Jumping In

First blog post of the new year! My life has gotten busy, but that’s not really a good excuse. It’s just that I feel anti-social if I sit in a corner and write a blog in my house. The only reason I’m writing now is due to a class cancellation.

Me being Nica

Class cancellation. Now there’s a theme. All the experienced Peace Corps volunteers told us class would be cancelled a lot; by their guesstimation, they only taught 80% of the classes they planned. I am wayyyy below that now (this week: 3/8 classes), though I’m hoping a lot of it is just due to beginning-of-the-academic-year housekeeping. Nonetheless, I have decided to keep a list entitled “Class Was Cancelled Today Because…”

1.       Teachers had to have a meeting to figure out the schedule. The way scheduling works is the teachers report to school a week before classes begin. During this time, they attend sessions run by the school director in which they are indoctrinated about the values the Ministry of Education has decided to promulgate in the upcoming school year. This year the slogan is “Vivir sano, vivir limpio, vivir bonito, vivir bien”, roughly translated to “live healthily, live cleanly, live beautifully, live well”, though it sounds a lot better in Spanish. I didn’t participate in the multiple sessions of reading about values, discussing values, answering questions about values, and reflecting on values and how to work them into lessons.  Anyways, the point is, during this time the school secretary is in her office enrolling students, who need to drop by at some point during the week. At the end of the week, the school leadership looks at the numbers and decides how many classes each grade will have and who will be their head teachers. Then they design the schedule, a process that took about 10 days this year. In the past, this process was done on a chalk board with all the teachers present, each one shouting out their preferences and distaste for whatever decisions are reached. For the past two years, they have had help from Noelle, a Peace Corps volunteer in Altagracia (5 km away, where one of my schools is) who has downloaded a scheduling program. However, the computer-generated schedule inevitably upsets various teachers, who have their preferences changed manually. Noelle reports the process taking 8 hours last year for the school in Urbaite. And yes, occasionally classes must be cancelled for the teachers to meet and hammer out details.

2.      There is an “acto” to commemorate the death of Agosto Sandino. Sandino was a famous guerrilla fighter who battled a ruthless dictatorship in the 1930’s I believe. He was successful in his revolution, but then betrayed by representatives from the enemy who attended peace talks and assassinated. Decades afterwards, his image was co-opted by a socialist political party to become the Sandinista Front for National Liberation, the party which assumed control after the country overthrew the brutal dictatorship of Somoza in 1978. They lost control in the 1990’s but regained it in 2006 with the election of a former revolutionary leader, Daniel Ortega. “The Frente” has an amazing political machinery that works to generate propaganda across the nation and distribute hand-outs to encourage party loyalty, and I don’t see them leaving power anytime soon. I personally have no political leanings, but my host family is intensely Sandinista. So the Sandinista Youth of Altagracia organized an event to commemorate the death of their icon. I left the premises, but I saw a truck with speakers come in and heard loud music, and can only assume cultural acts involving girls dancing in traditional dresses were involved as well. No class.

3.       Students need to clean the premises. This may be culturally insensitive, but I really don’t understand why we don’t just place some trash cans in convenient location to dissuade students from throwing trash on the ground. Class is frequently cancelled in one of my schools so the students can go out and clean the very same mess that they created. My idea is make the students seen littering stay AFTER school and clean it up, since now it’s almost like a reward since they get to miss class.

4.       Head teachers need to meet to even out the numbers and gender ratios in the first-year classes.

5.       All the teachers want to attend a funeral. This week the mother of a teacher in Altagracia died, and all teachers in both my schools left to attend the service, despite not having permission from the director. I told them they were rebellious and they corrected me; united, not rebellious. And with a lot of solidarity for their fellow teachers.

6.       Parent-teacher meeting. I can only assume that teachers’ contracts obligate them to work during the school day and not a moment more, or else such meetings would be held in the evenings after classes had been completed. It was also ironic, since much of the meeting was dedicated to talking about how students shouldn't miss class.

7.       Gathering personal information from all students. I would have done this during registration.

It’s so funny to me to think about the contrast between Nicaragua and China. In China, I would come to school one week and be told I had an extra day of class on Saturday to compensate for a holiday on Monday. And before I could request a day off, I had to find a teacher to switch classes with so I could get all my weekly teaching hours in on a different day. Not so here.

