Activities and Good Days
Sometimes I feel like it has been a really good day for no reason at all. Last Friday felt like one of those days. I chatted with my sister about college and movies and normal life first thing in the morning. I only met two people in my morning wander/census: Wilfredo, who taught me a little about fishing and made it clear that I should never find myself alone with him again, and Gerónimo who really took the “Go forth and multiply” seriously and has 27 kids, 21 of whom survived to adulthood. He also converted to the Evangelical church at age 50 and spent over an hour talking about religion. After soup for lunch, a nap and a quick walk to the local tienda (shop) with my ten-year-old host sister, we stopped in to watch a few minutes of the youth soccer practice. In the afternoon we experienced an intense ice storm, and as the rain was letting up we raced out to watch the river rise. In five minutes the white rock I picked to mark the water line had completely disappeared. It is amazing to watch a river rise inch by inch, swollen with rainwater and debris. As darkness fell I played Phase 10 with the three youngest kids (Nayely-10, Edwin-13 and Olvin-15), then the game where you guess the person on your forehead. Before bed I finished The Silver Linings Playbook and even wrote a paragraph.
Tuesday morning I was supposedly continuing my census but actually ended up teaching kids to make bracelets in front of one of the tiendas. I did visit one house I was missing - the tienda owners - but then I ran into Henry, a kid I taught to make simple bracelets during the end of the soccer game on Sunday. Not that I don’t like watching soccer, but it gets long when it’s hot out and I don’t know the players and it’s the third game of the afternoon and the last two games ended in an empate (tie) and this game our team is up 1-0. I went to the game to try to get my face out there in the community and maybe meet some people. I certainly got noticed, but I was too uncomfortable to go up to random strangers and try to sit next to them during the game. I didn’t even know who was from our team and who was from the opposition.
My host brother Edwin suggested I bring some thread to the game just in case, and he hit gold with the idea. I positioned myself near the exit partway through the final game and started working on a pattern. Not ten minutes later I had a crowd watching me work and a bright little guy about ten years old asking if I could teach him.
That little guy, Henry, has been a godsend. He has popped up all over the place since Sunday, and is great for breaking the ice with others, especially the girls, to get them to join in. I can tell from the way they watch that they want to learn, but they refuse to speak and get this panicked look when I suggest that they take a seat and grab some thread. Enough kids are asking to learn that I finally set Saturday morning as a bracelet class for the kids.
I also got to talking with one of the teenagers on the soccer team and he suggested a workshop to teach some of the more complicated patterns to the teenagers, which sounds to me like the perfect ploy to get them all in the same place, build confianza (trust), teach something, and plant the idea that a youth group would be a fun idea. I may start playing soccer with the women’s team on Tuesdays as well, though I am less enamored of that idea than of starting a volleyball team. Volleyball requires significantly less running in extreme heat and humidity.
We went with a friend (or cousin?) and her baby down to the river to cool off and splash around for a few hours in the afternoon. It was a beautiful way to pass the hours, as long as you ignore the fact that the water is a kind of greeny-brown, which we did. I may have mentioned that the bug situation is out of control in this country, and every day I seem to encounter a new terrifying insect. A few days ago it was the tailless whip scorpion, and Tuesday it was the gigantic water spider. This thing is hairy and brown and as big as my hand and skips over water as if it were solid. They tell me it doesn’t bite, but they tell me there aren’t mosquitoes and that the water is safe to drink, too. One thing I am all too keen to leave behind at the end of my service is the constant spattering of bug bites that appear daily all over my body, that’s for sure.
In other news, November 18 is supposedly National Pupusa Day.
Also, I am starting a book tally. This week I finished The Silver Linings Playbook and 13 Little Blue Envelopes and started 1776 by David McCullough. I wasn’t sure about reading about the Revolutionary War, but before I knew it I was a hundred pages in and completely invested in the story. The book is wonderfully written and brings the people to vivid life within its pages. As for the other two, I enjoyed The Silver Linings Playbook in the simple sense that it was easy to follow the story and be sympathetic towards the main character, though I probably won’t read it again especially since I’m not that into football or Philly. Maureen Johnson’s book would have been great if I was in high school, and captured a lot of what I felt (the good, the bad and the boring) when I was traveling solo last year. Having met the author, it was easy to see parts of her in the main character and hear her voice in her writing. If you like twitter, follow Maureen Johnson on twitter because she is an absolute twitter pro and hilarious to boot.
That’s all folks! (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Chip and Dale and the whole gang are just as funny in Spanish and the DVD is always on the top of the stack, ready to watch again and again in the midday heat when it’s impossible to do anything except sweat.)
New book tally: 16
My host brother Edwin suggested I bring some thread to the game just in case, and he hit gold with the idea. I positioned myself near the exit partway through the final game and started working on a pattern. Not ten minutes later I had a crowd watching me work and a bright little guy about ten years old asking if I could teach him.
That little guy, Henry, has been a godsend. He has popped up all over the place since Sunday, and is great for breaking the ice with others, especially the girls, to get them to join in. I can tell from the way they watch that they want to learn, but they refuse to speak and get this panicked look when I suggest that they take a seat and grab some thread. Enough kids are asking to learn that I finally set Saturday morning as a bracelet class for the kids.
I also got to talking with one of the teenagers on the soccer team and he suggested a workshop to teach some of the more complicated patterns to the teenagers, which sounds to me like the perfect ploy to get them all in the same place, build confianza (trust), teach something, and plant the idea that a youth group would be a fun idea. I may start playing soccer with the women’s team on Tuesdays as well, though I am less enamored of that idea than of starting a volleyball team. Volleyball requires significantly less running in extreme heat and humidity.
In other news, November 18 is supposedly National Pupusa Day.
Also, I am starting a book tally. This week I finished The Silver Linings Playbook and 13 Little Blue Envelopes and started 1776 by David McCullough. I wasn’t sure about reading about the Revolutionary War, but before I knew it I was a hundred pages in and completely invested in the story. The book is wonderfully written and brings the people to vivid life within its pages. As for the other two, I enjoyed The Silver Linings Playbook in the simple sense that it was easy to follow the story and be sympathetic towards the main character, though I probably won’t read it again especially since I’m not that into football or Philly. Maureen Johnson’s book would have been great if I was in high school, and captured a lot of what I felt (the good, the bad and the boring) when I was traveling solo last year. Having met the author, it was easy to see parts of her in the main character and hear her voice in her writing. If you like twitter, follow Maureen Johnson on twitter because she is an absolute twitter pro and hilarious to boot.
That’s all folks! (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Chip and Dale and the whole gang are just as funny in Spanish and the DVD is always on the top of the stack, ready to watch again and again in the midday heat when it’s impossible to do anything except sweat.)
New book tally: 16
Comments
Post a Comment