Easter!

It's that time of year again... time for a sponsorship project! This one is for Easter, so I decided to go with the simple yet classic "Tissue papered Easter egg" craft. The kids actually loved making them, and we got through almost all 250 of them in 3 days, which is great and meant that I only had to miss one day of teaching! Yep, that's right. Reading specialist by morning, English teacher by afternoon, and sponsorship coordinator in the in-between... you do the math! Needless to say, I have been a little busy lately, but I LOVE it!

So here's a little glimpse of the sponsorship coordinator part of my job. If you will be the lucky recipient of one of these eggs, know that the kids love you and love crafts!

(Disclaimer: I know it's Lent, but I have deadlines. Plus they don't do Lent here except for the carnival part... they don't really do Easter Sunday either, but Holy Week is a really big deal. I'll tell you all about it after I've experienced it for the first time!)

Clockwise from top left: Brayan working, eggs, Jonas - pro egg maker, the finished product!, me overseeing some hardworking students, little ones working on fine motor skills... crumpling tissue paper is harder than it looks when you're 6!

A Rainy Day Adventure

Today the road to the village was ESPECIALLY muddy. And in a valiant effort to dodge the world's biggest pothole, Junior drove the Care Center guagua (12 passenger van) full of all the teachers off the road into a ditch. This ditch was full of soppy mud - not just the kind you can get through, but really deep, wet, goopy, mud. After some attempts to get the guagua to go forward or backward, the guagua was tipped at about a 30 degree angle into the sugar cane field. All 15 of us climbed out through the driver's door and onto the road. Now it's about 8:05 in the morning and we are only halfway through our 3 mile drive to school. And it's drizzling. But we have to get to school - we're the teachers! So after a little debating over how long it would take the director to come get us in his truck, we started walking. In the cold mist, in the mud, with our bags and purses and notebooks. I walked most of it barefoot because I realized my flip-flops were going to get stuck in the mud on every step. You can imagine, by the time we got to school, what we looked like: feet covered in mud, wet, crazy hair, a little frustrated and tired but excited that we had had a good adventure! The school day continued as normal, with a few "we're walking, right?" jokes as we boarded the rescued guagua to come home.

Here are some pictures from our rainy day adventure for you! They don't quite do it justice, but you get the idea! Clockwise from the top left: my incredibly muddy feet and flip-flops!; the guagua stuck in the mud; Francina and me; a distant view of the guagua; Janeli, Jessi, and Francina; the rest of the teachers: Jury, Chichi, Sara, Dudu, Junior, Junior, and Paleta.

Sami suma sapos... teaching 11 year olds to read

Today I taught reading. I have always taken being able to read for granted. If I don’t know a word the first time I see it, I can still sound it out, think about its roots, context, pictures, and figure out what the word means. But today I sat with two 11 year old boys (among others) who don’t know what sounds the vowels make. They also don’t know any consonants, and they don’t know how to put the letters together to make syllabic sounds or words. I was stunned. I was expecting kids who couldn’t read, but this? This makes me angry. Kids at the care center have to be in whatever grade the public school places them in for scheduling reasons, so these boys are in 4^th grade but completely illiterate. It took fifteen minutes for me to help them sound out a basic sentence: “Sami suma sapos.” (Sammy adds toads.) In the DR, kids first learn the vowels, then two-letter syllables starting with m, s, and p – ma, me, mi, mo, mu; sa, se, si, so, su… So these boys should have been able to read this book (Sami Suma) since first grade. But because of a failed academic system that pushes them through school whether they have learned anything or not, these boys can’t read. I feel sad, angry, bewildered. But…

But I am excited to work with these kids. I am excited to see more smiles on their faces as things “click.” Today that happened when I showed them how to use the pictures to help them figure out what the words are – if Sami is adding toads he drew on a chalkboard, then “Sami suma sapos.” It also happened when they realized that every page of the “Es un Elefante?” (Is it an elephant?) book said the EXACT same thing – it took them five pages to realize that, but they eventually did! I will keep looking for small joys, keep praising them for sounding out “no, no es” for the fifth time, and keep praying for wisdom in how to teach something that has always come easily to me.

Food for thought: THIS HAPPENS in American school systems! I know that there are people living in the United States who at the least finished elementary school but can hardly read… what do we do about this?

"But aren't you my friend?"

At MTI we talked about how foreign customs or habits that seem strange to us almost always have logic behind them. I experienced an example of this this week!

Monday I became an English teacher - grades 5-8 - at the Care Center. Each class gets two 20 minute lessons a week, which is NOT very much time, especially when a third of the time is spent waiting for them to stop talking so I can teach!

When speaking to gringos (white people) here, the kids in Villa Asencion (and I think in the DR in general) either start or finish every sentence with "my friend." Examples: "Give me five pesos, my friend." "My friend, give me a drink of water." "My friend, what's your name?" Or even, "My friend, hello, my friend!" Also funny is that they don't finish their words here, so it sounds like "my frien..."

I tried to teach my classes this week that people who really speak English don't use "my friend" very much. I have always hated being called "my friend" because it means the kid saying it hasn't distinguished me from the myriad of tourists, missionaries, and visitors as someone who is staying with them for a while and is here to give them education and sponsors, not money or candy. As MTI taught me, though, there apparently is logic behind this dreaded gringo greeting. As I was teaching 8th grade, one of my students actually raised his hand (!) and said, "But aren't you my friend?" I had to stop and think for a minute. I responded, "Yes, I am your friend. But in the United States we don't talk about people being our friends very much." It was an interesting cultural moment - one of those instances that makes you think about your home culture in a way you have never before thought about it.

Here are some specific prayer requests for this coming week:

• PRAISE God that I enjoyed and was energized by my time in the classroom this week
  
• wisdom in lesson planning and ESPECIALLY classroom management - that I would be able to come up with and implement an effective and positive reward/discipline system
• wisdom as I begin reading tutoring - they are essentially going to put me in a room with five illiterate 9 year olds and say go...
• that God will continue to energize me through teaching and that he will put more love in my heart for my students every day
• Holly, a Makarios staff member who went to MTI with us and has been living in Santiago, is moving in with us on Sunday - pray for healthy transitions for her, Lauren, and me
• that in the midst of teaching, I will find a good Easter sponsorship craft and have the time to get it completed in time