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