Generating Life

Dear friends and family,

Thank God, it’s the weekend. I just finished my first week of “real work,” teaching two classes of about 20 or 25 kids from Barrio El Recreo. Some days have been wonderful, others simply hellish. Right now I feel that the week was a success, and I feel great about my general abilities as a teacher/ youth counselor. My typical day now tends to look like this: I leave the house at 7, and Mary, Margaret and I jump on a bus literally overflowing with people. We spend most of the 15 minute bus ride pressing up against strangers trying to squeeze our way towards the back door. We then walk into Barrio El Recreo on a dirt road, walk over a sketchy metal bridge that crosses over a giant ditch filled with trash, sometimes on fire. I get to Proyecto Generando Vida at 7:30, spend about an hour sweeping and cleaning, and then frantically prepare for my first class at 9. There are 27 kids registered for my “comedor” morning class, about 20 of whom show up. The age range is 9-12. We start class with a “dynamica”, like a name game or something, or I’ll read them a story about cutting down trees and ask them some questions about it. Starting next week, assuming the kids can stay still, I’ll be reading the Chronicles of Narnia to them in Spanish for 30 minutes every morning. A couple days a week are ‘game day’, where we either play board games or I take them outside to play soccer. My goal is to have three days a week of class, where I give them reinforcement in Spanish and Math, and give them help with their homework once school starts in two weeks. My kids grew weary of my Math lesson yesterday and eventually convinced me to translate The Beauty and the Beast and read it to them in English, which they thought was hilarious. Comedor is extremely difficult, as the kids are disgustingly poor, very unruly, and some are completely illiterate while others are at a 6th grade reading level. It’s hard to teach any subject to a group of 20 kids when some get insulted by the simplicity of the lesson while others have never gone to school and have no idea what I’m talking about. I spend most of my time in comedor chasing down kids who just walk out of the classroom and raise hell around the Project, confiscating soccer balls from those who play in the corner while I teach Spanish, and telling the same kids over and over to be quiet, sit down, turn their desk towards me, stop hitting, etc. A lot of the kids are only there because their parents see us as cheap babysitters for the morning, or so I believe.

Comedor class ends at 10:45, I then sit with my kids and eat lunch, they go home, I help serve another 70 kids that come to get fed, clean up, and I’m done for the morning at noon. In total there are 45 kids ages 5-12 that come to class in the morning and get a very nutritious, heavily discounted lunch (2 cents per meal), and another 70 under the age of 5 that just come for the lunch. At noon I go to the nun’s house (the Project is founded by a group of nuns…they are sweet, trust me), eat lunch again, maybe take a cat nap on the couch, and go back to work at 1 or 1:30 depending on my level of preparedness for the afternoon. I go back to my classroom, sweep, and plan my 2:00 nivelación class. There are also about 20 kids that come to my afternoon class out of about 24 that are registered. These kids are all going into 4th grade (some for the second time). I usually spend most of this 2-2.5 hour class reviewing Math and Spanish concepts that they learned in 3rd grade, mixing it up with some fun games that occasionally are successful. Again, once school starts, the point of this class will be half helping them with homework and half teaching reinforcement classes. Right now it’s just all reinforcement. Out of the 20 students in this class, I would classify at least 6 or 7 as hellraisers, an unusually high proportion I feel. Many of my students fight, throw trash on the ground, steal each others’ stuff, try to steal my stuff, cheat, gossip, swear at me, and disappear for 20 minutes after ‘going to get a drink of water’. I’ve had a couple wonderful classes though where I played a game with Spanish grammar that they were totally into and where I taught a euphoric lesson on subtraction.

The 3rd grade textbooks say they know long division, and that they can read a short story excerpt and respond to basic questions. Yet the preliminary Spanish and Math quizzes I gave them suggests that most have never seen a long division problem, let alone mastered basic subtraction or multiplication. I’m also not sure that critical thinking is at all taught in the public schools. Literally none of my kids got the one question on the Spanish quiz that asked them to explain why something happened in a story excerpt correct. Every kid simply used direct quotes from the story to answer every question. Frustrating.

