Hello all, just thought I’d walk you through a normal day
here in San Dionisio.
I normally get up between 5:45 and 6:30, depending on the
day. Many days, I am awaken by birds
(chickens start early!), dogs, the neighbor’s radio, etc. before my alarm. The radio is local and typically plays the
same songs over the course of the morning, and has a soundbite telling the time
about 20 times an hour. There are also
soundbites saying things like “Sabes estillo” and “Fin de semana” which
interrupts songs and drives me crazy. I
only listen to the radio vicariously, as my neighbors oftentimes play it
loud. On Tuesday and Fridays, I work in
a small rural school about an hour outside of town, so I get up early to get on
my way. I get to school around 7:15,
where the school has a quick assembly and then we start class. I teach third and fourth graders Natural
Science, and I try to make class more dynamic than the lesson book. It should be noted that we only have one
lesson book for the classes, so it is relatively easy to stray from the
sponsored plan. For most of the classes
I teach at that school, we have a bit of a conversation of the theme, and then
I dictate a lecture for the kids to copy.
Then, I have the kids read back a sentence or two at a time, and I
comment on its meaning in context. We
then give some questions to answer, maybe some drawing and explanations of
diagrams. For older kids, I try to get
more into analysis and conjecture, but it is tough because the textbooks are
very narrow and teachers are unwilling or unable to get much more information into
their hands. I also try to do some
experiments, like tracking the sun, making fossil replicas, decomposition of
various objects, planting of beans in various soils and liquids etc.
Tuesday I get done at 12, and get home by 1. It’s laundry day for me, where I wash with a
“lavendero” which is a table sized contraption with a washboard with a tub of
water attached to it. Washing is slow
and boring; many other volunteers are disposed to paying a woman in town to
wash their clothes for them, but I figure right now I have enough time, so it
seems worth it to do my own. I have my
own plastic bucket, where I soak clothes and then take one out at a time, rub
soap on them, scrub them against the washboard, then rinse the soap off. The average Nicaraguan woman is more thorough
than me, but I think my status as a white male makes me rather immune to many
of the material criticisms common to Latin American cultures. So, while my clothes may be slightly off
colored and wrinkled, I have no ambitions to improve my technique at this
point.
On Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, I teach at the urban
school in the afternoons. The noise
level is always high at about 6:30 am, but by 8:30 it is much quieter, namely
because my loud neighbors both work for the school system and have work
starting at 8. Sometimes their two kids
start playing more contemporary pop around then, but other times everyone is
out of the house. I oftentimes hear the
10 year old boy, who I teach, whining like a champ. Literally whining seems to be his preferred
manor of communication. Sometimes I make
fun of him at school for it, but generally he is a good kid. On the other side of my house lives a young
couple with an 8 month old girl and one of their mothers. They are much quieter.
Monday morning is rather slow, and I generally work out a
little, read, listen to podcasts, cook beans or something like that. On
Wednesday morning, I teach basketball to some of the high schoolers. The basketball/soccer court is right near my
house, and I have also gone around 3 times a week recently to play around
dinner time. I can say that before, I
rarely observed kids playing basketball, but once I started showing up with my
ball, people have taken to playing much more.
Granted, double dribbles and lots of fouling is part of their game, but
certainly the high school kids are improving a little bit each week. On Thursday morning, I co-plan with one of my
teachers before class for an hour or so.
After school, I sometimes have time to play soccer at the
fields, which are a little outside of town, about a half hr from my house and
15 min from the school. The level is
pretty relaxed and it is sometimes frustrating to show up only to have the
majority of time spent watching others shooting against a goalie instead of
playing. At the beginning of league
play, lots of people were playing, now the number is usually less than 10 who
show up.
I co-plan with one or two teachers in the evening, trying to
get a good grasp on the subject we will be teaching and trying to guide the
lesson plan to more amplified ends. In
total, I work with 6 teachers: 1 in 3rd, two in 4th, one
in 5th, and two in 6th grades. Because I do not teach each hour of Science
and the classes have paced themselves differently, I sometimes teach the same
class twice, or teach one aspect of a class and then teach the prior theme with
the other section. Sometimes my head
spins a little trying to remember what we taught last time and where we were
trying to take a certain theme, but generally my teachers are accommodating to
my questions.
By 7 pm I might not have done a whole ton during the day,
but I am certainly tired. As my site
mate says, it gets late really early here.
I usually have some cooked beans on the stove which I heat up, cook some
rice, and bring that into my host family’s house to eat. They are generally in their own worlds, the
mom lying in bed, cooking or chatting in one room with friends, while a few
kids are watching the latest Disney shows like “ICarly” or something like
that. The older son is generally out at
a friend’s house, and the mom’s nephew (his mom died of kidney failure 2 years
ago) who sometimes sleeps over, come home around 9 or so. Usually, I am already back home by then, and
in bed around 8:15 to 9:15.
