Muyyyy alegre!

Came back to Jinotepe this weekend to meet up with my friend Christine (who is leaving Tuesday which is a huge bummer) and a big group of volunteers that came from Queens University during this past week, their reading week, to volunteer. It was really interesting to go around with a big group of volunteers and see how much they´ve done in such a short time. We visited an orphanage they´ve been working at, painting the playground equipment, and WOW they should be proud because they did great and the kids were over the moon. All of us went to Granada Friday night...which was spectacular! Leon and Granada are both colonial towns/citys and I love Leon but Granada is awesomeee (which apparently I´m not supposed to say because apparently they were bitter "rivals"). Saturday we all took a bus to San Juan for the night which was even better the second time around, despite the insane amount of sand I have in my hair/ears as proof of a weekend at the beach. Luckily this time I remembered that strange invention called sunscreen and am not bright pink. Also I tried quesillos FINALLY. There are these women that roam the streets with trays on their head and they all have this specific sing song way of saying "quesillo quesillo QUESILLLLLLLO", in a voice that travels milllles, seriously it´s a skill. Basically what they do is take a tortilla, put a little thin patty of some cheese on it, put in a bunch of pickled/cooked/not sure what onions, put that in a plastic bag, and squirt in sour cream and salt. Sounds pretty standard but then you mush the tortilla and everything down into the corner of the plastic bag, tie the top, bite off a corner and suck the now tortilla and cheese and onion mush out of the corner. It was delicioussss, and even if it wasn´t, it was so much fun to eat. Awesome weekend, and it was nice to be back in Jinotepe for the night where I know everyone. I wasn´t particularly excited for the 4am bus I was taking back to Leon but it was worth it to be around for the whole weekend.

SO speaking of work, I´m really proud of myself so I´m just going to brag for a sentence, or twenty. I´m still loving the SOS Aldea I´m working at (I got pooped on last week which everyone thought was hilarious, I never knew poop could fly, but I´ll spare you the disgusting slimy details) and I found out it also houses kids who either don´t have parents or who have unsafe households (drugs, prostitution, etc)...which I think is pretty spectacular. Working at Las Tias, however, has been driving me crazy. Most of the kids are great bundles of teenage energy and they´re all great. The problem has been this...I teach two classes a day. In each class there are a scattering of a) kids that really want to learn english, and have a good background or have been trying to teach themselves, therefor know a varying amount, b) kids that want to learn but don´t know any english, and c) kids that don´t really have any desire to learn english, don´t really want anyone else to learn, and just want to be in class in case I have candy as a prize for a game. I´ve been having a ridiculous time making lesson plans that would engage all of the kids and make them want to be in class, and most of the time I´ve just been playing games with them that don´t really require learning any english...because that´s the only thing that will hold all of their attention. Kids are still walking in and out of class as they please, whether to hit someone in the class or blow me a kiss or whatever. So I´ve been feeling somewhat like a horrible babysitter for the past few weeks, because that´s basically what I´ve been doing (and poorly). Plus the women that work there don´t have any problems ignoring me, which makes me feel like I´m doing an even better job. SO Friday I went up to one of the ladies and told her "we need to talk"...which is where I begin to be proud of myself because confrontations with people that act like I don´t exist is not exactly a skill I posess. I told her what´s been going on with my classes, and that if I´m here as an english teacher, I don´t want to be put in a position where they just throw kids in my class that don´t want to be there and don´t care about learning. I said if it keeps on going this way I´m going to be leaving in May and I´m afraid no one will have learned anything, so I´m changing everything. I decided to give one on one lessons to the kids that want them, instead of teaching classes. I had been teaching from 10-11 and 1-2, and not really doing anything in the middle...which if I teach each kid for half an hour, gives me eight mini classes a day. I thought it was a really great idea, and told the woman that that´s what I was going to do from now on (which was the end of me feeling like I´m being awesome and strong and expressing myself in english because she shrugged and basically said "sure whatever"). Anyway I was a little nervous that my classes would feel like I was abandoning them or something, because the bummer thing is that not all kids really want to learn english, therefor not all kids will be having the classes. There´s tons of other stuff for them to do around there, a wood workshop and crafts and other stuff, but I felt a little guilty. Howeverrr, most all of the kids were super psyched! They were all singing up right away for their time slots, I told them they could do it one day a week or all of the days, depending on what they wanted. They were telling me things they specifically wanted to learn and how they were hoping to learn a lot faster with the one on one etc etc SOOOOOO I´m excited and relieved and hopeful that this will be a lot better than the big crazy classes.

To update...I had the first classes today and they went WONDERFULLY! I haven´t been this happy since I´ve gotten here. There´s a new volunteer here now who wants to teach beginner english classes, so what we finally worked out is that she was going to teach any beginners that wanted classes (as a big class, which she wanted) and I was going to teach the rest in one on one classes. So it works out that noone gets left behind or left out or anything. So AHH today was just amazing. I was pretty aware where each kid was in their english, whether it was learning new verbs that they needed, present, future or past tense, or just needed help understanding homework. During each kids class we made a sheet of the verbs or tenses or ideas they had learned and FOR once instead of throwing their worksheets/papers on the ground, every single kid wanted to take it home. It was awesome working at each kids level, because they really opened up which was great. Even the two kids that are unmanageable together, when seperated, turned out to be very very smart and focused. I´m really psyched to teach again because WOW I´m pretty sure they all absorbed more in that thirty minutes to themselves than they have the whole three weeks I´ve been here. Slowly everything is falling into place and I´m pretty thrilled with everything right now. Adiosss!