Still Truckin Along and Slowly Forgetting English!

New tradition: I will start all of my blog entries with one new story of how my complete lack of mastery of Spanish has gotten me into trouble and I will call these fables, "Idioma Bromas" which means "Language Jokes"...because sometimes I just have to laugh...and also it rhymes!

This weeks Idioma Broma:

Last week in my 5th/6th grade class we started talking about boyfriends and girlfriends (always a dangerous topic) and the focus momentarily turned to my student Rebeca and her boytoy Raul.  I asked her if she was embarrased and we would change the subject and she didn't know the word embarrased so I wrote it on the bored and she gasped and laughed at me while waving her arms and saying, "no no no no!!".  You know what though, if I was a native Spanish speaker who spoke very little English,, I would think embarrased was English for "embarazado" too.  Incidentally, embarazado is actually Spanish for pregnant. Accidentally ask my 12 year old student if she is pregnant in the middle of class...check!

Now onto the update and goodness gracious it has been too long since I have written!  Thus, this blog might end up being longer than Moby Dick, Gone With the Wind, The Torah, and OJ Simpson's List of Regrets combined and I apologize in advance.

 So lots to catch up on and in the words of one of my first graders when he realized he left his pencils at home, "hijo de putica!".....where to start!  Hijo de putica = son of a bitch...actually techincally "puta" is bitch..."putica" is a bitchlette, or a small bitch to the lay person. "putica" (n): a bitch of deficient physical stature; etymological origin- Danny Devito.  At least when my 6 year old adorable students curse, their cursing is small and adorable too!  Don't worry...as a blossoming teacher and important role model I gave him the appropriate punishent for his vulgar transgression...I giggled at his cuteness and only gave him 3 hugs that day.  I think he learned his lesson.

So to back up a ways, about 3 weeks ago was the annual festival in La Esperanza.  Apparently every year the town has a 3 day weekend festival to raise money to buy something new for the town.  At first I was skeptical of the potential economic catch-22 situation of the only visitors to the festival being the people from La Esperanza, as the notion of people outside our coffee-laiden borders even knowing of our existence baffles me.  Though I am definitely starting to love the town and gain a sense of belonging and pride/possessiveness of my mountain shire, by comparison in terms of national intrigue and notoriety, if Costa Rica represented the whole world, La Esperanza would be Canada...yeah that's right Canadians, I said it!!!  However, the community was superb in getting the word out and throughout the 3 days, I reckon hundreds of people from nearby communities came to fiestar.  I was actually amazed by the transformation that occurred from the people in the community working together.  The different duties were all delogated 2 weeks before the festival (which should have been planned months before as they kept telling me, but hey...tico tiempo) and the "downtown" La Esperanza, formerly and usually comprised of a small field, a church, my school, and the giant corrugated-tin town salon was tranformed into a respectable festival with horse riding in the field, food and drink vendors in the school, and a bar and dancefloor with DJ in the town salon.  My part in the weekend was twofold.  At first I really didn't care what I did and just volunteered to help where needed because I was just excited to be involved and act as a part of the community to any degree, but all things considered, I think I had a pretty sweet gig as 1) the Co-founder, Vice President, and Ambassador of Condomant Management and Selection at Nito and Teacher Mark's hambuerguesa shack and 2) the part of "Priest Rosenbergstein" in a skit presented to the whole town.  So, to start with my entrepeunerial endeavors.  Basically, Nito (Erick my host brother) and I set up a makeshift hamburger stand by the church and made and sold them for all willing customers.  Now, I'm no mathmetician, but at 1000 colones a hamburger (about 2 dollars), I think we probably made about 11 million American dollars.  Seriously, those hamburgers were selling like hotcakes!  (ironically and paradoxically, the hotcakes at the stand down the road were only selling like hamburgers).  There really isn't too much to say about 2 days spent assisting with and often running a hamburger stand, but it did feel really cool to be integrated into such a huge community event and made me feel much more like a part of the town as oppossed to just a visitor.  So, on to my more interesting obligation as the honorable Priest Rosenbergstein (I chose the name...nobody else understood the irony, but I thought it was funny...I guess that joke was just for me).  Anyhoo, Nito, Marielos (she is the women in town I am tutoring in English and teaching her the diva songs...she is also the mom of 2 of my awesome awesome students...she's pretty incredible), another student's mom, and two of my 6th graders put on a little skit for the town.  Since I could barely understand what the hell was going on in the storyline since it was all in Spanish, it was pretty interesting having to be a part of the storyline, especially since we had no script and I had to improv in Spanish.  As an aside, I am feeling like my Spanish is hitting a plateau these days so I really hope with further practice and immersion, I will keep improving, but lately it has been a little frustrating.  Anyway, back to the play...though the 3 scenes preceding my debut still remain somewhat of a mystery to me,  all I know is that I was playing a Priest who was marrying 2 people together.  This involved me wearing a scarf and a tablecloth Nito turned into a tunic and singing a beautifully loud and obnoxious falsetto version of Ave Maria.  I didn't really know what to say since I wasn't very familiar with the functions and rituals of a Costa Rican wedding (though now I am!...story to come...no, I'm not married), so after joining them together, I pretended to throw holy water on them, then crossed myself and said "En el nombre del Padre, de La Madre, y Tio Jorge, ahorrita ustedes son juntos en amor y vida por siempre", which translates into "In the name of the father, the mother, and Uncle George, you are now joined together in love and life forever"...despite my fear that this would send me back to America, if not directly to hell, my friends loved when I did this jokingly during our rehearsal and really wanted me to do it during the performance, so I decided what better way to demonstrate my cultural senstivity and get into the good graces of the community by mocking their religion and their language simultaneously!  Luckily, everyone had a good sense of humor and seemed to really love the little skit (which Nito and Marielos did an awesome job creating) and people in town called me "Padre" and came up to me and asked me to sing ave maria and forgive them of their sins for 2 weeks afterwards. hahahah.  Que es mi vida???

