartesian Geckos and Rastafarian Planters

Word of the Day:
la sombrilla- umbrella/parasol. Or literally, little shade.

It's easy to become accostomed to things, and stop even noticing them. I'm writing this post about some recent changes, and some staples that I have never described, but would like to share before I get used to them.

-It's sort of spring here, roughly. Everyone refers to it as summer, but it seems springish to me. There's bright yellow and pink flowers blossoming on lots of the trees, although many of the deciduous trees are still bare. However, compared to the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua which is very brown right now, there's much more green here, from all the palm trees and there's still a lot of green grass. Since it's dry season now, we haven't had rain for two weeks. Since there aren't clouds hanging around at night anymore, the stars are incredibly clear and bright now. It's incredible. Supposedly you can see 88 constellations in Nicaragua. I'm excited to do some stargazing. The sunsets have also been incredible. The sun is setting closer and closer to the two volcanoes of Ometepe island, a brillant, gigantic orange orb descending into sparkling blue.

-It became hot this week. We had been blissfully enjoying at cold front that had blown down from Mexico. Mexico's been responsible for a lot of great things in my life lately, namely cold fronts and the telenovelas I watch most days, Abismo de Pasion (Abyss of Passion), Porque el Amor Manda (Because Love's in Charge) and Amores Verdaderos (True Loves), although I don't always manage to stay up late enough to catch this one, since it starts at 9:30 pm and isn't very good. Anyway, I walked out of the shade of the classrooms on Monday morning into the midday heat and was like, "O, now I understand, this is what hot feels like." To prevent the lobsterization of my skin and create my own shade, I've picked up the Nicaraguan custom of bringing along a parasol. Unfortunately, my umbrella is one of the least functional umbrella in the history of umbrellas, and already has metal bits sticking out, even though I just bought it. It also flips up at the slightest opportunity, no doubt providing entertainment for the locals, amused by such incompetent umbrella usage.

-Geckos run wild in the houses here, eating bugs as they wander around. At night, since the bugs are drawn to the lights, the geckos roam there too. Since the house where they live has white ceiling tiles, the random distribution of geckos always reminds me of Geometry class in high school, when we had to make graphs with Cartesian coordinates. Or maybe like an M. C. Escher lizard tesselation. In other amphibian sightings, we have a small frog that lives in our kitchen.

-Speaking of bugs, these weird little bugs that sort of look like miniature lobsters have showed up en masse. I literally massacred thirty bugs the other day, in the span of about 5 minutes, because they seem to be attracted to white things, like Borges short story collections and grammar charts and notebooks.

-Pineapples cost a dollar here. They have white flesh and aren't as sweet, but still. NOMzzz

-My house now has Rastafarian plant containers to hold the ferns on our porch. They are unbelievably rad.

Teaching Annecdotes, Week 4

Most fun: Teaching "If you're happy and you know it" to 8th graders, and breaking out the high five
"If you're happy and you know it" is an awesome song. You can't be unhappy after singing it.
I taught another one of my 8th grade classes and some of my 7th graders how to give high fives, as a combination of being encouraging, reviewing numbers and teaching American culture. Seriously, I challenge you think of something American than giving a high five: a hearty dose of encouragement and goodwill.

Most humbling: Realizing the sacrifices students make to come to school 
Because of interruptions in my classes this week at the school in El Tule, my counterpart teacher gave the students a take home assignment. El Tule is a fairly well connected community just off the highway, but it draws students from a very large and very rural area. Therefore, my counterpart had to go through his class roster community by community to see where students live, so they could work together easily. Later, he explained to me that some of the students walk over an hour and a half from the highway to reach their homes. They might leave home at 8 or 9 am, walk in the hot sun to the highway, get a bus, and then wait around for school to start, not returning home until dark. Beyond the challenges this poses for the students themselves, it's also a challenge that the teachers deal with: integrating students whose only experience of school has been a one room schoolhouse with one teacher with their "urban" peers in the 7th grade. Other students from rural areas live with relatives in El Tule proper during the school week and return to their nuclear families on the weekend. Given those kinds of circumstances, the kids who show up are really dedicated, which makes working with them a really great experience.

Most frustrating: The constant interruptions to the students' schedule/ limited amounts of class time
Nicaraguan students at public schools only have school for 4 hours a day. Including the singing of the national anthem, the singing of the Literacy hymn (dating back to the Alfabetizacion campaigns of the 1980s), a  break, and gym class (once a week). So naturally, as a time-sensitive gringa, I balk anytime there is an interruption, however legitimate it may be. This week, we had a lot of interruptions in each of my schools, which was surprising given that there weren't even any holidays, but are only poised to increase next week when the town wide parties to celebrate the town's patron saint begin....Three different NGOs/government agencies came to give charlas, which were all on really great, relevant topics, from human trafficking to interpartner violence. It's just frustrating that they can't find a better system for imparting this information, like keeping the kids after school for a little bit. It was extra frustrating since these visits were not pre-announced, and my coteacher had planned to give a test to check in on the students. Additionally, the majority of the students and many of the teachers at the school in San Miguel left school midway through the session to attend funeral services for a well-respected grandmother in the community. It's impressive that the community is so tight knit. And in Las Palomas, there was an American medical brigade visiting to provide medical services to the community since it was the biggest space in the community. All these interruptions provided great, necessary things, but they were interruptions all the same.

When I first arrived in Nicaragua, I questioned why the school day was so short, but there are a lot of reasons why it's unlikely to get longer anytime in the foreseable future. Most schools, especially in more rural areas are used as a primary school in the morning, and a secondary school in the afternoon. Alternatively, many schools in more urban areas have multiple "turns", with multiple sessions of high school. There simply isn't funding to construct more physical space, or additionally, hire more teachers. Secondly, Nicaragua is still a very agricultural country. Lots of kids help out around the farm or the house in the morning. Thirdly, as mentioned above, with the travel time it takes students to reach school, it would be difficult to extend the school day without negatively affecting these populations.

Oops: While a health worker was talking to my counterpart teacher just outside our classroom, it fell upon me to explain an assignment we were going to do. Since part of TEFL volunteer's role is to use more English in class, I was naturally explaining in English. Slow, cognate peppered English. The students were generally messing around, and yelling at me to explain in Spanish. The phrase "No freguen" slipped out. I'm not even sure this was the best way I could have conjugated it, Dejen de fregar probably would have been better. I was looking for an equivalent phrase to "Knock it off" which can be kind of playful and threatening simultaneously. I think what I said has that meaning, vaguely, but it's a little bit vulgar, or rather, not the kind of thing a teacher is supposed to say. They tattled on me when my counterpart came back. Luckily, we have a really chill classroom environment, so it wasn't a huge deal, but probably I need to look for a new phrase that's more professional, respectful and appropriate.

