So I’m back to the blog after another hiatus, sorry about that :) I was really busy until the weekend of the 24th, then I spent some time just relaxing and getting my life back in order, such as cleaning my filthy house (which was covered in brownies after the dinner party on the 24th) and doing laundry (I had begun buying clothing because everything was dirty). But I’m back now, and though work hasn’t picked back up yet, I’m to the point where it’s time to do something, even though my laundry is once again reaching the top of the laundry hamper (which is actually a cardboard box with a plastic bag in it, but I’m roughing it right?) Now most volunteers would take care of these domestic things during their weekends, but as it turns out, I actually do most of my work on weekends. The jovenes have started back to classes in the universities, so they’re pretty much busy all week, leaving the weekends free. I’m they’re overjoyed by the fact that I take up some of their weekends with my work, but at least for now they participate. So during the week unless I make work for myself, I don’t really have anything that I have to do. Work could include going back to what I was doing, going with the women who work with kids under 5 yrs old in the homes, or I could go back to helping in the schools. The first option doesn’t interest me too much because I don’t feel like I was really helping with anything. It was a great way to meet 150+ families in the community, but as far as productivity, eh... So then there’s the school option. Well I’ve explained how the schools are here, crazy, loud, possibility of getting stabbed with pencils, etc. So in the end the school will be my work week, it’s just a matter of succumbing to my destiny, oh, and getting out of bed at 6am to be ready for school. My host mom has been pressuring me to come help her in her math classes. Side note, her school has changed its format this year, possibly because of the new principal that has taken over. Before, the kids would stay in the classroom and the teacher would rotate. Now, the teachers rotate with some of the classes (under 5th grade I think), and the 6th (which is what my host mom is teaching this year) and 7th have the same teacher in the same classroom all day every day. Actually, I might have that a little mixed up, but the idea is that they’ve changed their system, which can only be a good thing. So anyway, my host mom is back in the government mandated university refresher classes for teachers, and they’ve been doing math for the last couple months. One day I told her I like math and used to tutor in middle school (less relevant) and in college (more relevant) so she got really excited and now I’ve been helping her, and sometimes her colleagues, on their math lessons. I know it has to be really hard to go back and relearn algebra and trigonometry, etc. after not looking at it for a long time, but she is really doing a great job with it. What usually happens is that I read through the problems, get an idea of how to do it, then we work through it step by step. Afterwards, I have her explain it back to me, and we brainstorm ways to make it more concrete and simple for her 6th graders. Then she goes to the university class and usually they get together in groups of 4 and talk about their homework. At which point she explains to her colleagues how to do the problems, then sometimes they have to present the problem to the rest of their class. And sometimes her fellow teachers come to our study sessions to get extra help as well. So I feel really good about tutoring her because not only is she learning, but she is also teaching what she has learned to the other teachers, which then helps put the information into the students’ hands in a more efficient and accurate manner. I feel like it makes a bigger difference than just working with the students directly, and therefore is a better use of my time. Also, my host mom has been getting really great grades in her math class on the exams, which demonstrates that she is actually learning it well enough to replicate on the tests. She is always so excited to tell me how the test went. After the last one she came home and said “I did so good they’ll have to give me 11 out of 10!!” and was super excited. Now I don’t know what grade she actually received, but I would suspect it was pretty high. It’s not foolproof teaching math here though. I have heard that division is taught very differently here, but haven’t figured out how they teach it. What we usually do, is I explain to her how I know how to do it, what I learned in school in the US, then I explain what the goal is (for example dividing 5 by 10 to get ½) and she then does it in the techniques they use here. And sometimes she explains what she did to me, but usually as long as she gets what we’re doing and has her way of doing it, we drop it and move on. But anyway, she has been asking me to come help in her math class, to pull a couple of the struggling kids aside and work one on one with them, which again, I’ve been avoiding the schools, but I will be doing that a few days a week starting this week I think. I also want to get an afterschool tutoring program started on Fridays, but haven’t gotten the initiative to move forward with the plans.

