Teaching, El Recreo, and Father Roy

To my friends and family,

I’d like to tell you all a little about my recent experiences as a teacher, more info about the Barrio in which I work and where my kids live, and a certain international political issue that made it’s way to our dinner table the other night. I will break it down by theme to ease your navigation of this blog entry.

Teaching at Proyecto Generando Vida
I have now completed four weeks of teaching in the morning Comedor and the afternoon Nivelación program at the Project. Thankfully I’ve had a few pleasant and affirming interactions with my kids that tell me that perhaps they really do appreciate my presence in their life, even though they sure as hell don’t show it while I’m teaching. Every Friday morning in the Comedor is outside game day, so I spend most of my 1hr. 45min with the kids playing soccer and different variations of baseball right outside the Project. I’ve gotten a lot more signs of affection from my kids on these days, mainly because they’re having a good time so they’re not brats, because they’re not being brats I don’t get pissed and yell at them, and because I don’t yell at them they tend to like me a lot more. A lot of kids have given me drawings (which is especially comical when they hand it to me while I’m teaching; a dead giveaway that they aren’t paying attention), mainly of my house, and in Nivelación I made out like a bandit on Valentine’s day with all sorts of sweet cards from kids I yell at all the time and teacher’s pets alike. That all has been a good reminder that perhaps they have some respect or affection for me deep down.
I’ve had a bit of a cold this last week, which has made yelling next to impossible because my throat hurts so bad. Discipline has thus been difficult, as the kids who are stealing, punching, cussing, throwing, and leaving simply can’t hear me amidst the noisy chaos that is my classroom. Yet at the same time it’s been a good way for me to search for alternative, non verbally-violent methods of getting my kids to a reasonable level of tranquility. I talk softly now while my kids erupt with energy and screams, and quietly remind them that there will be no recess for those who continue to “hacer buya” and plentiful points (which will later translate into prizes) for those who chill out. It works so-so, and like peacemaking in general it is way more difficult than violence and aggression and takes an excruciatingly long time to be effective. But the end result is relatively calm kids who haven’t just been yelled at or felt threatened by an authority figure. I’ve also started kicking kids out of class after a few warnings, and have on occasion threatened to talk to their parents. This approach works without fail, but it relies on the terrible nature of the home life of my students. My kids know that if they get sent home with a note (which I have yet to do) or if I tell their parents that I had to kick them out for indiscipline, they will likely get beaten. Even the students who cuss directly at me and laugh at my threats to take away their recess or something have calmed down when I mention their parents. I’ve only had to threaten this twice, and it’s a weird feeling…I always hope that the students don’t ask “would you really do that?”
Aside from the constant challenge of maintaining some semblance of order, security, and decibel level at which I can be heard by my students, I’ve also been dealing with the challenge of actually teaching. I’m supposed to be helping kids with their homework for the first third of class and then teaching reinforcement lessons for the rest of class. I’ve been very frustrated with the Nicaraguan education system for the homework that my students bring to me. Neither my students nor myself understand many of their assignments, and the ones that are clear pertain exclusively to copying things out of books; their Spanish homework is to copy a few pages from a story book, their Social Studies homework is to copy certain sections of the textbook or trace a map, etc. The story problems that the math teachers give my students are incredibly vague and make little to no sense. Even if they did, not one of my 4th grade students knows how to do a story problem. I have some really smart students, but no one has ever taught them how to think for themselves or analyze anything. Frustrating. I have trouble deciding whether I should do creative lessons that might expand their capacity to think critically and make connections, or if I just teach what they learn in school so that they can get their homework done and pass 4th grade.
My relationship with my coworkers has drastically improved over the last few weeks as well, as we all think it’s kind of funny now that I can’t understand most of what we talk about in staff meetings, and I’ve been learning to joke around a lot more with them. All the other Nivelación teachers are public school teachers by morning, and most of them are middle-aged, sarcastic women who love to play jokes on me and make fun of the fact that I’m the only heterosexual male working at the project. Lately I’ve been sarcastic back at them, which they think is a riot. All in all, my feelings toward teaching are well balanced…there are fewer extreme days (euphoric or hellish), and most of my classes are quite mediocre, which I think is good for now.

