It´s the little things in life

Working with three year-olds requires a lot of patience, changes of scenery on a fairly regular basis, and of course, an extra supply of clothing less than one hundred meters away (fortunately my house isn’t even that far from the school).  Of course most of you already know this, many of you having already raised children on your own.

I sometimes wonder what my kiddos do at home, and how they use the information that they learned at school. The Pre-Kinder 3 class so far has learned/reviewed (in English): colors, numbers 1-10, counting and being able to identify how many of something there are, singing twinkle twinkle little star, identifying Mr. Owl, Mr. Rooster, Iguanas ( we count as many as we can.. but sometimes there are more than 15 and we can’t quite get that high), birds, the campus dog, and butterflies! We also practice our joga (yoga) every two or three days, starting with our heads on the table in the dark classroom, calming ourselves and pretending to wake up with stretching and breathing, and then moving to a circle on the floor where we meditate (no joke, they sit cross-legged and put their pointer finger to their thumb and go “mmmmmmmmmmmm”… and then they speed up until their vocal chords get sore and that’s how we cut it off). We then stretch our fingers, arms, shoulders, necks, legs, backs, and then we lay down on the floor and breathe.

The three year olds also enjoy doing art projects (we regularly play with playdough, paint, markers and crayons) and reading books, along with building with blocks, playing in our play room (giant soft blocks, a little kids kitchen, and a train and car track set).

I hope that all of these activities are really helping my students. Many of them are able to regurgitate information well but I hope that it builds and sticks in their brains... we do a lot during our half days (along with watching parts of movies that often have something to do with what we are talking about in our books.. such as Finding Nemo when talking about fish or apparently, Wizard of Oz, because it has a horse that changes colors quickly.. which is insanely exciting when you’re three… note, they chose Wizard of Oz).

Oh, and they go to P.E. class, which one of my kiddos doesn’t like. Actually, he’s terrified of P.E. as our P.E. teacher reminds him of a monster in one of his movies and every time we take him to P.E. he either promptly pukes, or stands in the corner and hides. 

More updates from the land of pee pee, poo poo, and ¨puhlease¨ soon. 

Lightning bolt moments in September

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It’s the bottom of the fifth, and the Minnesota Twins are up by two against Texas. Fox news is commentating, in English, mind you. I recognize most of the players on the Twins  roster, and on the Texas team I don’t know a single players’ name. But I do know that I don’t like them. Or rather, that I want the Twins to win.

Because it’s my home team, where I feel my sense of patriotism and pride. Most of the players aren’t even from my “home” state, but somehow I feel a strong need to shreak in joy at the T.V. whenever they put another point on the scoreboard…

…I’ve been watching the news over the past few days, mostly BBC, and taking in everyone’s views on Syria, what the U.S. should or shouldn’t do to “act” or “strike”, and thinking about my own feelings on the situation. I sometimes wonder about my own feelings on the actions of my countries’ government, and whether I feel really connected to the U.S. I watch videos of those suffering from gas burns, from children shaking because their nervous systems are compromised, and videos of world leaders making statements about these events, instead of taking “action”…

I find myself standing in a crowd of swaying, mostly off-key singing 20-something Venezuelans, head bobbing to the best rock band that this country has to offer, I feel just right. This is where I am meant to be; surrounded by my co-workers, that I also call my friends, watching a talented group of Venezuelan guys (one in a cowboy hat) rock out pretty darn well.

These three events may seem extremely disconnected, but they all lead to my understanding that I am one small being in a very culturally diverse but also extremely connected planet.

I feel an association to strangers who run around a baseball diamond 3,000 miles away, an association to strangers who stand outside until 3am to hear their favorite rock-band play, and association to my own government, in D.C., as they carefully and privately discern whether they should intervene in a crime against humanity, on the other side of the world.

Despite my distance from my home, Duluth, I feel so connected right now.

My friends in Duluth just enjoyed a celebration of freedom, a celebration of love, and a weekend of music, dancing, and rainbows. It’s gay Pride weekend. Though I missed Duluth’s annual celebration, sitting in the green grass of the Bayfront Park watching close friends perform, I looked over at a friend last night after we walked over three kilometers home from the concert on a poorly lit and crumbling Venezuelan road, and wished her “happy pride weekend in Duluth”, she responded accordingly, knowing that it was hard for me to be away from those I love.

I’ve got everything I need right now. A beautiful place to live, fun people to enjoy it with, and daily activities that keep my brain and heart occupied. I spent a few moments last week sitting outside after getting my daily workout of basketball in our school gym (it almost feels a mosque with the lighting that flows in during the evening hours), and as I sat on the soft ground I watched a beautiful lightening storm to the south west, which lasted over an hour. I called my friends and they came out to watch as well as lightening against the background of a huge storm system, lit up our sky, with stars still shining directly above us. I was perfectly content, but more, I was connected.

