lessons, laughter, and the legend of the clouds

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I have the better part of a week to talk about, so I will go through and describe some of the more important highlights...

Funny Story:

My first story still makes me laugh out loud as I am walking down the street by myself and thinking about it. An important thing to keep in mind as I tell this story is that the students we are teaching hardly know ANY words in English. OK? VERY few. To begin: Sascha and I were leading a lesson with 4 or 5 of the older kids while Ari took a few of them elsewhere. After a long time spent teaching the students to say, "how do you say this in English," and then attempting to satisfy their vocabulary curiosity, we moved on to the text book. The name of the lesson was "Cool Things," and not a single student knew what that meant. Neither Sascha nor I knew how to say cool in Spanish, so the two of us both start trying to act it out (by being cool, of course). We were walking around the 2 square-foot space in front of the desks with a gangster limp and showing off our clothes while asking the students to describe us in Spanish until we heard the word we would recognize as cool. Most of the students were at a loss, except for Carlos, who stuck his hand out in imitation and said, "look at me, I am gay." I nearly peed in front of the class when I burst out laughing at this comment. FIRST OF ALL, the kid cannot respond properly when asked "how are you," so how on EARTH does he know the word gay? Second of all, here are Sascha and I trying to act cool, but our actual impression was far from its intent. If that is a story that you "had to be there for" and you did not find that amusing, oh well. I am still laughing. By the way, cool in Spanish is chevere. I think.

Week at work:

Work at the foundation this week was very different from last week. All of the students are back, and there is an actual schedule to follow everyday. Playing with the children all the time was wonderful, but getting them to respect you, sit still, and listen in the classroom is a whole other ball game. I am not leading most lessons because I am much worse at Spanish than my two trusty co-teachers, but I am essentially a teacher's aide, and thank God we have so much support in such a small classroom. On Monday and Tuesday, I spent most of my energy putting my special education skills to work. That is, I drew and colored about 10 posters for vocabulary references and decoration, 3 of which I designated as introduction lessons for each class every day. Implementing a routine and establishing some sort of norm is essential for the flow of a classroom, right professor? The posters are easily bought by teachers back in America, and it is certainly something I did not appreciate enough until I came home and could hardly write in my journal because my hand and arm were so tired. That has worked well so far, for the most part. It will hopefully at least expose the children to specific things enough that they will memorize it by rote. Hopefully.

Wednesday was interesting. We arrived at the foundation to find all of the young children (there had to be about 30 of them) dressed in Antorchas uniforms, which we had never seen before. We were then told that we were going to the Game Box, about a 10 minute walk from the foundation. The game box, yes it was in English here too, is basically a smaller version of Sportstime (arcade, small rides). This place gives the foundation vouchers that allow them to bring the children for 2 hours to go on all the rides they want, and we had the place to ourselves. I felt like a camp counselor and it was quite enjoyable. I, myself, did not care for the rides, but to see the ear-to-ear smiles on the children's faces was all the entertainment I needed. They had one of those ships (not shits, krug) that swing back and forth really high, bumper cars, a huge playground, and a merry-go-round. Those 4 seemingly simple rides would get really old really fast for a lot of children back home, but these children could have gone on those rides all day if we let them. It was 2 hours of "I have the privileges of a normal child!" At the end, the employees gave all the children snacks and drinks, also for free, and they all sang a thank you song that gave me the goosebumps. I know that a bunch of those children were just singing it because they had to, but I focused on the ones who seemed to be singing it with all of their hearts out of genuine appreciation for the carefree 2 hours of running around they were granted. The bumper cars hurt me, but I came out alive.

The final thing I will mention about the work week is more of a downer. Today when we arrived, we were told that morning classes were canceled because a girl who used to live at the foundation died. She was 18 and was back out on the streets for months (I did not know her), but she had lived there for years and a lot of the children knew her. To be honest, none of the children seemed too affected on the outside, but it made me think a lot about what the foundation does for the children. While it is amazing that these children have such a fantastic alternative to the streets and are able to attend school for a half day everyday, what are these children being taught about getting out of the foundation and attaining decent lives for themselves? One of the major flaws of the foundation is that it does not yet have a way to transition children into jobs or into universities, so what happens when they get older? I am not sure. I met one who used to live there. He now lives with his sister and seems to be doing well. He looked good and was so genuinely nice and respectful. I know there is another one who lives with her mom, but nobody seems to know where and nobody knows what she is up to. If the children are not hearing very many success stories about the people who used to live with them, how can they be properly motivated to achieve their own success in the future? I appreciate that so much is done for these children everyday, but they need to be taught independence and they need to go above and beyond what most other children do in order to get jobs and go to school. Some of them talk about coming to America, and I would love nothing more than to see that happen for them, but becoming a citizen is so damn difficult, time-consuming and expensive, and I feel the need to be careful when talking about that dream so that I don't make it sound too easy. I want to go home and have enough money to start a foundation of my own. I want to take some of these kids, and also american homeless kids, and I want them to learn a trade, excel at a sport, or go to school. It breaks my heart to think of some of these children going back out on the streets. Sascha and Ari have been to a church to feed the homeless who are not at the foundation. They all carry glue around their necks and sniff it all day in between digging through the trash in order to eat. My little darlings cannot end up that way! What to do, what to do...

Ending on a colorful note:

Tonight, Friday night, Sascha and I attended a musical called La Leyenda de Nubia (Legend of the Clouds). HILARIOUS. For starters, it was in Spanish (not Russian, as some of you might have thought), and I didn't understand 95% of the words. Never before has so much of a play been left up to my very own imagination! Secondly, it was crazy. Here is what they did. They took all of the crayons out of a crayola box. Every single crayon was brought to life and their personalities matched their colors. They were then separated into two communities, one containing the black, white, gray and brown crayons, and the other containing all the other colors in the box. The crayons in each community mated with each other, had multi-color babies, and developed their own societies. Where the play begins is when the bland-colored, evil community kidnaps the princess of the bright, rainbow community. That is how I decided to interpret it. It was an amateur combination of Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz, starring the Doodle Bops, for those of you who are lucky enough to know of the Doodle Bops (Does my sarcasm come through in my writing?) I will not tell you everything that happened, of course- just my favorite moments:

-The giant smurf came out during a fight scene and started clocking people with a frying pan.
-While captain hook and his bland-colored crew were singing their evil songs and dancing their evil dances, the music stopped and suddenly one of the scrubby-looking guys started beat-boxing. Then three of the guys started break-dancing, while the rest of the crew attempted a lame shimmy/pop-lock type dance.

I am so happy I went because it was a very different experience and Sascha and I had some good laughs about it. We are going shopping tomorrow because we decided that our wardrobes are just not colorful enough anymore. And I am buying a purple wig. That is all.

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