A small success: In one of my 7th grade classes last week, one of my students was being a real wise guy and giving me a hard time, which was a problem because I was teaching class for a bit on my own. I wanted to chew him out very badly, but I've been trained to use positive reinforcement to deal with discipline issues in a way that treats students with dignity, so I restrained my impulsive urge to yell, and took him aside to explain that he is an extremely bright student, and that he will do great things in school if he can pay attention and respect his classmates and the teachers. This is true. In class this week, he was super into participating and behaved far better than previously. Don't know if I deserve credit, but maybe being called something other than necio! necio! (roughly: misbehaver) had an effect. The power of positive thinking? I hope.

Head scratching moments: I had a discussion with one of my counterparts about whether the phrase "in their own words" was redundant or not. She said that an American teacher told her that it was, because "their" implies ownership. I can't imagine the phrase any other way; "in their words" sounds wrong to the Native speakers' ear, so that was what I told her. But I can kind of see her point. Then, we got in a discussion about using "What" vs "Which"? In Spanish, the word for which is used far more often than it is in English, at least I think so. For example, in Spanish, the question "Cual es tu color favorito?" would be directly translated as "Which is your favorite color?" implying that you are choosing a color from within the pool of possible colors that exist. Maybe that's correct according to some grammar book in some library somewhere, but I dare you to find anyone in America who talks like that in real life. So I basically told her that we only use "Which" in cases where the action of choosing is more explicit or right in front of you , ie "Which pen is yours?"  But now I'm paranoid that I talk badly, and I owe her a better explanation.

Teaching Annecdotes, Week 3

Most entertaining: Teaching "Baby Shark" to a bunch of reluctant 10th graders

This is a camp song that a PCV taught us during our training...that we're really obsessed with, because it's goofy, and you can use it to review a bunch of different kinds of vocab. My counterpart and I were pretty excited about "Baby Shark" but our enthusiasm was not exactly matched by our students, understandably, since they are at pretty much the worst age ever in terms of being embarrased in front of your peers (14, 15, 16...). But with much cajoling, we got them to sing...sort of.

Here's the lyrics to "Baby Shark":

Meet the shark family....

Baby shark...do do do do do do...Baby shark...do do do do do...Baby shark....do do do do do do do Baby shark.... (accompany this by holding your arms out and clapping your hands together vertically)

Momma shark...do do do do do....Momma shark...do do do do do...Momma shark....do do do do do....Momma shark (accompany this by clapping your hands together from the elbow)

Papa shark...do do do do do do....Papa...do do do do do do...Papa shark...do do do do do...Papa shark (accompany this with the biggest clapping motion you can make)

Grandpa shark...do do do do do ....Grandpa shark....do do do do do ...Grandpa shark....do do do do do...Grandpa pa (accompany this by knocking your fists together - toothless shark!)

You can add extra family members, use mother/father,etc. for begginers.

Now, on to practice irregular past tense verbs! Still using the same do do do do do/ repeat 4x rhythm...

Went for a swim (make swimming motions)

Saw a shark (make a shark fin on top of your head)

Shark attack (Flail wildly)

Lost a leg (Jump around on one leg- You can add other body parts if you want to review that vocab)

Happy shark! (rub belly)

Most difficult: Teaching class without a board

At the school where I teach on Saturdays, one of the classes got locked out of the classroom they use in the annex. So we had an outdoor class. Luckily, there were chairs for most everyone and a table that a bunch of students could write on. Unfortunately,there was not a board. Given that the students don't have books and that English basically does not sound anything like it is written, a board is a pretty essential thing for teaching.

We were going to teach colors and few other adjectives, and luckily i had color swatches. We rigged up a board out of a few pieces of scrap paper that I had on me, and used the "board" to introduce the concept of adjectives coming before nouns.

I had the kids go on a scavenger hunt to find colorful objects and then we described them. It kind of worked. 

Lessons learned: Don't count on technology

One of my counterparts and I planned a lesson about listening, using some recordings we had. We didn't have a text version of all of the recordings...While we did have electricity, the cd player refused to play the cd we had. So we had to improvise most of our lesson. Next time, I'll be sure to bring a text version along.

You woke up looking like a chicken: a slow paced transportation adventure

Phrase of the Day:
las palomas- the doves. Nice name for a town, eh?
pio pio- what chicks say

Saying of the Day:
La que de amarilla se viste, a su hermosura se atiene. - Really rough translation: People dressed in yellow think they're hot @#$%.Or think that they have a really nice body. Wish I had learned this saying before buying a yellow shirt....especially a yellow polo shirt that gives me a uniboob and ads easily 10 pounds to my figure. O the fabulous fashion of Peace Corps service...

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I had some excellent #gringafails on the way to work today. I was supposed to meet one of my counterpart teachers in his home in a nearby community, Las Palomas, at 9 am to plan our classes for this afternoon. This did not happen.

I left my house conservatively at 8:15 am. The community where I was working today is not really that far away from my town, maybe 15 miles max, but transport there is an interesting conundrum. I can get a taxi to take me there, but if I am the only passenger, occasionally I get charged an obscene fare roughly equivalent to $3.50 US (this is exorbitant given how much teachers make round here). So, unless I run across another person who happens to be going that way, I take a taxi to the junction and then wait for a bus to pass. There are usually plenty of buses that go by at this hour, but the majority inconveniently take a 15 minute rest stop between the junction and my destination. Hence, the need to  leave my  house 45 minutes early, por si acaso...

As I was walking to the taxi stop, I ran into the principal from one of my schools. Did you wake up as a chicken? he rhetorically asked me. I laughed nervously, wondering if that was some sort of an idiom that I didn't know yet.  When I got to the bus stop, I realized I had narrowly missed a taxi, but I noticed a bunch of other teachers were hanging around, including the vice-principal of the school I was going to.

While I had not woken up as a chicken, as far as I could tell, I had woken up grumpily, to wash laundry at 5:30 am after having nightmares that everyone I knew was dead. So I was not really in the mood to chat with anyone,despite the fact that the town drunk was trying to talk my ear off. I fumed and tried to just sit quietly, ruing the fact that I hadn't made another cup of coffee. No more taxis went by for easily 15 minutes.