I will continue to watch Twins Baseball and yell at the t.v. in my empty apartment, and I will continue to follow the news and hope that the leaders of our world can come to conclusions that allow for the greatest and most continuous level of peace, and I will always, rock out. I will embrace this month, the flaws, the battles, and the gorgeous moments. I hope you will too!

Mercado Central

Today I'm going to take you on an adventure. You don't have to put on your seat belt (don't worry, I wear one whenever possible, even though it's rare to find a taxi driver who wears theirs here). We're going to walk through small urban streets, a few food vendors on either side, and around the corner we can faintly hear the thumping music from multiple radios. We've found the mercado, or market. On the outside, it looks like a maze, with many passageways and too many vendors to count (though not nearly as intimidating as the grand bazaar in Istanbul. Don't worry, this is manageable. After all, this is only Anaco.

Imagine a large football field-sized market area, with aluminum covered open-sided buildings each holding different varieties of food or produce.

As we enter the market, the first thing we notice is all of the produce, with the bold smell of fresh pineapple and guava almost smacking you on the face when you step up onto the hard concrete.  This part of the market is divided solely by long skinny tables, overflowing with lettuce, tomatoes, green onions, carrots, bananas, papayas, limes, passion fruit, guavas, and pretty much every kind of melon, and multiple men and women behind each shouting (however lovingly) to come to their table to buy their produce. 

To buy this lovely food, you put as much as you want in plastic bags, then eventually hand it to them, and they weigh it all together on hanging scales. They then estimate how much they want to charge you for it. A whole weeks worth of veggies and fruit to fill up a backpack and both of my hands costs a total of about 170bs, or a little under six dollars.The bags are heavy, and pockets only slightly lighter, but still full of bills, because the smallest bill here is 2 bs (or about 12 cents)

As you wonder further into the market, the aroma overwhelms you, pescado. (or pfish as my three year olds would say). Here you can also buy as much meat or fish as you want- I only bought chicken. It is actually cheaper to buy the whole chicken (already de-feathered but whole body in tact minus the head and feet.. but don’t worry, they sell the feet), a whole chicken costing a gringa like me a whole 1$. Though the currency exchange makes everything extremely cheap for me, for Venezuelans it doesn’t necessarily make everything as cheap (depending on how much they get paid or their wages have changed with inflation).

Most likely we will also grab a bite to eat at the mercado, from one of over 50 kiosks, all selling empenadas, tequenos, arepas, or another deep fried Venezuelan delicacy.. Yesterday we had empanadas, a deep fried pastry filled with a meat of your choice, we had chicken. We also had some freshly made passion fruit juice..mmmmmm.

The walk to the market, which was a little over half an hour, helps to burn some of the built up calories  from the empenadas and overly-sugared “natural” juice.But don't worry, on the way home we'll take a taxi.. that half a water-melon the size of both my femurs is pretty heavy.

I hope that you can see the colors of this market. The blood from the chicken stained lightly on the counters of the chicken market, the brown grit on the ground of all of the left-over fruits and vegetables trampled on by soft flip flops, day after day. The stark contrast of fresh watermelons piled in the back of a pick-up truck, to the fly-covered dried fish with a name I don’t understand and am not yet brave enough to try.

The market is a place of colors, of smells beyond your imagine (and no mom, not nearly as poor of smells as Dhaka.. only the potent smell of fish), and of joyous noise. Young kids run around chasing each other and offering you large plastic bags to carry all of your produce for a mere two or four Bs.

I hope you enjoyed your time at the market, now to make some watermelon juice! Ciao!

This is the universal sign for.... let's do another round.

It's 7:30 pm, it's been pitch black for about an hour, but it's still 84 degrees outside, but the high was 93 degrees earlier today. It's Monday, which means that I didn't have any classes in the afternoons and was lesson planning/grading/ meeting with our school director from noon to five pm (yes I'm aware, school ends at three...). The week started out well, however I did have to put multiple students in time out today.
I had a new student added to my class today, he is pretty darn cute but it's amazing for me to see how my three year olds already have the systems down and know how to sit at a table or how to line up at the door. They did well at helping him out, pictures to come soon! We are starting a unit on animals today... I really wish that I could take my kids to a farm or a zoo, they certainly would remember the animal names and noises then! We see our friend Mr. Owl (there are at least three Mr. Owls outside our classroom) who we say hi to almost every day and we count them, and we know how they flap their wings and one of my sweet little ones even recognized how these beautiful burrowing owls wriggle their bodies.

My writing classes has been fairly easy so far, especially since I'm getting a feeling of how competent my students are, what their strengths are, and what kind of support they are going to need. None of my students are native English speakers, which actually makes it easier to help them with their writing because they associate their mistakes with being an ELL learner instead of an incompetency. I will have to share some of their writing eventually, because I've already received some really great responses to our daily writing prompts.

