rain day!

Wed dec 5

Hooray for rain. It’s only 26’ in my bedroom right now (1pm), as opposed to the minimum of 36’ it’s been the past week. I don’t have any thing to do really, and rain lets me stay home without feeling guilty about it. When it’s hot out, I stay home and just kind of listlessly sit around trying to make it til the slightly cooler late afternoon. But with rain I suddenly have tons of energy. I’d love to watch a movie but it’s still raining a little too hard so I won’t be able to hear it (gotta love tin roofs).

So, what’s new here? My blogging has been kind of sparse I think recently, let’s see. I’ve taught two whole English classes already, each with 18 students, so that’s pretty exciting. History has shown that during the summer the classes taught by former volunteers will narrow down to just a handful by the end, so while I was considering splitting the class into two it doesn’t really make sense, lest I end up with two classes of one person each at some point. So for now, 18 students, one hour of class, twice a week. I’m trying out the TPRS method (www.tprstorytelling.com), where students learn a handful of new vocabulary a class, and then we make a story using that vocabulary and the students answer questions about the story, repeating the vocabulary words a number of times. It has worked ok so far. I’m glad there are a couple of teachers in the class too, because I’m also trying to model the kind of interactive, multiple intelligences pedagogy that I’ve been talking to them about for two years. I’ve taken over a classroom at the high school, which is empty for the summer, and have already put up bunches of signs to create a “text-rich environment” with lots of English words, for example. It’s fun to teach again, and to remember that there is in fact something that I’m good at.

I’ve also continued my Reading Clubs. Instead of just being lazy and letting the kids come over and color, I’m determined to do little activities with them (and then they can color or play Uno or whatever). I’ve set very strict hours for reading club (Wed, Fri and Sun from 9-10am) and won’t let kids in the house at other times, because otherwise I would literally have kids in my house all the time and that would put me over the edge. Today only a handful of kids came, I’m not sure why, but hopefully more’ll make it on Friday. I have prepared 30 pairs of “magic glasses” – two toilet paper rolls taped together with a piece of string to put around your neck – for a fun creative activity, and now all I need are for the 30 kids to actually show up.

The Supervision is pretty much done for the year it seems, which is a shame because they are still technically working until January. But neither Noemi or Betty is at all interested in helping with the reading club, or doing some activity for the reading project, or even making books during the day – they just sit there in the office. I suppose I should be happy with the occasional sparks of energy and interest and hard work that we did with the reading project and learning circles during the year, and maybe not expect that it’d be a permanent change. It’s still hard tho to see all the possibilities and not be able to make things happen on my own.

The youth group continues to drive me nuts, now that they raised money with the soccer tournament while I was gone they want to spend it ALL in the next two weeks, before the president moves away. The speech she gave was that she doesn’t want to have worked so hard and then have next year’s people benefit from this, which is apparently something she discussed with the group before, and the speech was given essentially as a challenge to me I think, as she stared at me the whole time. I’ve learned that confronting her only puts her on the defensive, so after a lame comment about how “I’d like us to focus on activities instead of worrying about how to spend every last penny we have,” I was pretty much ignored and they continued to discuss plans to spend every last penny. We’re going to get group tshirts, which I’m excited about, and have a year-end graduation kind of event, which could be cute but again, it feels like they’re most excited to throw themselves a party instead of have a real purpose to the money raised. They want to buy beer for the party too, and while I only asked a pointed question at the meeting “Do we think it’s ok to use the funds raised by the group for positive activities to instead buy beer for underage kids?”, I got nowhere with that, I’m going to talk with the kids this week that we can’t use the group’s money for beer. There’s technically no way I can prohibit them from doing it, but with advice from a couple of PCV friends I’m going to say that parents have entrusted me with the health and safety of the kids, and neither the group’s money nor I can be a part of underage drinking. What I imagine happening is that we have a nice asado and then afterwards I leave and the kids and their parents buy tons of booze and party without me, but at least that way I’ve made the point. I’m looking forward to Senia leaving (which makes me sad because she is a good kid and I just haven’t done a good enough job of managing her in her role as president, but it’ll be so much better if she leaves), so I can get the group together (there are about 6 or 8 kids left) and do some goal-setting and mission-statement activities with them.

Apparently Josefina, my boss, is considering placing a Youth volunteer here to replace me, which I’m really excited about. We have to have a meeting and write up the official request form, and discuss a bit what the goals would be of this volunteer and some possible activities. Youth volunteers are supposed to work in urban areas, which we’re really not here, but there’s so much work and possibilities for someone to work with the kids who are urban enough to live close together and have a bit of money, which leads to alcohol and drug use, but rural enough so that the school has no activities and there isn’t really anything for them to do, which leads again to problems. I’ve mentioned this possibility to community members and gotten overwhelming support, so I think it could be a great way to mobilize the adults a bit too to provide more support and options for their youth. Like everything else here, I know I shouldn’t get my hopes up, but I can’t help it!