Speaking of Marielos and diva songs, our intercambio has been going great!  We have been meeting every Wednesday afternoon for English lessons and it brings me simultaneous pride and equal shame that I was able to translate Celine Dion songs for her.  This past Wednesday I walked to her house instead of the usual of her coming here (mostly because I wanted to hang out with her kids who are some of my favorite students) and after an hour or so of English lessons, she brought out the guitar to start teaching me.  It will be a very interesting process of trying to learn a new instrument in a new language, but I am really excited that we seem to have started a Wednesday tradition.  As bad as I am at planning and as much as I do most things last minute or spontaneously, I am also a creature of habit and feel much more at home in a place when I get into a routine.  My daily school schedule of 7am-12pm has been great in terms of free time and in terms of making me feel like I am making most of the days here, but having so much free time has its ups and downs and it feels good to at least have Wednesdays to look forward to as being a full day.  I'm also going to start tutoring one of the high school kids in town as there is no English teacher for his grade in the school.  He lives about a 30 minute walk from me and it will become a nice little excursion I have to make every Thursday and it will be good practice because I am planning on starting adult classes after school for the community soon.  With all this said however, I am trying really dilligently to not do what I will refer to as "pulling a college", whereas I do what I did in college; fill my schedule up with as much as I possibly can in order to feel more productive and carpe-diemesque, and then in return feel resentful that I have no freetime for myself and activities I should be doing just for sheer enjoyment begin to feel like a chore.  Thus far, my life consisting of teaching until noon, reading, and then walking around for most of the day until I find people to hang out with/talk to/feed me has worked in favor of maintaining a purposeful, but ultimately simple life.  Just as my appetite and physiological need for caffeine has increased an absurd amount, my perspective of a "good time" has decreased in its complexity...i.e. the other day I spent an hour throwing rocks at a tree with a 6 year old and then found a stick and cut it into a spear with a machete and practiced throwing it at a banana tree for another hour and considered this a red letter day!  I know it is often hard to pick up on sarcasm when reading something because there isn't any inflection, so to clear it up if there is any confusion, I was in no way being sarcastic.  If I can walk around town and find people to take me in for a cafecito, some 7 year olds to play soccer with, and walk down interesting new path to walk down, I consider the day a success and go to bed feeling like I milked something new out of my time here.  In fact, the charm of living in a small town and never making set plans to see people has kind of made me forget that in the United States that isn't often how things go.  I think it will be a shock to my system when I go home and instead of people inviting me in when I show up at a strangers door unexpectadly, they will call the cops.  Preemptive apologies to the many people at home who get annoyed with my habit of not making plans far ahead of time...being here has made me even worse.  However, excluding my time in school where it seems nothing can be planned for or counted on, some of the most exciting and unusual experiences I have had here I found simply by walking around and stumbling into a new circumstance, i.e. playing a soccer game at sunset against some of my kids and their parents, watching and helping in the process of cooking a pig (from the pig-pen to my stomach...yikes...I think the sound the poor little guy made when they killed it will haunt my dreams for eternity), and sitting around a giant stove outdoor stove to cook sugarcane while sipping contrabanda (which is essentially home-brewed moonshine that some of the locals make) with some farmers.  In terms of drinking, I essentially haven't at all, in La Esperanza as I've been really worried about making a bad impression and wouldn't want to look irresponsible to the community, especially my kids parents, but as it was one of my student's parents who offered me the poison, I decided it was a moment not worth passing up.  I realize that most of this entry is not really updates on events and experiences as much as just me rambling about my state of mind, but I think this slowed down life has given me more time to simply think and read and explore than I have had in a long long time.