Then, I saw the mini bus that goes to Las Palomas. The mini bus has a schedule that this notoriously unschedule like. From what I can tell, it leaves sometime between 8 and 11 am every day. I have never actually managed to take it. But I saw it drive into town and figured it would pick up some more passengers and leave. Great. I would take the mini bus and save a dollar.

After waiting for 30 minutes without sighting the minibus again, and having turned down several taxi rides, I was becoming concerned about actually arriving to Las Palomas ever, never mind on time without major embarrassment. So when the minibus zoomed by, I leapt up off the rock where I was sitting and ran towards it. It left me in the dust, literally. All the teachers were like, "Where are you trying to go, anyway?" When I told them Las Palomas, they told me that the bus wasn't leaving until 10 am and that they could bring me in their van since they were taking a trip to a city in the same direction. Fabulous, a free ride! The only thing PCVs like more than free food. After another few minutes, we climbed into their van. Then, we sat for 15 more minutes. Ironically, while I was waiting in the van, the bus to Las Palomas left. It was now 9:15. Then we went to the car garage to put more oil in the van. More sitting. The driver dirtied his shirt in the process of putting oil in the van, and so we drove back to his house so he could change.

Finally, we hit the road. The principal, who is quite the jokester, clarified that my bright yellow Peace Corps polo shirt was what was sending off chicken like vibes. Which made a lot of sense. And made me highly self conscious for wearing such an absurdly loud color. He then proceeded to sing the chicken song, "Los pollitos dicen pio-pio......." since there was no music in the van. It was embarrassing, because I don't take too kindly to being the butt of jokes.

At 10 am, I arrived to plan classes.

Moral of the story: There's no such thing as a free ride, if you're accounting for time and dignity.

6 Months in NIcaragua: A few reflections

As of today, I've been in Nicaragua for 6 months. This is the longest I've been away continuously from my home in Jersey and it's also the longest I've ever lived away from the States. It's a long time and it's a short time, in the scheme of things. It's hard to really measure what's changed, pin down exactly what'd different about me in the last few months, although so many surface things have changed that sometimes when I look in the mirror I can't even recognize myself. Who's that girl in tight jeans and a polo shirt with painted nails and hair bling? Who's that carnivorous girl who goes to church, sits around watching telenovelas, doesn't own a bicycle, goes to bed at 8pm, occasionally uses styrofoam cups, and wanders arounding singing children's songs/generally being foolish? Sometimes I feel as if my personality has been erased almost completely, and I haven't quite gotten back around to reinscribing a new one. But then I have moments of strength, or zanyness, or an opinion slips out, or I curl up with a good book and I know I'm still in there, somewhere.

Here are a few things I've learned these past few months:
-That referring to cold showers as "refreshing" is a euphemism. But that they are not really that bad after a while.
-That chickens and dogs near and far can make a sinister chorus at 3 am, as if they were plotting a revolt against their captivity.
-That parrots can learn to catcall.
-That knowing grammar rules and having better spelling than native speakers has almost no bearing on your ability to actually speak a language.
-That English doesn't have a word for the male version of a mistress or the relationship between two sets of parents-in-law.
-That you can erase permanent marker off a whiteboard by writing over it in dry erase marker, that you can erase a whiteboard using only a sheet of paper and that chalk will always get all over everything and there's nothing you can do about it.
-That while the shortest distance between two points is a line, it doesn't guarantee that speed will be involved in any way.
-That long bus rides are awful, but give you plenty of time to think.
-That any surface can be a comfortable place to sleep if you are tired enough.
-That patience must be practiced, and practiced, and practiced. But that bringing a book along can sometimes help.
-That big is beautiful, beauty is subjective, and the exotic will always be viewed as beautiful, no matter what (sweaty, exhausted) condition it presents itself in.
-That every country, no matter how small, and every person, no matter how poor, craves dignity.
-That it is possible for a "poor" person to have a much nicer phone than you.
-That a universal health care system, while far from perfect, does a lot to reduce suffering.
-That being bored is a choice to let your immediate surroundings limit your imagination.
-That sunsets and water can take on infinite permutations of color.
-That it is hard to keep in touch, but it is harder not to.
-That friendship is just as valuable as romantic love, or maybe more.
-That strangers can become family if you want them to be, but there is no substitute for those you've loved longest.

21 months left. Bring it.

Reading Reviews (Volume 2)

Vivi mi vida hasta este punto me atrevo a afirmar que no hay nada quitotesco ni romantico en querer cambiar el mundo. Es posible. Es el oficio de la humanidad se ha dedicado desde siempre. 

I've lived my life until the point in which I dare to affirm that there isn't anything quixotic or romantic about wanting to change the world. It's possible. It's the task to which humanity has dedicated itself since the beginning of time.
Giaconda Belli, El Pais Bajo mi Piel / The Country under my skin

The arbitrary view of individual responsibility-with the individual standing on an imaginary island, unhelped and unhindered by others- has to be broadened, not merely acknowledging the role of the state, but by recognizing the functions of other institutions and agents.
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom

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Apparently, I mostly just read books about war and traveling. And political imprisonment, although I haven't got back around to finishing Gulag Archiepelago. I'm trying to see if I can complete a highly unofficial Peace Corps challenge of reading 100 books during my service, up to about 19 right now. Given that I'm close to a 1/4 of the way there in terms of books, and only about 1/8 of the way into my service, it seems feasible. Although I think I handicapped myself with the 1000+ page books early on....

 -Infinite Jest- David Foster Wallace
Finally finished. CRAZIEST. BOOK. EVER. I have to say though, I felt that the ending was a little underwhelming...but over all, one of the most creative books ever written.

-Holidays in Hell- PJ O'Rourke
PJ O'Rourke's comedy can be really funny, but this book hit a sour note for me. It features vignettes of his travels as a journalist to war torn places, looking for humor...Let's just say we've come a long way since the 1980s (when this was written) in terms of political correctness. It just wasn't really funny although it was vaguely insightful. The basic premise of the book reminded me of a really intense Bosnian film- "No Man's Land"- possibly the movie with the darkest humor that I've ever seen.

More than a Native Speaker- Don Snow
This book is a beginning guide to teaching English abroad. It had some helpful suggestions on professional conduct as well as guided ideas for teaching each of the 4 skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing (listed in order of importance for language learning, according to the author). It also features an entire appendix of activities for teaching culture lessons. On the whole, I'd say it's a better read for the complete newbie or someone who's teaching lessons to advanced speakers, say business English or college students.

