Teaching

The teacher has been out for two weeks so Dominique (another volunteer) and I have been asked to take her place until she returns. It has been an interesting change in pace. I am seeing a side of the children I have never seen before. Some of them are so shy in the class room and don’t want to participate, thankfully we have been able to open several of them up and they now enjoy being involved. There are still the few that feel like they just don’t get it and need more one on one teaching. We have been teaching them about the solar system, math, writing skills, geography, as well as many other subjects. It’s amazing what these children don’t know! They have learned a lot since we have been teaching and it’s been a learning experience for us as well. I have decided that teaching is a crash course in learning patients.

Random:

· The air here smells like it has some sort of lime twang to it sometimes. That is only one of the smells of course. There are way too many to count!
· The Medina Market has smells of its own…most of them are good. But the first time I went they were cleaning the sewer and it was disgusting smelling!
· Red and Black represent mourning and white and black represent celebration
· Since we are so close to the airport planes are constantly flying over really really low our heads and I love it!
· I had to pay 5 cents to use a really nasty restroom with no running water and no toilet paper, at the court house of all places!
· The left hand is unclean you cannot use it when coming into contact with another person, like when you are shaking hands or exchanged money. It gets really tricky when you are purchasing something and they are handing you the item at the same time you are handing them the money, but they’ve got it down so it usually works out pretty well.
· I was shocked to see that the people dress amazing well around here. I mean of course we are in the city and there are still those who don’t but for the most part people are dressed very nicely in slacks or a nice dress. Most of the time I feel under dressed so I try to look a little nicer when I know I am going to town.
· We have power outages on a weekly basis. Since I have been here we had 22 hours straight and then 37 hours straight without electricity. It really wasn’t that bad except for the fact that all of our food went bad and we had to throw it out. Recently we have experience half power outages. The side of our house where are rooms are had no power but the rest of the house did. Then it would switch, it’s the weirdest thing ever but thankfully only lasts for a few hours at a time.