Mind you, there is nothing slowed down or simple about teaching in the school.  Everyday is 5 hours of me being on my toes and constantly changing my ideas that don't work, lessons that struggle, and miscommunications that occur.  Honestly, I think I could put this all down to one things, which is completey and utterly my fault; my lesson plans are usually no longer than about 3 words.  Being here has confirmed what I already knew about my ability to plan ahead and go into a situation involving being in front of people with a well organized script...I don't.  Sometimes this works out great and awesome lessons seem to just fall out of my butt, but at other times, my mentality of "so I wonder how I am going to teach today! Guess I will find out!" gives me some consternation and too often I realize a better method to teach something I just taught immediately after I finish...it's sort of like when somebody gets at you with a really really good insult and you realize exactly what you SHOULD have said like 10 seconds after you throw out a really lame comback.  I guess I just miss improv and am componsating by improvising my job as I go!  Such is the life of a teacher who is still learning the ropes I suppose.  A friend of mine (shout out!) who did WorldTeach in the Marshall Islands a few years ago summed up teaching perfectly as feeling "all powerful while simultaneously completely inadequate".  Some days I leave school feeling a natural high for hours because of much I love the kids and how much they seemed to learn, and more importantly, seemed to like learning that day.  Other days I walk home with my tail between my legs after a day of awkward lessons and struggling to keep the kids engaged feeling like I failed them as a teacher.  I am giving the 3rd-6th graders their first test next week, which I almost feel guilty about doing to them hahaha...I think after my many years conditioned as a camp counselor where my primary objective was the kid's happiness and entertainment, the transition into a primary objective of focus and learning has been a clunky one for me, but I think I am starting to find a good balance of dancing around the room like a clown and actually imparting useful knowledge.  I think ultimately, what I care more about in this year is not how much they learn from me, but how much they learn to like learning from me.  Given that 3 out of my total 7 6th graders aren't planning on going onto high school after this year, if I can't inspire them to change their minds, I at least hope I will plant some sort of interest in the younger kids so that number will be smaller by the time their class reaches 6th grade.  Upon reading this, I realize I sound just like a cliche after school special or an aspiring combination of Coach Carter and Mr. Feeny, but in reality, I am still just trying to really find my feet as an educator.

Wow, okay, MUCH more to share, but for now I think I will post this while it is still a semi-reasonable length to read, but I PROMISE to update more in a few days with stories of my brothers wedding which was two weeks ago and my visit south to Bella Vista, Costa Rica to visit my friend at her site, and the new antics of Nito and my family drama.  Stay tuned and thanks so much for reading!!