sink or swim time baby.

This has been an event filled week, starting with my English class, the death of my room rat, learning how to “dance”, and a mini-earthquake tremor episode. The assumption here is that if you speak English, then you would make a good English teacher, a bold assumption I thought. Teaching the class reminded me of my first day of driving on Waters Road (a curvy road with ditches on either side) with my Pops. I was wildly apprehensive about driving A. over 20 mph outside the ‘hood and B. about driving on a real road with real ditches, and James Hackett tells to that it’s “sink or swim
time baby”. So to make a short story entirely too long, I taught the colors and parts of the body to a class of 23 fifth graders, who were a lot of fun and tried particularly hard to pronounce “purple”, but it just wasn’t happening for them. The teachers at the school a lot of confidence in the gringos, but I managed to stay afloat…we had a good time.
Next mini story from my week is the Mouse story. I have/had a mouse-rat that lives/lived in my room. I’d named him Randy and Randy only squeaks at night, much like the crowing roosters, who choose the most inconvenient hours to make their animal noises. The only time I had ever seen the true animosity between cat and mouse was in cartoons, but now I know that they are born enemies. Our house cat (who subsequently doesn’t have a name, they just call him Cat), caught Randy, who turned out to be a tiny mouse, and then kind of just played around with him for fun. My host mother called me over to see Cat killing Randy, and I happened to have my camera handy, so I’ve included it for your viewing pleasure.
Next mini-story/disaster for the week….Last Friday, we had a dance class, which turned out to be fairly tragic for most of the gringos in the group, as there are few people who have any sort of rhythm whatsoever. However, I snapped a few pictures of the calamity that the teachers had the unfortunate duty to instruct. Apparently, when we are out of training and into our permanent sites (T-minus 3 weeks), and are invited to various social events, we may have to dance at some point (eeeek!)
As well, there were earth tremors that lasted about 30 seconds earlier last week…. I was sufficiently freaked out that my body was moving and I wasn’t the one responsible for it. My host mom told me that El Salvador has about 4 major natural disasters a century. Which for a country the size of Delaware, the amount of devastation the people experience is just crazy. There are over 180 volcanoes here and they get hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods…no blizzards (oh how I long to not be sweating for more than 5 minutes). During those few seconds of the tremors, I was convinced that the volcano I live beside was going to erupt and we were going to be the Pompeii of 2008. After my host mother convinced me that the volcano was, in fact, not erupting, I had already convinced myself that there was going to be another earthquake… however, there were 2 major earthquakes in January 2001 and February 2001, so hopefully we’ll stay natural disaster free for a little while. This country’s got a hard time building, because when it takes 2 steps forward, nature knocks it 3 steps back.
Again, I apologize for how I’ve haphazardly strung my week’s events together… but to wrap up, this week we will be putting on a play in front of the town with our youth group in order to kick off the Environmental Campaign. I will be playing the River… Apparently I’m a teacher and an actress in this amazing country.