Development as Freedom- Amarthya Sen
A classic in economic development literature, that I probably should have read while ago, this a well- reasoned defense of why the ends are just as important as the means when considering economic development. Democracy, women's rights, social safety nets, equality don't necessarily have to be sacrificed to give people the means to acquire the type of life they desire, which Sen considers as the end goal of development rather than traditional rubrics, such as measuring increases in GDP growth. By considering how people can be made more free to pursue these ends, the focus of development work can be revolutionized.

To the End of the Land- David Grossmann
Echoing a reviewer, this is one of the best anti-war novels ever written. An Israeli mother, Ora, goes on an extended journey on foot in the Galilee and narrates her son's life to his estranged father, in the hopes that this will keep the son alive as he completes a military operation. Along the way are exquisite depictions of the relationships within families, between mother and child, between citizens in a state plagued by the uncertainty of terrorism, between (reluctant) oppressor and defiant subaltern.

Ora is a brilliantly written character...perhaps I found her relatable: she's a lefty for sure, but afraid to truly challenge the establishment/larger structures, a feminist, but uncertain of what that means for her daily life, outraged by the abuses of power she sees, but often inarticulate....

I thought the book did a good job implicating everyone in the violence of Israel/Palestine. While the Palestinian narrative is limited to Sami, Ora's cab driver, I think it lends the book authenticity, by not trying to narrate outside what the author intimately knows: the perspective of liberal Israelis who feel immense guilt over the way their country conducts itself yet feel powerless to change the larger dynamics at play.

A beautiful, intense, and riveting read.

 El Pais Bajo mi Piel (The Country Under My Skin)- Giaconda Belli
A fascinating account from a bourgeoisie poet who was involved in the FSLN (more familiar in America household as the Sandinistas) almost from its inception. It describes Belli's awakening as a feminist, her struggle to balance her motherhood with her work life, love, marriages and the fight for her country. Beyond the fascinating and still relevant questions raised by her personal life, it narrates enticing episodes about the revolution in Nicaragua for any Latin American studies nerds out there.

 Ficciones (Fictions)- Juan Luis Borges.
Exquisite. Intellectualism at its finest. Reflections on the nature of time, the boundaries of the physical world and imagination, the relationship between literature and the real world...wrapped up in relatively manageable short stories.

A Dead Bat in Paraguay- Roosh Vorek
I picked this up in the Peace Corps office because I was feeling nostalgic for South America, and I thought it would be about Paraguay, which is a country that really fascinates me...WRONG. This was the most pathetic travel adventure/memoir I've ever read. It was so bad that I started hoping it was a satire, but even that would be upsetting because if was satire, it was poorly executed. The only reason I continued to read this garbage was that I was stuck on the slowest moving bus ever and it was my only entertainment. The book consists of a microbiologist who quits his job to travel to all the countries in South America and "find himself." For him, finding himself turns out to be code word for sleeping with as many women as possible. Since he is a completely culturally innabropriate asshole (complete with your typical backpacker facial hair/diarrhea) and a generally bad person who doesn't seem to think women are people, he has a hard time getting women to sleep with him. Of course, he is far too clueless to realize that his own behavior is the culprit, and BLAMES the women for his inability to "find himself". The only redeeming quality of this book is the (sort- of) accuracy with which it describes hedonistic hostel culture, the way guide books standardize travel experiences, and the kind of people you might meet while traveling in South America. That being said, I've met WAY more interesting people on my travels...and I haven't traveled as nearly widely as he did. Just saying.

Anyways, if you're actually interested in Paraguay and looking for writing that doesn't make you want to punch fratty men in the face, read "At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig," an excellent history and travelogue of the country .

The Solitude of Prime Numbers- Paolo Giodano
A quick but haunting read, which occasionally hints at mathematical concepts in a way that makes the non-mathy person feel smart, I'm not really quite sure what to feel about this book. Written about the almost love affair/friendship over a lifetime between an anorexic photographer and a mathematician struggling with his past, it's chock full of beautiful and astute observations of human nature, yet failed to create characters that inspired compassion or let the reader inside their heads: the distance they felt from society was maintained towards the reader.

I wonder what it would have been like to read this in the original Italian. Also, I wish the picture of the author on the back cover had been bigger because he is shockingly attractive. Seriously.

Running with Scissors- Augusten Burroughs
Another memoir, this time dealing with extremely dysfunctional family circumstances, was simultaneously entertaining and horrifying, and demonstrates that people who are supposedly "sane" can be just as messed up as those who supposedly are mentally unwell.

Spanish Time in the Pueblos Blancos

Spanish Time in the Pueblos Blancos

Last week, I was away from my site for a few days for a Spanish workshop. It was a rather stressful experience, since I missed school for a week, and a lot of other things that were going on, and on top of that they were literally throwing grammar at us. But it was good to have a chance to review "proper" Spanish, for what that's worth.

In between doused with a fire hose of grammar and skyping with people back home since my host family had internet, I had a little bit of time to explore the department of Masaya and the Pueblos Blancos, the "White Towns," thusly nicknamed for their traditionally white- washed walls (although not that many of them are white anymore). Masaya is one of the smallest departments in Nicaragua, and you can get around easily by taking mototaxis, essentially motorized, covered tricycles that sort of look like beetles.

Each town in the region has its own specialty. Masaya is known for its giant market, including lots of artesania, handicrafts. Catarina is known for its vivero, colorful plant nurseries, and a mirador that overlooks the Laguna de Apoyo, a gorgeous blue lake formed where a volcano exploded a couple thousand years ago. On a clear day, you can see across to the city of Granada and gigantic Lake Nicaragua.  San Juan del Oriente is known its world class pottery, featuring pre-Colombian motifs. Masatepe is known for its wooden furniture and cajetas, sweet treats made from things like caramel, coconut, and nuts.

Niquinohomo, the town where I stayed for the workshop is known for...well, I'm not really sure what it's known for, other than being Augusto C. Sandino's birthplace. A guerrilla fighter who fought against the United States in the early 20th century, Sandino's determination to fight against imperialism and for equality have made him a ubiquitous national hero. We visited the Museum dedicated to him in Niquinohomo, which is a bit underwhelming, but has a look of cool pictures. There's also a gigantic statue of him in the central park, which depicts him in his wide brimmed hat, trousers, and boots, all decked out for asymmetrical warfare.

