Wednesday, July 05, 2006

yo ho yo ho a pirate's life for me

so, #1, everywhere i go, whenever the address for something here is written down, it always ends with "guatemala, central america", or just "guatemala, c.a." why? is there another guatemala somewhere? i understand like with georgia, which is a state and also a country in africa, but i didn't think there were any more guatemala's anywhere. anyone have any input on this one?

#2, i found two yarn stores today and went wild, because this stuff costs less than a dollar per skein, and sometimes a lot less, and there was also an armed guard outside one of the yarn stores. why? the yarn is not very expensive, i just said that, and although there is a lot of it, it's all behind the counter and you have to ask for what you want, so it's not like theft should be a really big problem. maybe last year a woman who was on a bus but didn't get pulled off and patted down smuggled a gun into the yarn store and demanded $25 worth of it, pronto. who knows, man. this place doesn't make that much sense most of the time.

#3, for anyone traveling to guatemala ever, if you want cheap, reliable ice cream, pollo campero is the place to go. pollo campero is really popular here and it's like guatemalan kfc. probably it's owned by the same people, but the locals here don't really know about kentucky, so they changed the name. anyway, remember how a vanilla cone at mcdonald's was 3 quetzales? well, the cones at pollo campero are also 3 quetzales, but you can get it with chocolate, caramel, strawberry, or pina colada sauce, at no extra charge. i had a caramel one today and i really liked it a lot, it was well worth my 40 cents.

#4, i went and hung out with the niñas again today, and i had an epiphany: these children don't have worksheets. how weird is that? everything they do, they copy off the board into one of two or three notebooks that they have. i think they would have time to learn a lot more if they didn't have to spend their day copying math problems off the board, and instead could just write the answer on a worksheet. also, that would ensure that everyone was doing the same work, because only about 2/3 of the girls copied the homework, correctly and in it's entirety, off of the board, which means that only 2/3 of them will do it tonight. not terribly efficient, in my opinion. but, i also understand that worksheets for 30 kids every day is a lot more expensive than telling them to buy a notebook.

#4 and a half, i wanted to spend some time talking about three of the girls in the class. first we have heidi, who, as i discovered yesterday, cannot read at even close to the level as the rest of her class. she's socially well adjusted, and not a dumb kid, but i figured out that she doesn't copy stuff off the board, like, ever. today i sat myself down next to her and kept bugging her until she started to copy the sentences off the board that she was supposed to, and she does know how to write, she just has no idea what the letters mean. well, i shouldn't say no idea, she has a pretty good handle on s and the vowels, but with a word like "la cama", she's almost completely lost. i think her biggest problem is that she just never developed good classroom skills, and spends most of the class time talking to her friends instead of trying to learn stuff.

the next kid is liza. she's the exact opposite of heidi - she's always done copying stuff way before the rest of the class, her handwriting is impeccable (better than mine) and she's a really good reader. actually, she reminds me a lot of myself as a kid, one of those who religiously does all the work, and does her very best, which is really good and several grade levels higher than the one she's in. i've also noticed on the "playground", which is a fancy word for enclosed cement area with some plants, that she's well liked by the other girls, which can be difficult sometimes when a kid is so far ahead of her class, academically. she's respectful and honest, and a very easy kid to work with. now i understand why teachers always want the smart kids in their class - they're easy.

finally, we have lorenza. she's easily as smart as liza, and is very good at reading and writing, but is really easily distracted and tends to steal stuff from her classmates, several times a day, at least. doris wasn't in class today, and she's lorenza's main partner in crime, and the change in lorenza was amazing. she was still taking stuff from her classmates, but was much more focused on the classwork than when doris is around. she's like heidi and liza's bipolar love child; smart, but only applies herself to schoolwork selectively. maybe i should be a child psychologist or something, i find this stuff fascinating.

#5, i went to the natural sauna thing yesterday, and i almost had cardiac arrest because we had to walk for an hour and a half up this giant mountain, but sitting in a room full of heat from lava was really neat, and really hot and i felt refreshed and renewed afterwards, it was lovely. look at the pictures i took of it.

that's all for now, i'll be back in the country in 4 days!

Posted by Sarah @ 4:35 PM