I remember reading the description of life on Ometepe as a Peace Corps volunteer that a former volunteer, Joanna, had written for me in 2010. Her words of advice were to not become a workaholic like she was. At the time, I scoffed. Then did precisely that. The Peace Corps’ assignment tells us to work 16 class hours a week between our assigned counterparts. I have 21. Plus 6 at the university with an additional counterpart that I wanted to work with. I meet with each of my four counterparts for about 2 hours every week to plan our classes, in addition to actually teaching them. We are also required to have a community class. And that’s a whole other saga. I believe I mentioned in a previous post that a group had approached me about supporting their studies after they had completed a 3-month intensive English course at a nearby technical institute. So I met with the students and set up the course to begin mid-January in the evenings. They completed 3 textbooks’ worth of material, but I decided it can’t hurt to review, so I would start from the beginning with quick reviews and a lot of practice activities. Well word got around and over 30 students of all different levels arrived to my first class. I told them I would also start a beginners’ class, that those with no knowledge should switch and the new class would begin in February.One of my neighbors was organizing the beginner class and had a list of about 12 students on the day of our first meeting. Again, 30 people showed up. What’s more, all the students from the intensive English course for whom I had designed the class decided they wanted to switch to the beginner level. This felt like a slap in the face, like I had failed completely, but they assured me it was fine, especially since I would be here for two years; they had time. So as it stands now, I have two classes: my “advanced class” meets on Monday and Wednesday evenings. There is a range of levels within the class; there are several who work at a nearby tourist destination and speak English with foreigners every day, and others who struggle more. I started from the beginning to make sure all the fundamental bases were covered, and it’s nice because everything is more like a review than teaching; less work for me! I work to find speaking activities that focus on the target structures and vocabulary. I’m lucky because the Peace Corps has provided us with a fantastic teaching manual, developed and revised by volunteers from previous years. It provides lessons plans and a range of activities to choose from for each topic that the Ministry of Education mandates, and has proven invaluable to me already. I also have a binder full of teaching materials I made in China that have helped me a lot already. My beginner class meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays and started from zero: alphabet, colors, numbers, introductions, etc. There are a lot of students from the upper levels of high school who have been studying for 3 or 4 years, but I think they were scared out of the advanced class by the more fluent and confident speakers. My host brother (age 14) tells me the beginner classes are boring. Oh well. Long story short…I am very busy.

I also want to take a moment to talk about a potential secondary project that I really want to develop. Noelle, the volunteer from the sector of Small Business Development, organized a university fair last year for students on the island. She invited representatives from 11 universities in our region of Nicaragua, and the top 10 students from each high school on the island, giving students a chance to explore their options for the future. It was an opportunity that both the universities and the students loved, and I hope to organize it again this year.

As for recreational updates, my big news is that the day of The Big Race finally came, and I successfully completed the 25-km course. I realized after scouting the route ahead of time that running up the steep hiking trail was not an option, so my friend Emily and I jogged the 10k or so to the base of the volcano, hiked up, hiked down, and jogged to the finish line in 4:17:50 (almost exactly 2 hrs behind the winners!). This put us 63/106 overall and 20/42 females, which was a lot better than I thought. We showed up the day of the race to a crowd of professionally-dressed runners with camel-baks, looked at each other in our basketball shorts and t-shirts, and thought, “What the hell are we doing here?” But then we began and settled into our own rhythm and all was well; it was a beautiful day to run a race, one of the rare occasions when the peak of the volcano isn’t obscured by clouds. Emily wrote a beautiful blog post about the experience which I, unfortunately, cannot replicate because I have grown too accustomed to the awesome beauty of my island. Most of the runners were as uncompetitive as we were, walking up the volcano and resting for 5 minutes at the top to rehydrate and admire the view. It really was a team effort, as Emily set a blazing pace up the volcano and I kept her going through the final 5km stretch.

I made it!

 We made it!

A disappointing thing about the course was that there were way less water stops than I anticipated. I’ve never carried water during races in the US because water stations are so plentiful that I skip half of them, and the only reason I carried one during this race was because a sponsor pressed it into my hands a few minutes before we took off. There was only one water station between the start and the summit of the volcano, which we reached in 2.5 hours, sharing a water bottle between the two of us. Then the route down was totally exposed to the blazing sun, parching us until the final water stop, 5 km from the finish line. I was so dehydrated at the finish that I could barely drink. 

Me 'lying flat' after the race. Note the medal (for participation), scone, and nails painted with tiny Nicaraguan flags. And utter exhaustion.

After over an hour of resting in the shade and drinking water and Tang, I tried to take an ibuprofen and vomited into the trash pile of an unlucky convenience store owner. The outpouring of sympathy and support from all onlookers was touching, if humiliating, as Gatorade, electrolyte pills, and a chair suddenly appeared by my side. So I have something to improve upon for next year, I guess. All was not ruined however, as this experience was followed by Emily and I splitting a huge veggie pizza. Nom nom nom. 

Next up: a half-marathon in the city of Jinotega this weekend in the mountainous northern region of the country. But this time I actually have to run the entire course, which is allegedly entirely uphill. Wish me luck!