I stayed with a wonderful host family for 5 days, which I expected to be awkward, but it really wasn't, because they were used to random gringas traipsing through after already having hosted 3 or 4, and I was overfed to the extreme (thank goodness I had a cold and my body was craving calories) and cooed over like a baby, and had a lot of interesting conversations. Plus, I got to teach songs in English to two absolutely adorable 5 year olds.

One of the other upsides of the workshop was that we got to see other volunteers from our training group. I've seen everyone from TEFL a lot, but I hadn't seen most of the Environment volunteers since we swore in as PCVs, so it was great to catch up. It's funny to run into people after months, and feel like it hasn't been that long. Asi es la vida in Peace Corps. Any form of companionship is welcomed, whether it's been a month or three or six.

A comparison of my teaching experiences

Words of the Day: Acronym Addition!
ESL- English as a Second Language- This is what I taught as a volunteer in the US...or more  accurately....
ESOL- English for Speakers of Other Languages- This term is sometimes favored instead of ESL because many people learning English know other languages as well, a strength that can be harnessed in the classroom
EFL- English as a Foreign Language- This is what I teach now.

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Since I've been a volunteer ESOL teacher for many years, making the switch to EFL has been interesting.

ESOL, as taught to (adult) immigrants in the United States, has goal of helping them communicate to be able to integrate into the country where they currently reside. The idea of "integration" is a loaded and complicated term particularly for non-white immigrants, but I'm trying to use it in a benign way related to language functions... Students generally are motivated, because they immediately recognize the relevance of English in their lives, whether in helping them get food at the grocery store, speak with their child's teachers or get a better job. They may (although not necessarily)have possibilities to interact with native speakers of the language in their workplace or places in their community, or at the very least, hear native speakers on the television and radio. Classes, particularly for beginners, are easy to focus, and almost automatically geared to a communicative approach, because students need to be able to be able to perform at least a few functions of spoken language to reach their goals.

EFL teachers in contrast, teaching English in countries where it is not widely spoken, can fall into the trap of teaching the English language as you might teach any other subject: physics, math, etc: by teaching the rules without demonstrating real life relevance, which may sometimes be very abstract and hard to excite students about. Students may struggle to see why learning the language is an important skill and generally present lower levels of motivation.

On the other hand, EFL can sometimes be an easier setting to navigate. Generally, you are working with students who have one language and culture in common, which makes classroom management and giving directions infinitely easier. If students are really lost, you can refer back to a common language. Secondly, there's a possibility that your students are of a similar age and level of education.

ESL classrooms can be far more complicated spaces for a teacher to guide in this respect. For example, in my last ESL volunteer gig in the States, I was teaching (or co-teaching rather,  alongside a Brazilian immigrant) students originally from El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Brazil, Turkey, Nepal and Haiti. If I referred back to Spanish, half of the class hung in the air. I could not always call upon Spanish to build confianza with my students and show them that I cared. Some students were in their early 20s and others were in their 80s. Some of my students were college graduates in their countries of origin, while others might have had a 6th grade education at best. Cultural differences in what classroom behavior is appropriate led to difficult moments. For example, the Haitian students preferred to use Haitian Creole to help each other understand what was going on in class, which led to loud and animated exchanges, which were deemed unbearably rude and inappropriate by the Turkish grandmother in my class. It was a little bit more free wheeling and it was sometimes harder to move quickly through material. On the other hand, students paid more attention because they knew I could not repeat instructions in their native language, a different situation from working with students in the institutos, who often try to exploit the fact that I speak Spanish.

Certainly, this multicultural melange could be called upon to create interesting lessons. In one brief example, we had students think about what time of day it was in their country, and what daily activities their friends or relatives might be doing at that moment. We could talk about foods or places they missed, what their town or city was like...there was an incredible richness that this multicultural space provided that I miss sometimes.

But working with kids is a lot of fun too.

Missing Voices: Struggling to Engage Girls in the Classroom

La princesa esta triste. Que tendrá la princesa?
Los suspiros se escapan de su boca de fresa.

The princess is sad. What troubles the princess?
Sighs escape from her strawberry mouth.

Ruben Dario, Sonatina

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Word of the Day (review)
pena- shyness, nervousness, embarrassment

This post uses a lot of broad generalizations, particularly about gender, that I'm not entirely comfortable making, but it's to the end of verbalizing a vexing problem that I'm really passionate about, so I'm going to make them. Sorry, grey areas, you're being slighted. 

One of the biggest challenges I've faced so far in my first weeks of school is effectively engaging female students in the classroom. To vastly overgeneralize, the girls in my classes are devastatingly shy, particularly in the schools that lie outside the "casco urbano" (urban center, where I live). They giggle, cover their faces with their hands or their books, refuse to even try speaking, or give up easily if they make a mistake. Or just shut down entirely. This behavior isn't exclusively confined to female students, but it is more certainly more pronounced.

Usually the two or three really outstanding students in each class happen to be male. This has lead to some uncomfortable moments for me in which counterpart teachers have made comments like "What's going on here? It seems like the boys are better than the girls!" to urge the girls into talking. There are exceptions of course. One of my most stellar students happens to be pregnant. But in the classrooms I've observed so far, the trend of women outperforming men in the classroom is not in evidence.

Perhaps a communicative English classroom, featuring lots of movement and speaking and activities is more appealing to the active learning style of boys, which is awesome because this doesn't happen enough and according to a lot of teaching research, generally, appealing to more active learning styles is better for everyone. I'm using gendered dichotomies in a way that I don't like here, but I think you get the drift...My fear however is that my methods are somehow disempowering female students.

As a former overachieving student, who was always passionate about learning, and probably a bit of a precocious teacher's pet a lot of the time, I have trouble relating to this phenomenon as much as I am concerned about it. Secondly, as an American, I have to watch my reactions and remind myself that I'm from a culture where messing up is a pretty acceptable and normal part of life. In a classroom in an upper middle class suburb in the States, being shy, nervously giggling, and wasting class time would probably be more embarrassing than just trying to say a word you didn't know. Americans fearlessly butcher Spanish and French and Italian and German and Chinese.

