I got up and got ready for class, and Mishel and I walked over. On the way there, we ran into a woman who asked me when my classes were, who could come, and how much money they cost. I was sort of surprised by the “how much does it cost” question, because Barbara had English classes too, but I told her to send me her kids next week. I started to worry a bit about people thinking it cost money. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do about that…part of me doesn’t really want more kids to come because we’ve already had almost two weeks of classes, and I’m afraid of boring the kids who have come to every class by reviewing for the new kids.
We had two more new kids, both very young and very shy. All my boys, Samer, José, Hames, and Darlyn were all a bit late, but I was really glad when they showed up. I guess my class is fun! We did some revision for the new kids again, and then I taught them how to count from 0-100. It was quite the job, but they got the hang of it. “teen” versus “ty” for endings to numbers was nearly impossible to differentiate for them because they don’t really end words with “n”, so they can’t really hear the difference.
After I taught them the numbers, we played a card game I made up with my uno cards. I took out all the special cards, like the wild, draw two, skip, reverse cards, and then each person had to take a card from the pile in the middle. They had to correctly say the color and number, in English, that was on the card, in order to keep it. When the deck ran out, the person with the most cards won. They liked it a lot.
I had copies made of a bingo card when I was in Chota, and each kid got to put the numbers in their bingo card. This took a lot longer than I had planned, but once they all had it made, I handed out the “chips”, which were actually small squares of paper I had painfully cut out and colored in red. I explained the game to them, and then we started. I had also cut out 100 pieces of paper and written numbers on them, which I had been using for flash cards, but which were doubling as the bingo numbers. I put all the numbers in a bag, mixed them out, and then picked a number, said it in English, and they had to tell me what number it was in Spanish. It was harder, because I didn’t let them see it, they had to go just by listening. It took a while, but Hames, who whined the whole game about how he didn’t have any of the numbers, eventually won. I think I’ll probably play bingo with them again the next class.
I’m thinking about splitting the class in two and having two classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, because there are kids who are clearly at different levels. However, with the exception of a few kids, they don’t all attend regularly, and I’m not going to sit in a class with one kid for two hours. We’ll have to see what happens.
After class I hung out at the health post for a while. On Friday, it’s the day all the Moms come to the health post to get vaccines for their kids and have them weighed. Natalia had told me a while back that we could probably get a bunch of encuestas done on that day because all the moms would be there with their children. I mentioned this to Silvia and Violeta, two other health workers, and they kept trying to discourage me, saying it was going to be busy and the moms wouldn’t want to wait around to do the encuesta. I told them I would just do it with moms who were waiting anyway. They kept trying to convince me otherwise, but I was resolved to come anyway, partly because Natalia had told I should, and because I was not going to pass up an opportunity to get all those encuestas done. I was sort of irritated with them, but I shrugged it off.
On the walk home, which I started a bit early because it looked like the sky was going to dump on me, I ended up walking through this huge mass of people on the road. I couldn’t figure out what they were all doing there, until I realized it had to be something to do with the woman who died. I immediately felt super awkward, because I was walking against a giant group of people collected almost right at the bottom of my house’s hill, and I felt like I was totally intruding. It sort of felt like walking through a parade, in the wrong direction. Or even worse, it kind of felt like trying to weave my way through a funeral procession, because that’s exactly what I was doing. I ended up walking through about a foot of water in my boots through a field just to avoid pushing through people standing on the road. At the bottom of my hill, I got charged at by a bull my host mom had staked right on the path and I almost fell over. Some guy standing on top of a van at the very back of the currently non-processing procession called out to me to be careful. A couple minutes later, Tobi and Lobo, our dogs, came barreling down the hill, and he told me to watch out for the dogs. I called back that they are my dogs, and he looked a little surprised at that. I felt sort of satisfied…and a little surprised that I had said it. As I got up the hill, Mishel was sitting outside with her little pink sunglasses on, the puppy, who had come a long way since day one, not far away. We watched the funeral procession as it walked toward the school, band instruments playing despite the rainfall. I found out later they walked the whole hour to Chota, and then walked all the way back up the mountain after the coffin was placed in the cemetery.
Mishel asked me if I would play Uno with her, but I was too tired and really wanted to just crawl into my bed for a little while. I told her I would play with her later.
I finished reading Water for Elephants that afternoon, and watched the movie that night before I went to bed. The book is way better than the movie. The thing I liked about the book was less the plot and more her brilliant descriptions and unique way of capturing the main character as an old man. It made me miss my fiction writing class at Yale.
I was home, and storm hit, complete with thunder and a little lightening. I was sitting in my room, looking through encuestas when I heard a really high-pitched sound. I thought it was the puppy caught somewhere, or maybe cornered by Tobi, so I went outside, only to see Mishel, sitting in her doorframe, half screeching, half crying, looking at the sky. I went right to her and asked her what was wrong, stroking her hair and trying to be soothing. She said she wanted her dad but didn’t calm down at all. I told her he would be back later and suggested she play with the puppy, but she kept screeching. I figured she was afraid of the storm. I asked if she wanted to play a game, and she said yes and immediately stopped crying. I immediately became skeptical, and by the time I had the Uno cards in my hands, she was already sitting at the table, completely calm, with no indication that she’d been crying. I felt totally played. We played three rounds of Uno and I was caught between complete resentment that I was being manipulated by a six year old, and a slight satisfaction that she had totally opened up to me. By the last game, resentment had won out.
That night, Celina gave me a ton of food. Some kind of weird startchy round bean, a pile of rice, a fried egg, and then this weird black spikey stuff. Black spikey stuff turned out to be greasy charred herbs. That sounds weird, but I’m serious. She had taken a bunch of herbs and charred them to literally a crisp, pitch black, with the texture of super dry leaves, like when you can crush them in your hand they are so brittle. However, she had also cut up some part of a pig and fried it in there with the crispy charred herbs, so that it was sort of greasy and tasted a little tiny bit like bacon. I had seen that meat hanging over our clothesline for a week, however, and eating it was not particularly appetizing. I had to remind Celina again, after asked me if I didn’t like her food, that I can’t eat all the food that she serves me. Then she made a snide remark to Samuel about how I didn’t want to get fat, and I ignored it.
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