December 1, 2008

I finally officially moved into my new house on Saturday. I can’t describe to you all how much I LOVE IT!!! It is my home, the sanctuary that I dreamt about. It is a place where I can be me: where I can prepare my own food, walk around in my underwear if I so desire (and I desire to do that a lot… it is getting really hot), and… well… be me. It isn’t prefect. There is only water in the morning, my place shares a wall with the owner and I can often hear them when I want to sleep, and the children apparently believe that my house is the latest playground… or a zoo. I friend came over yesterday and a group of children just watched us through the screen door for half an hour. They didn’t say anything. Just watched. I keep reminding myself that the novelty of my living here will quickly wear off. I hope.

Today I spent the morning enjoying my new house. My counterpart then came over and I showed off my new place. We discussed what we would do this month. She wants me to write another 3-week ‘Libros y Arte’ (Books and Art) class. This time with a Christmas theme. The only problem is that there are no children Christmas books or stories written in Spanish. I spent several hours surfing the internet for Christmas stories posted online, but none of them were any good. I know Christmas isn’t a big deal here… but seriously! I desperately searched the libraries close to my parents in hopes that my mother could scan some books for me. No luck. After several hours I found ‘The Gift of the Magi’ in Spanish and another story that looks passably interesting. Hopefully I can start with them and therefore buy myself a little more time before I have to write the lesson plan for the third and final week. Wish me luck!!!

In the afternoon I baked banana muffins in my new campo oven… which is basically a big pot with a rock in the bottom that I place over the stove to bake. I’m happy to say that it worked! Then later this evening the little girl I’ve been tutoring came over and I helped her with her homework. She can barely subtract but is ‘learning’ long division in school. (I put quotes around learning because I know she isn’t learning anything in her classes.) I broke out the large lima-bean shaped beans that I have and we counted and grouped the beans for several hours. In the end she managed to do all the math herself with me only prompting her with phrases such as “Where do we write the 7?” “What number do we bring down now?” and, my favorite, “Are you sure 7 x 7 = 1? I think you better count how many beans there are.” She eventually got the hang of the concept of division and while she solved the problems I cleaned my house and shaved my legs. All in all, it was a very productive evening!