On a balmier and more tropical note, the three other new teachers and I rented a taxi and headed out to Lecheria, this time for the whole weekend. We went out the first night and had some delicious pizza from a popular restaurant just off the main street in Lecheria about twenty minute walk away from our beach house's compound, passing the golf course and the a 15 foot deep hole in the middle of the side-walk which is now entitled "big ****'ing hole by one of my co-workers. After scarfing down some dinner, we attempted to get our bill, with me attempting to translate. Our wonderful waiter was aware that we had another waiter refilling our bills, so instead of bringing us a total of six beers, he made sure we only had four or five between the four of us. This brought us to thinking that when it was time for the bill, doing the universal signal for encircling the group to mean "put the bill together", he thought *of course they want to do another round*... we laughed it off and drank our cervezitas.

We then headed out to grab another tiny beverage on the steps of the restaurant/shop area and ended up being lured into conversation by some Venezuelan guys who were trying to hit on my friend Shannon. Once she explained to them in spanglish that her husband Jay was standing next to her, they stopped talking to us for a total of 20 minutes... we then chatted it up again when I realized one of the guys was saying some things in English. I asked "porque tu hablas ingles?" and he responded "because I'm English". We met the one guy from Manchester living in Lecheria, working at a software company (we think). We ended up hanging out with this group of Venezuelan/foreigner gentlemen for a couple of hours, and went to another bar with them. We ended up going home around 1:30 and crashing until the next morning. We spent five hours on the Lecheria beach eating fresh avocado with chips and getting supremely sunburnt.

Hope you enjoy these photos as much as I enjoyed my weekend.

First Day of School|

After spending my entire Sunday decorating my classrooms…yes I do have more than one… I went home, had a beverage, and prepared myself for the fact that I have indeed, become a teacher.

I did pretty darn well for not having our class’ schedule until 7am and having my assistant only a little exhausted after she and her family drove from the coast just this morning at 4am! I have eight beautiful and smart 3 year olds, all of whom had my assistant as their teacher last year, so they know her well. I convinced most of them to call me Ms. Morley or some variation thereof instead of “teacher”. I also taught many of them how to count to 5, though I’m not sure they understand what that actually means! I had 3 hours of prep today, which I used very well as I didn’t have most of my curriculum or planning available until Sunday when I found the class outlines and the Understanding by Design models used by our school.

So I survived. No crying from the kids during the day, only a few spills, and most of them actually listened to me! Here are a few pictures of the school grounds and of the drive from Puerto la Cruz to Anaco.

 

 Elementary classrooms...my writing classroom is just a little further down

  

View of outdoor cafeteria patio and lower elementary wing in the background

 View of the front of the school

 View of the front of Matts apartment, mine is just next door on the right

Where I play basketball a few days a week

Perks

One of the many perks of living in a foreign country where you haven’t known everyone around you longer than two weeks, you’re struggling significantly with the language, and you spend almost all of your time in a confined compound that is both your residence and your workplace, is that sometimes, just sometimes, the employer that allows you to be in such a situation, feels bad for you, and allows you to stay on the weekends in their beach house on the Caribbean coastline, with a bike culture, good sea food, and lots of beautiful beaches.

We call it Puerto; it’s official name, Puerto La Cruz (the area where our beach house is in is actually Lecheria…but let’s not get too technical). The other new staff members and I, along with some of the returning staff including our amazing secretary, her daughter, and the director, drove us out to Lecheria last weekend to see the 4 bedroom house which is a 2 minute walk from the beach. Yep..life’s hard.

Food poisoning and school starting

I´m going to attempt to ignore the fact that the entirety of my last post was about food, considering this post may also be about food...but more so about my body´s rejection of some of this amazing food.

Alright, the past 48 hours have been somewhat of a blur…. mostly because of all of the great activities I have taken part in, but moreover because of the intensely strong and impressively defeating food poisoning I obtained on Tuesday night. We’re still not sure what caused it, but I can say I lost some quick weight in a very short period of time.  I took the day off of orientation to take care of my body, much needed, but I certainly became acquainted with my house (more so my bano).

Over the past few days I have been going through orientation (nothing too exciting about that)… We have been working on getting our classrooms ready to go for school to start on Monday- I am not quite ready for either of my rooms, but we are getting there, slowly but surely. I have a lot to learn from the other teachers, but fortunately I have a lot of freedom in my curriculum for the writing classes I am going to be teaching in the afternoon (3^rd and 4^th grade together, and 5^th and 6^th grade together). The mornings will be what zaps my energy, as I will have Pre-K 3 year olds all morning every day, with my wonderful assistant Arianna, who is from Venezuela, has a high school daughter here at the school, and worked with all of our students last year in the nursery, so she knows all of them!