I’ve already made a number of cultural faux-pas (sp?) in my nivelación afternoon class. For the first couple days I had kids do homework and in-class assignments in their notebook and rip out the pages to hand in to me. On the third day of classes only 3 people handed in homework, the rest shying away from taking it out of their notebooks. So I said they could just bring their notebook up to the front and show me, and one girl came up and asked me to stop having her rip out pages because her grandma hits her when she does so. Lesson learned. On the second day we were playing a name game…everyone here has two first names. It was Guiselle Margarita’s turn to say her name…she said “Guiselle” and someone else said another word that started with an M that I didn’t recognize. Thinking it was her second name, I asked the confirming question to Guiselle, “Guiselle M….?” Apparently whatever word I said was Spanish for whore. Everyone laughed, except for me and Guiselle.

At the end of nivelación class I clean up the room, wipe off the chalkboard, grade quizzes, and maybe start planning for the next day. Starting next week I’ll be doing house visits in the evenings to get to know my kid’s parents and where they are from. I find Mary in the library and Margaret in the women’s bank, and usually we make our way out of the Barrio together, stopping frequently along the way to talk to friends and students. We get home around 6, eat dinner, enjoy each other’s company, have a community meeting or a spirituality night if it’s Monday or Wednesday, I start to plan for the next day, and go to bed as early as possible (never early enough). I think for my own personal health I’m going to try to make a habit of not bringing the Project home with me…preparing for classes only during designated times at home and doing the rest during the day at work. Planning what to do with so many kids for a total of over 4 hours every day is exhausting, and the anticipation of spending 2 hours at a time trying as hard as is humanly possible to speak loudly and consistently, discipline, teach, and keep my cool when angry all at the same time is nerve-wracking. The exhausting nature of my job and the knowledge that my classes are on the brink of chaos at any given moment have prevented me thus far from actually looking forward to work, but it is rewarding thus far.

Finally, to wrap up this rather long entry, I got to meet our in-country coordinator the other night for the first time. Father Joe, a Jesuit priest who has lived here for over 20 years, just got back from a peacemaking trip to Palestine and Israel. He seemed like a wonderful and friendly man with a lot of admirable passions and convictions (he spent a few months in prison for nonviolent civil disobedience at the SOA protest, something I have a lot of respect for). I’m having dinner with him tonight, and I’m looking forward to getting to know this guy who is supposed to be kind of our point-man for everything logistical, personal, and spiritual while we are here in Nicaragua. I think that’s about it…work and meeting a Jesuit has been my life for the last week. Thanks for reading.

Michael

December-January update

So the glory days of orientation are over, and I am now officially a working Jesuit Volunteer. A quick summary of the end of my orientation phase: Being outside of the U.S. during Christmas for the first time was a little harder than I thought, mainly due to the cultural differences surrounding the holidays. In Nicaragua the 24th is celebrated way more than the 25th. The whole day of the 24th is spent visiting family and friends; everyone’s doors are open and people just walk up and down the street and stop in to visit neighbors and loved ones. I feel like Christmas in the states is much more geared towards only spending time with family. Anyway, Christmas Eve here is celebrated with fancy dress and makeup for the girls, a feast at around 10 or 11pm, and then dancing until at least 2am. We were over at a neighbor’s house for this celebration, and I definitely felt nostalgic of the peace and calm of Christmas Eves in the U.S.

Between Christmas and January 10 we were lucky to have both Margaret and Josh’s families visit from the U.S. It was really amazing to see my two housemates interact with their families for the first time in a year, and we all had a blast hanging out with them, taking adventures with them, and occasionally being spoiled by them! During those few weeks after Christmas I also spent most of my time making endless trips around the city and painfully wading through government bureaucracy to apply for my residency visa.