So what can I do to help girls grasp the importance of a second language and motivate them to enjoy it, as well as school and learning more generally? What messages are they receiving outside the classroom from their families, from their daily lives or activities, or even their churches that lead to such behavior and how can I, as an outsider and a foreigner, help to encourage them to achieve and participate? My strategy so far has been to bestow absurd levels of positivity and encouragement on the students. (YES, YOU CAN do it. I know that you can. I would not ask if you couldn't. Just Try! Excellent!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! EXCELLENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) Another, more subtle approach, is to give students women role models in the activities we do. In addition to having a female English teacher (moi, at a minimum) present in the classroom, which can sometimes be kind of rare in Rio San Juan, I try to make flashcards or use images with women in professional roles. For example, for a class on occupations, I made flashcards with a female doctor, police officer and engineer.

Somewhat relatedly to all this, I observed a Musa Dariana (Darian Muse?) contest during school this Saturday. Held to celebrate Nicaraguan poet and national hero Ruben Dario, it featured a female representative of each classroom competing to be the "Musa Dariana" of the school. Contestants had to dress up in traditional folklore costumes, answer questions about Ruben Dario's life (On what date did Dario die, and where? What newspapers did the poet write for? etc.) and then recite a passage from the poet's work, while wearing a different outfit, that supposedly corresponded to their poem. I had mixed feelings about the contest. I appreciated that it was more than a simple beauty contest- their outfits/get up only counted for 20% of their score, and it was awesome to see girls confident enough to take the stage and recite a poem in front of 200 people. However, it reified an outmoded concept, memorization, as the ultimate goal of learning, rather than praising critical thinking, writing your own poetry, being the next Ruben Dario... It is cool that the Nicaraguan educational system exposes kids to so much good poetry though. And that their national hero is a poet.

If any readers out there have suggestions for what to do motivate and encourage girls to feel comfortable and confident in a classroom (or any other public space) let me have em!

So, what do you do again?

I've been meaning to put up this video for a while...it's about 15 minutes long, but it's a really good description of what Peace Corps TEFL volunteers do in Nicaragua, made by a former volunteer.




I haven't given a workshop or taught a community class since training, but I am planning to do those things eventually.

Classroom Anecdotes from the First Two Weeks of School

Hours taught: 40ish
Classes shortened or canceled for meetings, celebrations or holidays: 6

Most amusing:
A 7th grader (the youngest students I teach), came up to me after our first English class and said "Thank you teacher. I liked class and also you are very beautiful." Would have been really excellent had he said this in English, but I will take what I can get. If my students thinking I'm attractive gets them to learn and like English, I guess there are worse things...

Runner up- I danced in front of 200 students with one of the male teachers during the Musa Dariana competition (previously described) at the school where I teach on Saturdays.

Surprising smash hit: A very good friend.
This is a very simple chant to practice verb "to be" disguised as a song.
(I am, am, am a very good friend....You are, are, are a very good friend...etc)
The kids loved this song, and they wanted to come up to the board to sing it again on their own after we had moved on to another activity. Then, I heard one of my students singing it to a friend from another class as she walked to the bus. I almost jumped for joy and wanted to do this.

Something I did for the first time: Jazz Chant
I implemented a jazz chant in class to practice the modal "can"! Popularized by educator Carolyn Graham, jazz chants use the rhythm of spoken English to help students learn "language chunks". (MMM chunks of language...not  as fun as chunks of say, chocolate, but still fun if you play your cards right.) It was a impromtu thing, so it was a little rough, but it was a good time.
Can she milk a cow?
Yes, she can. Yes, she can.
Can he drive a car?
No, he can't. No, he can't. (Finger wagging included here, obviously)

Something I'm thankful for: Working with a Nicaraguan counterparts.
Not only is it really fulfilling and fun, but they also get to share their insight for things that will resonate with the students. For example, when we were teaching our lesson on abilities, we were going to use the phrase "use a computer" as one of the vocab words. My counterpart realized during class that there isn't even a cyber cafe in this town and instead added in two phrases as a replacement: "milk a cow" and "cut grass" aka chapear potrero aka cut tall grass with a machete. The students had actual everyday exposure to these concepts and the lesson went far better as a result.

Tried and true (ish): This is a pen.
Did one of TEFL volunteers favorite dinamicas, "This is a pen," with varying degrees of success, based on level of pena in the class. In some classes, the kids laughed because it was funny (which is the point). In some classes, they laughed and covered their mouths and almost had breakdowns from nervousness. So, mixed results. But when it worked, it worked. This is a great dinamica to introduce objects, especially classroom objects, but you can do it with almost any vocabulary, or you can do it with older kids to work on intonation (whether your voice goes up or down at the end of a sentence) or sentence stress (what word within a sentence is emphasized). It goes like this:

A: This is a pen. (Person passes pen to another person)
B: A what?
A: A pen.
B: Oh, a pen.

"La Gringa que corre" visits "El Oasis de Paz"

 Phrases of the day:
"La gringa que corre", aka the American who runs, is quite literally how I am know to my community, or at least the taxi drivers, who routinely see me running along the road. Every taxi driver I've ridden with in the past week has asked me to clarify which gringa I am based on this information (There's another really awesome PCV gringa in town, my 'sitemate" Christina, who works in the Small Business program). This seems like a pretty good thing to be known for, rather than other possibilities....

El Oasis de Paz (Peaceful Oasis) is the nickname of the Island of Ometepe.

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After my first week of classes (stories to come later), I went to compete in the Fuego and Agua Ultramarathon event on the island of Ometepe this weekend. Because I am only slightly insane, I didn't actually attempt to run an (ultra)marathon, but rather stuck with the more manageable 25k, about a 15 mile race.

It was truly epic and personal record breaking on two counts:

-Most forms of public transportation used in a day: 7

In an 11 hour journey basically across Nicaragua: bus, taxi, school bus, boat, school bus, bicycle and car

During the 12 hour return journey: school bus, boat, bus, taxi, bus, bus and taxi

-Longest distance personally covered on foot in a day: 25k in 4 hours and 20 minutes, which is  including a hike up a volcano that is technically active, but not currently exploding out magma or anything crazy like that.




                                                PCV Runners show off their race swag...


                                                            Volcan Concepcion just after sunset

Island view from the ferry across

I look way too happy in this picture

Adorable! (Photo credits to Laura Bisbee on the last 3 of these pictures.)

I am fairly obsessed with islands, especially in Latin America (some readers may remember my obsession with Chiloe, an island off the Southern Chilean coast). Ometepe, formed by two volcanoes in the middle of Lake Nicaragua, was stunning. Even though I can see the volcanoes from San Miguelito at a distance on clear days, I was literally floored at how gorgeous the twin cones of the volcanoes that form the island looked when I arrived at San Jorge, where the ferries to the island depart from, green bases rising up from the bluest of water, to a foreboding grey peak on the taller volcano.

