Time Flies When… You´re in Achuapa? June 17th, 2010
So I can´t believe it´s been almost a week since I last posted. I guess I intended at first to wait until I had at least started to do something, and all of a sudden I´ve been swept up in this storm of happiness and anxiety and exasperation and complete relaxation. It´s been a ride already and I don´t know where its headed. I have greatly benefitted however already from a dose of structure in the last couple of days, establishing my routine. That is, I get up around 8 (if this sounds earler, my host mom gets up at 4am every morning to start making tortillas) and Gladys my host mom makes me a breakfast batido (a milk’based smoothie) with bananas and sometimes pineapple for energy. Then I wash a couple items of clothes by hand, put them out to dry and take a cold shower. Gladys heads to work at 9am, at which point i start to get my things together and dawdle a bit, getting to the library about 10am. The morning is my planning period. From 10 to 12am I do practice examples for the afternoon activities. Today was my first day of doing this, as I felt it would be nice to do Father´s Day Cards for this weekend. It is a simple popup card, but as with any art activity that goes on, it is not easy to be doing anything for long without a gang of anxious nibbling youngsters to come flocking toward the activity. So I started with two compañeros, Randel and Katherin and we started going at it. I showed Rafaela, the librarian, what I was doing when I was finished and she was so intrigued and delighted that she wanted me to teach her how to do it as well! So we all sat and talked and drew for 2 and a half hours making these precius little animal cards, which i will enseñar later with fotos. It so happens that Rafaela has to go to this taller, workshop, tomorrow, its like a meeting for teachers and librarians. She exclaimed Oh Kati!As for little Leonardito, I have had many adorable moments with already. He is only one year old so he is just learning to walk but he has to keep momentum to stay upright or he falls down PLOP right on his butt. On Tuesday Gladys and I had to watch him while Margini, his mom, went to a job interview in Managua. This was the first time he had ever been left along by his mother and so when I woke up and walked into the kitchen my host mom said to me, Kati, estamos jodido con este chavalo. Kati, we are f*ed with this little boy. We did fine though! And Margini got the job!This one girl who keeps coming into the library for help with her English homework is a gorgeous, terribly timid girl who I think was at first afraid of me (imagine!) but has recently shown a great interest in art classes and even showed me some of her little ink drawings that she sketches between the pages of her algebra homework. What amazes me is actually how much kids here like to draw or actually do draw despite the fact that, for example, sketchbooks or really any kind of real art supplies is virtually unheard of here. All the library has for example is a little tin of stubby broken colored pencils and a little jar of sorry looking paint brushes.