Settling in

In our new apartment! It really is beautiful - tiled floor (easy to clean), wooden furniture, and a colorfully tiled bathroom with a shower big enough, and nearly deep enough, to qualify as a hot tub. There are a few odd things, like the lack of a towel rack in the bathroom and any storage space in the kitchen, but those are oversights expected from someone like our landlord. The man is ALWAYS drunk. Or asleep. Or trying to get drunk. He took us on a fishing trip - at 530 am, mind you - and he and his brother got Emile to drive the boat so they could drink margaritas while fishing off the back. They caught one king mackerel, and we saw lots of sea turtles. By the time we got back, Salvador, the landlord, was staggering. But he mostly keeps to himself, and he's amiable even at his most inebriated state, so I don't foresee any problems. His girlfriend (poor girl!) takes care of everything anyway.

Teaching is going moderately well. I'm slowly realizing that many of the students, and maybe some of the teachers, see the school in a summer camp light. We teach the kids a little something, babysit them/keep them out of the house for a while, and have fun. I tend to take things like this more seriously, so I'm afraid I'm not the "cool, fun teacher" at the Barrio Planta Project. This week we'll be working on a project, though, which will hopefully achieve both the students' and my objectives. Wellford inspired me for it, actually! Remembering how his Shane Battier book was the only school activity that got him excited about reading and writing, and that was largely because he got to draw pictures, I decided to twist that a little bit. Instead of writing the story first, I'll have them draw a storyboard. A comic-strip-style thing, with only pictures, so they aren't thinking in English or Spanish, just in images. Then we'll put words to the story - in English - and make a book out of it, complete with larger illustrations. One boy in my class, man actually, is 20 years old and has a learning disability/developmental disorder leaving him at the maturity level of an 11 year old. He's always drawing beautiful pictures, though, and I'm hopin this project will draw him into actually learning some of what I'm trying to teach. He's woefully behind despite his being one of my only students that shows up consistently.