Ometepe is touristy, but it's just starting to take off as a destination, and it's still rough around the edges and sort of remote, which adds to the appeal in my opinion. I didn't actually go to the part of the island where most of the tourist hotels and beaches are (Volcan Maderas), but rather stayed on the more populated towns around Concepcion, the taller and "active" of the two volcanoes, where my PCV friend Laura lives and teaches.  Beautiful sandy unpaved roads abounded, cows wandered untethered through pastures and into the roads, people ambled on bicycles past tiny towns with colorful houses and even more colorful flowers, bourganvilla spilling over walls...All with the giant cone of Concepcion majestically looming overhead. Fabulous sunsets, and beaches and phenomenal view of the stars at night. And a calm, laid back island feel washing over it all.

After taking a crowded 5am public bus to Moyogalpa, the main city on Concepcion to go to the start of the race, Laura and I discovered that we looked a little bit out of place, particularly in terms of our running gear, but also in terms of visible musculature...People were decked out in some fachenta spandex and we were wearing some slightly scruffier duds. I wasn't even wearing socks, because they bother me when I run and I wanted to be my best. I sought solace in the fact that we have little control over our diet, don't have access to a gym, and have to deal with mild sexual harassment while running...not challenges that I assume are generally faced by the average North American runner or wealthy Managuan/Costa Rican, who were the majority of the people running, besides the other volunteers. Luckily, my mother's saying "You've got to look good to be good" doesn't hold true for running. We ran down those spandex clad fancy people. Well, some of them.

Play by play:
First hour and a half: The race started at 7, and it was cool with a fabulous island breeze. We ran past cow pastures, occasional settlements where people started to watch, along sandy but fairly flat paths. After the first aid station though, the soils got rockier, more volcanic and the incline steeper. Finally, we reached a point where it was not advancing our cause to run anymore and switched into hiking.
Hour after that: Climbed the volcano. Some wicked amazing endorphins grabbed me and pulled me up that mountain like a crazy person. It was cold, jungle-y and awesome. Also there were howler monkeys at one point. The summit of the trail was gorgeous- it was incredibly windy, but you could see up to the peak of the volcano, and down to everything around for miles. Also, there were high altitude gigantic aloe plants that were the coolest ever.

Next hour: Getting down off the volcano was not as easy as we had thought it would be. Steep terrain with slippery volcanic soil in full sun with dusty gusts made for slow going. The view was awesome though- we looked out over the bluest blue of the lake, across to grass growing on what looked like the cracked earth of an old lava flow and up a beautiful sweep of green with a few trees leading up to the top of the peak. Also, there were some random cows.

Final leg: Finally were able to run again, but were exhausted and hot, as the midday sun was starting to come out in full force. Laura got me through a lot, especially this one part where I almost decided to call it quits. She is the sweetest person ever in addition to being an formidable and multi-talented athlete. For instance, she introduced Nicaraguan teens to ultimate frisbee during ACCESS Camp.
Post race, we celebrated with pizza, a trip to her awesome host family's beach farm on the lake side of the island for dinner and a whole lot of "lying flat."

It was such a beautiful time: friendship, physical activity, and exploring. It's been very much against my vaga nature to be as settled down as I have in the last few months, and truth be told, with camps and meetings and things I haven't even been in San Miguelito all that much. So it was good to get some travel time, even if it was solo. But I read a book (El Pais Bajo mi Piel/The Country Under my Skin, a memoir by Nicaraguan poet Giaconda Belli) and National Geographic in Spanish (appropriately the 125th Anniversary edition about human desire to explore) and had some interesting conversations with strangers, so it wasn't that bad, even with the mega-amounts of time. But it does feel good to be "home" now, too. Off to teach about 400 kids some English this week!

Feliz Dia de la Amor y Amistad

Feliz Dia de la Amor y Amistad! As Valentine's Day is known here...
I've been thinking a lot about the friendship side of the equation today, how incredibly lucky I am to have friends and family/"family" scattered literally all over every corner of this country, all over the United States and in so many others. What a beautiful world! May your kindness and love come back to you tenfold.

Corn Powdered Girl Gives Saturday Teaching a Try

Word of the Day
pena- shyness, nervousness, embarrassment.
Emily (dancing around capriciously, generally being weird): No tengan pena!!!!!! (X100)
Students faces: We are not convinced by your antics, gringa. We're still going to have lots of pena.
=====================================================================
When my alarm sounded at 5:30 Saturday morning, I momentarily felt extremely disillusioned with my job. There's something especially sacred about Saturdays, and having to rouse myself at this hour went against all of my better instincts. But after drowsily sprucing myself up, fixing myself a cafe con leche, and hitching a 20- minute taxi ride, I arrived for my sabatino class in a nearby community called Never Oporta, comically referred to by people around here as "Never". Sabatino classes are held on Saturdays, mostly for teens who are working, who got pregnant or have dropped out and are trying a second round. It's also for adults coming back to school or who perhaps have never studied. Theoretically, it's only for people who are over sixteen. It's sort of like the Nicaraguan version of getting a GED.  Since "Never" is currently in the process of constructing a building for the high school, however, the majority of the students who come to the sabatino are young, at approximately the typical age for going to high school. Many of them probably work, on farms or helping around the house, and some live in agricultural communities that are very far away. Most people showed up nicely dressed in their uniforms, blue bottoms and white tops. It felt like a real day of weekday class, except that there's a lot more to cram in if you're only teaching once  a week.

While we were waiting for school to start, I toured classrooms (they use the primary school, which is why they need to wait until the weekend) and met the principal, a very nice man who was eager to introduce me to his school. "Pregunteme!" "Ask me!" he goaded, trying to load me up with information. This phrase and his particular intonation unfortunately reminded me of a bizarre and hilarious character on Mexican comic genius Eugenio Derbez's show "Derbez en Cuando," which led to me being awkward because I was trying really hard not to laugh. Womp womp. Anyway, I started off teaching a section of 8th graders with my counterpart teacher Xiomara, who's about my age and the possibly the sweetest person in the entire universe. The students were well behaved, somewhat in contrast to their urban peers. For example, when I went over to ask a boy not to use his cellphone, he just handed it over to me. Boy, they were shy though. We tried to do a game where they would introduce themselves... "My name is ________" and think of a word, in Spanish if they wanted, that began with the same letter as their name. I begged, pleaded, put myself entirely at their mercy, smiled freakishly, with limited results in the back corner. The kids were not even going for "My name is _________." They were just not going to talk. The 7th and 11th grade sections went much better, in this regard, because the kids were less nervous and even knew a little bit of English, in the 11th grade class.

