Yo quiero una americana...

To get me a visa.

Yes folks, a while ago that was the number one favorite song to shout at me from my campo, my street, the capital, the gua-gua...basically, everywhere. The song followed me, and other PC volunteers around like the bubonic plague followed rats. One girl even had it shouted at her from inside the Secretary of Education's office.

Well guess what. The freaking song is STILL following me around. Yesterday I had to relocate from my office to the front porch of a neighbor's house while tutoring because, why? 20 pre-schoolers were screaming the song into my windows while I was trying to teach a boy to read. Why didn't their teacher do something? Where was their teacher? The principle? Anyone? Good questions. Why didn't I just put them in their places, calm them down, get them seated, and explain to them why they should respect me, how the song is disrespectful, how they really shouldn't scream at me when I'm trying to teach another child to read or working through his or her assorted traumas, and how really they should be learning something because they're only in school for less than 4 hours a day? Well, I didn't because I'm tired of being patient and explaining things and having people look at me like I'm a martian. Ergo, we went to someone else's front porch. Then we got kicked out because they had a meeting...you know how things go.

Here's a nice story. When tutoring one child, we worked through one of the blends "bl" as in "amable", the word for friendly. I explained to him that the word means nice, someone who doesn't shout a lot and makes you feel good. Then I asked him to tell me one person in his life who was amable. Wouldn't you know that after half a minute of serious concentration, he looked me in the face and said "usted," or "you". Well gosh, I guess I am pretty amable every now and then.

Here's a not nice story. Last week, one of my girls told me that one of my boys in a nearby batey had stolen a cell phone from a neighbor, with the intention of selling it and using the money to play dice. So then his father beat him so that his hips swole and his back was bleeding (with barbed wire, she said), so that he couldn't put on clothes. Then the father and mother took him to the judge so that they'd put the boy in prison. Also the boy is 10. That day, I told another teacher, my good friend, what had happened, and we went to visit the family, and I saw the boy, with his red back and loose fitting shorts, and the teacher told the mom why this cannot happen again, and we both told the boy how much we care about him. Nothing happened to the father, because that would mean that the world was a just place.

Here's a nice story, one more time. The science class was so much fun! We made pyramid-shaped kites, and it took the whole 2 hours to construct them. The boys worked really well together, and the groups that finished first helped the stragglers. Unfortunately, some of them didn't fly (and I'm not sure why...) but they learned the valuable lesson that sometimes science projects just don't work. They had a blast, so did I, and I've got more coming this saturday, along with 2 teachers who, after realizing what "science projects, experiments, and demonstrations" means (which is not just writing stuff on a board and then copying it into a notebook) are really excited about learning what I'm doing with the students, so that they can replicate it in the future.

Also yesterday I had 3 glasses of lime juice. A very good day, indeed.

Why did the cows stick together when it was raining?
To keep the udders dry....
hHAHAHAHA. That joke compliments of my dad, whose sense of humor rivals mine, some would say.

later gators,
alicia