A Bit About Barrio El Recreo
The Project at which I work is kind of at the center of the El Recreo neighborhood, and most of my kids come from within a 10 minute walk of the Project. It is definitely one of the poorer neighborhoods in Managua, although surprisingly not too dangerous; no Jesuit Volunteers in recent years have had so much as a pick-pocketing while in El Recreo. Apparently there is a local gang, but I have heard little about it. Everyone that comes to the Project is someone else’s aunt, cousin, half brother, etc. I think that families are just so big in the neighborhood that chances of any two random people being related are quite high. The few houses of my students that I have visited have been quite insightful into their home lives- many of my kids have older brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all living in the same house with them. Some of the parents are very friendly and genuine, while others are disturbingly uninterested in the Project to which they send their children. My coordinator usually clues me in to whose parents do what or the reputation they have built around the Project. It is rumored that the mother of my most difficult student in the morning Comedor program is a prostitute and runs her business out of her home. Most of the parents, however, are genuinely concerned about their child’s ability to read or do long division.
El Recreo has a lot of trash lying around…either sitting or floating in giant ditches or being burned in the middle of the road. Because of the obvious health and environmental issues this causes, the Project plans to do a ‘don’t burn your trash campaign’ in the neighborhood this year, and it is expected that one of the principle obstacles to the campaign will be that people can’t afford trash bags (garbage pickup does exist and is cheap). Water in all of Nicaragua is an issue; even in our house the water has been going out for 2 or 3 years most nights. Yet in El Recreo there is no water throughout most of the day, and most residents have to wake up at 4am when the water comes on briefly to fill their buckets with water for the day’s consumption. At the Project there are a couple huge metal buckets of water that are used for cleaning but not for drinking. Thus I usually get the majority of my students in the afternoon asking for water from my nalgene. It’s not that there is a scarcity of water here, it’s just about the distribution; in a neighborhood ten minutes away on foot, one of the wealthiest and the neighborhood where the President lives, there are never any water shortages. Hmm.
My last word about El Recreo. I was shocked to realize how little people get out of the neighborhood. Aside from the major market I don’t think anyone leaves except for the men that go to work outside the Barrio. The public schools are a few blocks away, most women are stay-at-home moms, and frankly most people can’t just toss around 25 cents for a round-trip bus ride anywhere in the city. Many of my kids ask me where I live. I say “Barrio La Luz” and they give me a blank stare. La Luz is a 20 minute bus ride away. I ask them if they know where the UCA is, a major university a 10 minute bus ride away. Still no idea. So I just tell them what direction I live in.

School of the Americas (SOA)
A lot of you have heard about the School of the Americas (or WHINSEC) at Ft. Benning, Georgia and the growing protest movement to shut it down. The SOA is a military training school run by the U.S. military that trains Latin American police and soldiers in “counterinsurgency” and “pro-democracy” tactics. Some of Latin America’s most notorious human rights abusers have graduated from this school, including the soldiers who murdered the 6 Jesuit priests in El Salvador in 1989 and those who assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1981. Anyway, Father Roy Bourgeois, a maryknoll priest, has been leading the movement to close this school for about 17 years, and recently has opened up a “Latin America front” to close the school in which he and others try to convince Latin American leaders to stop sending their soldiers to the school. So far Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Uruguay, and Costa Rica have pulled out their soldiers and police from the school for its history of human rights abuses and oppression. So Father Roy was in Nicaragua this week trying to convince Daniel Ortega to cut ties with the school, and he left today for Ecuador to do the same. The best part of the story, in my opinion, is that Fr. Roy and his associate Lisa Sullivan came over to the JV house for dinner on Tuesday! Roy was an incredibly friendly and funny man with a hilarious southern accent, and we all sat around the table for hours talking about politics, social justice, and his experiences leading the movement to close the SOA. Him and Father Joe, our in-country coordinator, shared prison stories (each have spent a few years for civil disobedience) and Vietnam-era war and protest stories (Joe a protester, Roy a navy officer). Father Roy also entertained us with some comical stories of meeting with Presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia. The next few days Roy, Lisa, and Father Joe met with President Ortega, Nicaragua’s defense minister and a few others, and eventually got Ortega to say he was on their side in the struggle to close the school and that he would strongly consider pulling Nicaraguans out of the school soon. It was very inspiration first of all to share a meal with the leader of the annual protest that I attended last November, but also to realize that such a charismatic and visionary leader was at the same time such a regular, approachable person.
Thus ends this most recent overview of life here in Managua, including both my everyday experiences and a few unique tales. Thank you all for reading.

Peace,
Michael