The most notable new development in my life here in Guatemala is my teaching English at the Scheel Center, so that is where I´ll start my post. From now on, every Monday and Thursday morning I will be teaching English to three of the classes at the Scheel Center. The Scheel Center, if I haven´t mentioned this already, is a school run by the God´s Child Project specifically for poor kids who are something like 3 to 7 years behind in school (because they have to work, because they have crappy homes, because whatever).
So, being plopped down in a school with no qualifications whatsoever is a little difficult. I am working with a woman named Susan, who actually is a qualified teacher in the U.S., though she taught science classes there. She has never taught English, and obviously neither have I. I´m pretty much caught between thinking that my teaching is better than nothing and thinking that the students deserve a whole lot more than ¨better than nothing.¨ In any case, it is maybe going as well as it could, considering all the guesswork we do. Today I had the pleasant surprise of teaching by myself because Susan is sick. I was pretty freaked out, but it turned out to be fine-ish. I didn´t really have to teach, because the students had a test. Poor kids. Two strangers who have never taught English and who had only spent 40 minutes with them flipped through their former teacher´s lesson plans and made up tests that turned out to be wildly difficult for two of the classes, and just challenging for the other. It´s difficult to find a good pace. Because we only teach twice a week, we can´t spend a lot of time going easy and finding where they are comfortable. In reality, I only have 12 lessons with them left. Hm. My thoughts on my teaching job are all kinds of conflicting. I´m not sure exactly how I feel, but I know I am going to keep doing it.
Other than the difficulty of not knowing what I am doing at all, being at the Scheel Center is pretty cool. The students are very friendly, and they like to talk to me. The teachers are super nice, too, and very considerate re: my pathetic Spanish-speaking ability. I get to watch a recess when I am there, too, and that is cool. The kids either just hang out at the school or go outside to the dirt lot with two soccer goals. The kids are pretty good, and it´s quite the picture. Kids playing soccer in the foreground. A hillside covered in mad poverty and the Jocotenango slums in the background. Brandon, the director of the Scheel Center, told me that some of the houses on that hill are little more than sticks, mud, garbage, whatever, and absolutely wash away when it rains hard enough. It is wild.
So, that´s a difficult place for a transition. Um. Just imagine that that paragraph flows nicely into the next.
Last Friday at the vegetable distribution, we gave out a ridiculous amount of frozen broccoli. Ridiculous. I wish I had counted all the half-full garbage bags. 60? 70? It was a small hill of frozen broccoli, a giant donation from I don´t know where. Some of the women ended up walking home with one of those garbage bags-o´-broccoli on their heads, a full bag of other veggies over their shoulders. It was absurd watching it all come out of the freezer. I laughed. But I also thought it was fairly representative of the wild donations received by the nonprofit sector. My friend Jess told me all her first grade students went home last week with two free bottles of lotion, one of which was a sunless tanner for ¨fair skin.¨ Yeah. I know.
Dang. Okay, I actually did make an organized-ish list of things to write about, but I have been on the internet for a long time, am itching to get outside, am not thinking terribly lucidly anymore, and do not care to write more. So, know that more is coming. Just...later.
Kudos for reading this, or for taking the more efficient route of skipping to the bottom.
Adios.
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