October 17, 2008 (freakin’ early in the morning)

It is 5 am and I can’t sleep so I figured I would write a journal entry. Thursday morning I was awakened with a call from my parents. I am having a bit of a problem in the States that they are trying to resolve for me. Although the problem sucks, it was really nice to hear from my parents first thing in the morning. Between my cell phone and skype I am fortunate enough to be able to communicate with them almost as often as I did when I was living in the United States. It helps a lot with homesickness. I couldn’t imagine serving as a Peace Corps volunteer before Internet or cell phones. I don’t think I would have been able to do that.

Every Thursday morning my counterpart and I tutor children in the library. Usually I can’t do much because my Spanish isn’t perfect. Math, yes, English, of course, but language arts… not so much. This time several of the children needed help in English so I had a great time helping them. One of the little girls comes to tutoring a lot so I know her pretty well. She is very sweet and bright, but struggles a lot in her classes. She is (I think) in fifth grade, but doesn’t know how to read. It is a common problem. Children get behind for whatever reason when they are really young and miss out on the basics. They are therefore forever struggling and will never catch up. They begin to think that they simply aren’t smart and give up. Teachers can’t give them the help they need because they are too busy with 40-50 other students to give them individual attention. Their parents probably had a similar experience and so therefore can’t help. I’m beginning to think that I will make the biggest impact if I single out one or two children and simply focus lots of my attention on them. Invite them to my place (when I have one) for ‘learning activities’ and make learning fun! Bake cookies and have them read the recipe to me, break out all the crayons, markers, etc. that my mother sent me and incorporate them in my lessons, take them to the park and read books. Send me ideas if you have them.

Yesterday morning I tried to teach the little girl when to use ‘a’ vs. ‘an.’ As I tried to explain the seemingly easy concept, I realized that she didn’t know the difference between a vowel and a consonant. Further investigation revealed that she didn’t know the difference between a capital and a lower case letter. Teaching her how to pluralize words was like pushing a boulder of a mountain. But let me tell you one thing, when she finally figured out that the plural form of boy is boys and body is bodies, I was so ecstatic that I did a dance. This made her laugh, so I consistently repeated an increasingly exaggerated performance every time she got an answer right. She really is bright… she just isn’t used to succeeding.

After tutoring, my counterpart and I went to investigate the house that I am interested in. I finally got up the courage to peak inside and… I am in love. It has pretty tile!!! Sophisticated tile. And rooms (plural!). And a little kitchen area. It doesn’t have water… but the owner is fixing it up and putting in water because she wants to rent it out. YAYAY!!! My counterpart and I left our number with this person who knows her and hopefully, hopefully, I can convince her to rent it to me starting in December. I hope, I hope, I hope, I HOPE!!!!! This place could become a home. I can see myself being happy there. I can see myself being successful there.

In the afternoon, my counterpart and I had our second dance class with the group of children who will dance at the cultural night. They are getting better. It is far from perfect… but I have hope that they won’t make total fools of themselves. I brought my camera and video taped them so they could see themselves. They liked that.

When the dance class ended I went to Machala to pick up another package from my fabulous mother (She sent me UNO!), meet up with another volunteer to give her back her mailbox key, and head to my dance class. My counterpart, another lady and friend from INNFA, and a fellow volunteer all take this aerobics dance class together and none of them showed up today. I ended up being the only student. The instructor ended up giving me a private salsa lesson, which was really fun! I was kinda disappointed once other students started to show up and my lesson had to end.

After my dance class, I had to sprint back to my site for a town meeting. It was really frustrating because I couldn’t understand probably 90% of what people said. The room had bad acoustics, all the windows were open so there was a lot of noise and distractions, and the meeting lasted forever! I couldn’t concentrate.

Well it is 6:20 now and I am yawning away. Must go back to sleep because I have another big day today.