Getting Going..

21^st de Septiembre, 2011

             I’m finally back at site! After being out of site on and off for about 3 weeks, it feels great to be in my home again.  Right now I’m finally HEALTHY. For probably the first time since I got to site, I don’t have any digestive problems (thank you Cipro), no nausea, no cold, and barely any bites. Knock on wood. 

                Also, I am finally starting to feel slightly productive in my aldea. I’ve almost reached 2 months in site and was starting to feel quite frustrated at how slow things were going. I’d like to think it had something to do with my counterpart being on vacation for 45 days. However, after his 45 day vacation, he returned for 2 hours and I have yet to see him since. After calling him, I was informed he won’t be here this entire week nor next week either.  But, as I’ve learned to work without him I will continue to do so in the future and I won’t rely or wait on him to do any more of my work. So, with that being said, I’m excited to finally start getting this ball rolling even if it will be slightly harder than I had originally planned.

          I learned about one sector in my aldea that takes almost 2 hours to walk to. Therefore, since the sector does not have a school the children in this community need to walk the 2 hours every day to school in the central part of the aldea. Now think about how often school is cancelled in Guatemala. So now Imagine walking 2 hours just to find out school is cancelled.  This gave me the idea of a possible bottle school. Since there aren’t too many students, the school would only have to be one room. However, this one classroom would have a huge range of ages making the teacher have to split the class into two (just like another sector in my community). I have a meeting with the director of the school on Friday to hopefully discuss this possibility. There are still many things to consider, but I like the idea of the bottle school. With the amount of trash in the aldea and the amount of children that would be more than willing to help with this project, I believe the project is quite feasible. But, it will all depend on the necessities of the aldea and what the director believes.

             Other projects I’m currently planning are a soccer camp in November and a club called “GLOW” or “Estrellas de hoy”.  Every day the girls from the school come visit me at the health center wanting to learn English, play soccer, or help me with my charla materials. Therefore, this club will meet either once every other week or once a month to not only learn English and play soccer but also to learn about preventative health, reproductive health, self esteem, leadership, career options, amongst many other topics. Having a ‘club’ will give the girls excitement to be a part of something while having a formal learning environment where I will be able to plan for the meetings; rather than have them just walk into the health post and ask “CHASHEE (my name), what does this mean in English/can you play soccer now/can you tell me my height and weight?”

        Anyway, so today was a good day. As I walked from the highway into my aldea, an older man with probably only 6 teeth stopped me to tell me he remembered me from a meeting I went to last week. It was the cutest thing definitely making that 3 hour long meeting entirely in K’iche (the mayan language) where I didn’t understand one word- totally worth it. I then taught English to a new group of students in “2nd grade”. I told the teacher I could teach for 30-45 minutes. However, she left me to the dust and didn’t return until their recess almost 2 hours later. In the classroom next to mine there was an employee from an organization in Quiche who I ended up talking with later in the day. Mid conversation he was confused that I worked with the health post after assuming I was the 2^nd graders’ permanent teacher. Guess I couldn’t have been that terrible!

                After the English class I continued my nail hygiene/hand washing charla/workshop in the market. Today and yesterday I used my “porta pila” to teach hand washing [see picture below].  The kids love the porta pila and kept coming back asking to wash their hands. I made a booklet of pictures to tell a story about a girl who goes throughout her day performing her normal daily activities but without washing her hands. She therefore not only has dirty hands but dirty nails as well. Clearly, in the end she ends up sick. On the back there’s a series of questions that they need to answer about the story and the importance of hand hygiene before they can get their nails cut, cleaned, and painted. Today I was in the market for 2 ½ hours doing this charla which I now call a workshop because it’s always so long with the amount of kids that come. Definitely not complaining though! It was really rewarding to have the boys start coming to get their nails cut and cleaned. Today, one boy brought his friend and starting telling him the charla and the importance of short, clean nails. Definitely a proud little volunteer today.

          After lunch, a group of girls came to the health center with a pen and paper to ask about what words meant in English. I finally realized I need to write out the pronunciation of the words in order for them to learn.  The other classes I teach either don’t know how to read yet or are old enough to comprehend the odd spelling of English so I haven’t really experienced how different words in English are to the way they’re written. For example, ‘night’ to them is clearly pronounced ‘neegt’ and school is ‘s-shool’ or ‘After writing out the pronunciation of the words, the girls finally got it and improved drastically. It was great to see their improvement and to find a new method of teaching that works. See below for the way I had to write the pronunciation of our common, every day English words.

Spanish/English/Pronunciation

Using a porta pila in the market to learn about hand washing and nail hygiene

 

Nothing about this amount of trash in the street should be Okay. Bottle school anyone?