Sunday, April 25, 2010

Work Update

Hi everyone. So we still haven´t done anything major in the schools except introduce ourselves, but we´ve been to almost all our schools which is something of an accomplishment considering that we have 19. I´m still a little stumped about what to do in the afternoons usually, except that I´ve made a friend who is a teacher at a Middle School and on Fridays I go with him when he teaches P.E. so that I can play/help. It´s exhausting, but not for the activity, I barely do any running. It´s exhausting for the amount of Spanish I have to listen to and for how long I have to be focused and for how fast the kids that age and my friend all speak. Super draining, so I sleep well on Friday nights.

I baked a cake yesterday, the kind that we always had for our birthdays at my house, except that as my mom correctly predicted, I couldn´t get the frosting to set, so I went and bought a box of frosting and used that. It wasn´t quite the same, but it worked. It´s weird how hard it is to find brown sugar here. I haven´t found it yet...

Hmm, I think that´ll be all for now. I´m out of ideas and I´m getting sleepy...

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

In Site

4 Abril, 2010

Okay, so it's been almost a week that I've been in my site, and so far I love it. I'm living with a host family who is really great. They BUILT ME A BATHROOM! When we came to look at the house I was just going to have a room and share all the others, but during the week I was gone they built a bathroom in my room with a shower, and since they had met me at that point, they dug down into the floor so that the shower would be tall enough. It's the first time I've ever had a shower that I didn't have to stoop to use since I have been tall. Pretty crazy. Anyway, then they helped me find a bicycle and they're all really nice and well educated and I like hanging out with them, so life is good. There are 3 kids who live here during the week and there are 2 more that come with their family on the weekends. They're all adorable, and we play games pretty much every day. So I'm enjoying my time here at home.

We haven't started working yet at all, because it's still Semana Santa, so there's nothing we can do except plan. That means that I'm pretty much just hanging out with my host family and occasionally going down to hang out with my partner and site mate. I need to get out and find a soccer team or at least some random kids to play with, but my host brother is supposed to show me the soccer field soon, so after that it should be easier to find people to play. Our town isn't very big, but I haven't gone exploring yet because I just like to hang out with my host family most of the time to get to know them. Anyway, that's about it, I mean other things have happened, but I'm not going to talk about them right now.

12 Abril, 2010

Okay, so we've had about a week of work, and so far it's going fine. At this point we pretty much just have to visit the schools and meet all the teachers and the students and stand around looking pretty (or at least gigantic and strange). Today we went to seven schools with our CTA (district superintendent), and they all picked dates for us to visit in May, so that's good. The most important thing is that the teachers find out who we are and what our program is about, and that the students and communities start to see us and recognize us as being different from tourist gringos...

I don't really know what else to talk about right now, except that today I'm going to start the process of getting contacts (for my eyes, not people's numbers) and I'm really excited about it. Also my old host mom had her baby last week, and I'm hoping to meet her today, so that's cool. Alright, more later. Thanks for reading. Feel free to give suggestions or ask questions in the comments because I'm not really sure what kinds of things I'm forgetting to talk about; I'm sure there are a lot.