In the Classroom

Since everything is new to me here, I'm on information overload and everything is going to come out in fits and starts. Maybe chronological order is the best way to go.

I started out the day with a run. One of the other volunteers knocked on my door at seven thirty (apparently this has been going on for the whole two weeks that everyone else has been here ), and a large group of us met up in the courtyard to go for a morning jog. Usually they just run around a track at a nearby stadium, but today they wanted to actually get somewhere and have hills, so they decided to run to the cemetery. I did not make it to the cemetery. Since we're up fairly high in the mountains, the air is a lot thinner and that makes it really difficult to breathe. The rest of the group says that it gets easier as time goes on, and I hope they're right.

I hope that as my lungs grow, my knowledge of this town will too. If we hadn't gone running in a group I would have been completely lost after about five minutes. Everything looks the same. It's not just the squat, pastel houses and small shops, it's also the short streets without traffic lights and equal height of all the buildings.

We spent the morning making posters of the English alphabet, gathering supplies, and generally preparing for the classroom. Everything was complicated by the fact that I had no idea what to expect.

We took a small van up to the school in the village of Chuchuqui. It stalled out on one of the hills, so we rolled right back down. I was sitting backwards because for some reason there's a row of seats facing the wrong way. It felt a lot like falling. Again, completely irrelevant.

Teaching. It's so hard to remember because I was so terrified the whole time. And something about speaking in Spanish makes it so much harder to have an awareness of what's going on. It takes so much effort that the only way to go is forward (rather than fretting about the past or the future). Most of the day was devoted to introductions and creating rules and discussing note taking skills. But we also spent a lot of time going over "l, m, n, o, p." Apparently that is one of the most difficult parts of the alphabet song. It's so easy to forget how foreign the most familiar things can be to people.