On January 10 I had my first day of work at Proyecto Generando Vida in Barrio El Recreo. The first week and a half of work was spent cleaning and painting the project, holding staff meetings and workshops, and going door to door in the neighborhood spreading information about the programs. I was very nervous going in to my first few days of work, but my nerves were calmed a little once I got to know the setting and coworkers. It has been very difficult conversing in Spanish all day, and the language barrier has slowed the process of making friends with my coworkers. Almost all of my coworkers are women; I am one of two men at the project in a staff of almost twenty. Where are all the men? In Barrio El Recreo (and much of Nicaragua for that matter) fathers and husbands are a very rare sighting. Many men start families and then bail, leaving young mothers to care for a herd of children. The rest are working all day. So in Barrio El Recreo you have women more or less running the show, and a lot of kids with no father figure. Most of my coworkers are my age or a little older with a few kids and a divorce under their belt.

Proyecto Generando Vida is really an amazing project that offers comprehensive services to people in the neighborhood. I spent a few days last week trying to convince both receptive and skeptical mothers, aunts, and grandmas to pay 10-50 cents a week to sign their kids up for the “comedor” and “nivelación” programs that I will help lead. I also encouraged them to take advantage of computer classes, our discounted pharmacy, the visual health program, the cancer prevention program, the gym, painting and drawing classes, and the library. The project also has a micro-lending bank for about 150 women in the neighborhood. Walking through the entire Barrio without a doubt emotionally challenging, as El Recreo is in all actuality a squatter settlement in the middle of the city. The poverty did not phase me until we went door to door along the causeways that border the neighborhood. The “causes” (cow- say) are cement ditches filled with a lot of trash and some water, with tin shacks precariously built along their edges. I kept getting lost because there are no roads or consistent flow of houses; it’s just a bunch of dirt paths and randomly placed dwellings. The causes were suffocating due to their claustrophobic nature and overwhelming and blatant poverty. This was where most people were discouraged by the symbolic fee of 10 cents a week to send their children to classes, activities, and lunch every morning. The Project does wave the fee, and I expect that most of the people at the comedor in the morning will be from the causes.

Tomorrow I will start my work with the kids. In the morning I will work in the comedor program. I will take 20-30 kids, ages 7-11, and lead them for two hours in games, activities, and help with homework. The 50-60 kids at the Project in the morning along with around 50 more from the neighborhood, will then eat lunch and then go home or go to school (Nicaraguans go to school in the morning or in the afternoon). In the afternoon I will help lead the nivelación (roughly translated at getting back up to grade level) program and have a class of 4th graders who go to school in the morning. I will primarily teach them Math and Spanish according to what they need the most reinforcement in and what they are learning in school at the time. Thankfully, for at least the first week I will be co-teaching in the afternoon with the nivelación program coordinator. This is reassuring, as I feel immensely unprepared to teach Nicaraguan 4th graders. So that’s what I’ve been up to, and I plan to do another update a week or two after I start teaching!

Peace,
Michael (Miguel) Marchesini

The new community on the night of the going away party for Matt and Adriana.


Managua city scape from downtown looking South, main Cathedral.


Statue of Augusto C. Sandino (national hero) overlooking the city


View of Telica volcano, which we attempted to climb for Mary's birthday at the end of December. Unfortunately, we never found a path to get to the base of the volcano and eventually turned back after hours of adventurous but fruitless bushwacking. The volcano is about 2 hours northwest of Managua, near the city of Leon


The view from near the base of Telica


My five housemates (or "community mates" as we say here) on Christmas morning: Margaret, Jenna, James, Mary, Josh


The girls after being "pintared", or done-up, by the neighbors on Christmas Eve


At Doña Maxima's house (our next door neighbor, friendly, funny, third from left) on Christmas Eve


In a pickup truck on the way back from Laguna de Apoyo. Mary, James, and Margaret


Josh and I on the way back from the Laguna


Margaret, Jenna, Josh


Jenna and I with Laguna de Masaya in the background


My homestay in the campo, Arenal.