So in preparation for the Global Youth Service Day event we had, I made cookies and brownies for the jovenes to sell to raise money (but we decided to just eat them instead). The jovenes had been asking and asking me to teach them to make chocolate chip cookies, so one day I told them if they wanted to learn to come over to my house because that’s what I was going to make that night. So we had 6 of the jovenes in my house ready to learn. I got out the recipe and walked them through it step by step, translating the directions. Things were going great until we got to “butter”. When I told them ½ a cup, they gasped and gave me dubious looks. Then one of them got out the measuring cup and measured it out, asking me if I was sure that was right. After he filled up to ½ a cup and mixed it into the eggs, etc. they were all grossed out and said they had no idea that’s what cookies are made out of (they ate them all that night though, so I guess they got over it!). The good part of this story though is that because of the cookie making, they decided that they want to learn to make HEALTHY foods so now I have a captive audience to teach about nutrition and cooking. Our first goal is learning to make salads, American style. I have ranch powder, so we’ll make ranch dressing, and make it with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, etc. I also want to teach them some variations on salads, such as making chicken breast for the salads, oil and vinegar dressing, and Mexican taco salads. Then I want to teach them some entrees from the US, and they all really want to learn to make pizza (which I just did the other day, but this time I made a deep dish pizza pie = amazing!!). Plus I know whatever I make they’ll eat, which is a plus :)

Speaking of kitcheny things, I spent an hour and a half defrosting my freezer Saturday night. I have a big 1 door fridge/freezer combo, and I don’t know if it’s because it’s so hot here or what, but the freezers in this country always fill with frost. I’d been ignoring it ignoring it but finally Saturday night it was so frosty that the big door couldn’t close, so I decided it was time to do something about it. I took everything out of the fridge/freezer and hacked away at the ice with a knife, then eventually just put a bucket in the fridge and turned the fan so it was blowing into the freezer (turned out to be just like air conditioning haha!!) and after 3 buckets of icy water and an hr later, it was defrosted. I can’t believe my freezer is so big! It had been so full of ice (literally at least 3 inches on all of the freezer walls) that I didn’t realize how big it was. And I read in our Buen Provecho cookbook that Peace Corps provides us with, that a trick to making defrosting much easier in the future is putting butter all over the coils. So after it was defrosted I buttered my hand and smeared it all over the freezer, inside and out. Hopefully that will help; I guess I’ll know in a few months when it’s all frosty again!

Okay so an update on what happened for Global Youth Service Day (April 24). As you know if you read the last blog, we received a grant from GetURGoodOn (a foundation established by Miley Cyrus) and Youth Service America to hold a weekend of events for GYSD. First we wanted to make an 8 by 15 foot portable world map to be used by the local schools in their educational programming. We started the map 3 weeks before the event which made me a little nervous. But the first day of working on it the jovenes drew the entire thing, grid and all, in 3.5 hours. I was thoroughly impressed, not only with the speediness, but also by the quality. Sure we lost a couple of island countries, but that’s sometime you just have to accept and paint later once the ocean is done. We were planning on starting painting the next day, but the jovenes were unenthusiastic, so we waited until the next weekend. We started painting and I realized it wasn’t going to go as fast as the drawing did, but they painted and painted for about 4 hrs, covering a great deal of 2 of the 3 plywood sheets. Then another day they started the next plywood, and after 4 days of painting, things were looking pretty good. Then the week of the event I started getting nervous. We still needed to finish painting, draw the outline and label the countries, have the wood joined together with hinges, and paint on the protective lacquer. So I did some painting etc by myself in the house, mostly rediscovering all of the islands we had lost in the south pacific and Caribbean. But often when I was painting a couple of the jovenes would come over and join me, so I was rarely alone. The Thursday before the event we took the wood to be joined at a carpentry shop, installing the hinges and cutting off an extra inch we had somehow acquired one of the boards... Then the day before the event we had a huge group of youth came over and we outlined and labeled everything. The night before the event, they started working with the lacquer, but it was a challenge because the brushes were leaving streaks and we were worried about the marker smearing with the oil based lacquer. But after several hours of discussing it, they finally devised a roller taped to a pole that they used to reach all parts of the board....

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Unfortunately I’m almost out of internet so I’m going to post what I have written, but I’m going to continue writing the rest of the story right now so as soon as I have internet again I promise it will be continued!! Love and miss you all!