A new language, when you're just trying it on, maybe even for the first few years, is like a straightjacket, until it finally begins to open doors and allow you to see things in a new light. I had a bizarre urge at many points in class to just stop and break down the act and just chat with them in Spanish, however selfish this would be from the long term perspective. It was almost physically painful to see vibrant young personalities reduced to so little.

One of my students really provoked this reaction. He's maybe 12 years old, tiny, and he sells vitamins on the buses as a traveling salesman, for lack of a better term. This kid is a legend. The first time I saw him, I wished I was had a video camera to record him, in case it ever fell upon me to teach public speaking again. Excellent posture, projection, appeals to the heart strings, excellent knowledge of whatever (questionable) product he was purveying, details memorized but not in a way that appeared canned. Seriously, legendary. In contrast, seeing him trying and hack his way through "May I leave the room?" made me want to unlock his cage, unclip his wings, set things right, as bad as this instinct was. In some ways, being confident and highly competent in your first language (L1) can be a temporary mental barrier to gaining confidence in your second language (L2). Not to say that it can't also be a huge advantage, especially with languages like Spanish and English that share so much vocabulary.

The other teachers for the Saturday class are all really cool. We shared a lot of corn snacks and corn drinks during the break and after classes were down for the day. People are so instantaneously generous here. For instance, if you buy a bag of corn snacks, with an amount inside that is about a one person serving, you automatically offer to share with everyone, and they might take you up on it. Or if someone gives you a piece of breadfruit, you split it with the person next to you, aunque sea un poquito. We do not really have this custom with single serving snacks, ie a bag of chips, a candy bar, etc. in the States, so I really need to work on not being such a gluttonous egotistical American.

I had one other experience that was really interesting. One of Xiomara's former students, who's a teacher in a rural community called "The Clouds" (this lead to about a half hour of jokes about how he had "fallen from the sky", "had his head up in the clouds..."etc) came to talk to me in English. He was really excited because given his location, he doesn't have many opportunities to practice or speak English. Given the dearth of opportunities, he was so nervous he was literally shaking. The fact that I had the power because of a few weird coincidences of my birth to literally make a grown man lose his train of thought because he was so nervous was a funny contrast to the sense of powerlessness that is an inevitable part of a PCV life. Powerlessness over the distance from family or friends, which only multiples at the appearance of the slightest adversity (for them or me),  powerlessness over the weather, over when the water will come so that I can do my laundry, over what I will eat for my meals, over whether there will be real ice cream that's not frosted or defrosted 6 times in stock anywhere in town, over whether the chickens and dogs will create their own symphony at 3 am...It was a weird contrast and a weirder moment. I hope he got something out of our brief conversation.

Conclusion on Saturday classes: Definitely not ideal for "having a life," but absolutely worth getting out of bed for.

Walking Around, Shape Shifting

It's been a bit of a slow week, just waiting for school to start, and dodging in and out of meetings that are not exactly riveting, especially in my second language. I'm trying to stay calm and go with the flow, but not having a firm schedule established that I know will not change is killing me a little bit, especially since I'm finding it hard to fit in all the time, particularly for planning, that I need to work effectively with my 4 counterparts.

To help combat this tension, a lot of what I've been doing this week has simply been walking around. My site mate, Christina, made a pact that we would walk around every day to be more visible in the community. This has yielded some unexpected adventures and conversations, with each other, and community members. We ended up going down an interesting rock scramble past a beautiful ravine on a trail that goes somewhere still unknown, and we've seen some truly spectacular sunsets over the lake.

 Today, at one of the teacher's suggestion, we went with some of the profes to matriculate students. When I heard that this week they would be matriculating students, I assumed that this meant the parents would come to the school and sign their kids up. This is not what happens. Instead, the profes go house by house, throughout each sector of the town, to sign people up. This was a great way to meander down some side streets I didn't even know existed, meet people and have a visual connection to where they lived. It's always fascinating to me too, a vicarious pleasure, to see what people's homes look like.

One thing I absolutely love about Nicaraguan homes is their flexibility and openness, to change, to the elements, to passersby. Unlike American homes which are practically closed off fortresses in comparison, with very fixed shapes, with defined rooms and heavy furniture, Nicaraguan homes take form according to the needs of the moment. Having another child, taking on a renter or have family moving in with you? Add some concrete on back and you've got an extra room.  Move a bed into another room, add a curtain and a bit of wood, and you've got an extra space. Have neighbors chatting with you out front for a long time? Move a few plastic chairs out and you've got an instant porch. People's inventiveness and creativity is amazing. Function drives form, completely.

Running Chronicles: Volume 2

The other day, we had a volunteer meeting/Super Bowl Party with all the volunteers who live in my same department, Rio San Juan. As an ice breaker, we had to go around and write "the thing that is helping us get through our service" and then other people had to guess who had written what. The first thing that came to my mind was "running." Particularly in the last few weeks, running has really emerged as my #1 way of dealing with the stress of adjusting to Nicaragua, and particularly, dealing with the stress that living in a society where machismo is a latent part of daily life (As opposed to say, the United States, where it's less in your face, most of the time, but we've still got a long road to walk in terms of gender equality.)

This may seem counter-intuitive, since I've mentioned that running attracts its fair share of unwanted attention, ranging from catcalls (piropos) to awkwardly getting checked out to just strange looks. At first these things really did bother me, until I realized I could harness this discomfort to fuel my running. Hence, the machismo to endorphins cycle was born.

While piropos are at their root, a form of male control over the female body, I came to the realization that when I am running, no- one has more control over my body than I do. I am physically strong and powerful in ways that most cultures' gender roles cannot accommodate  And so as you smirk and me and honk your horn, I laugh and keep going. My mantra, sometimes whispered to myself, sometimes screamed out in the humid air after the offending car/motorcycle has past: "I AM MY OWN PERSON. I AM MY OWN PERSON. YOU CANNOT CONTROL ME."

Creepiness? A machista comment? Yet another person asking if I have a boyfriend? Another money taker on the bus obsessing over my eyes? Simply the psychological equivalent of calories to drive my down the road, to endorphins to happiness, to strength, to well- being, to the calm that will allow me to get through the day.