Yesterday was an interesting day. It began with more car racing – they zoomed up the hill right next to my house, and everyone gathered outside to watch. Out in my residential neighborhood, people set up little stands selling food and drinks and people brought little chairs out of their houses, which they set up inside the yellow tape. Some people had radios and would warn others when a car was about to arrive so that we could hug the buildings as the cars screeched around the curve.
There was a new guy who got to the volunteer house yesterday, so we walked down to the plaza, had to walk in tons of circles and loops because we kept being barricaded in. Eventually found lunch, which was hard because the world shuts down on Sunday – even the usually bustling central market was fairly empty. There were no museums or anything to go to, so we walked over to sit in the grass at the kid’s park. Not long after we sat down, a guy started to put on a show in a concrete circle. He spoke really quickly in Spanish, so we were mostly just really confused about what was going on. He started out by sticking a bunch of large safety pins in a stuffed rabbit and thought that was hilarious. Then came a stuffed snake out of his bag that he moved as if it was alive and kept kissing it and scaring all the little kids. More and more people gathered in a circle around him. He had a walking puppet of some sort of animal, that really upset someone’s pet dog – the owner had to hold back the pup from lunging at the puppet. It was eventually clear that the performer was doing a improv comedy show, but his daughter decided she wanted to be part of the show too and ran into the center and started jokingly biting him, which he said was better than a dog bite. But then it kept going and going, the girl wouldn’t stop biting and hitting and lunging at her dad, over and over again for way too long, but she thought it was hilarious. For a while, it was like we were just watching a show of father-daughter wrestling. After making some other jokes that didn’t make sense to me, he started stripping off his shirt, belt, hat, shoes. He put on a traditional vest from another area of the country and pulled on a pair of ridiculous looking stripped pants and a different hat.
Then came the fire. His first act was to drink a mouthful of what was probably gasoline, light a metal stick on fire, and blow on it so that it looked like he was breathing fire. The bursts of flames were huge and the kids loved this, so he did it quite a few times. After running the flame through his hands and across his arms (which I don’t understand how he managed), he put the fire out by putting it in his mouth and then breathing out the smoke. I could only understand bits and pieces of what he said because he was speaking quickly and to a large audience, and it’s much easier to understand someone when they are speaking directly to me. He said something about needing a volunteer and wanting a woman from the crowd, but nobody volunteered. Suddenly, he got excited and said that he should choose a foreigner, and kept making slit throat gestures and laughing. We were the only foreigners there, so I got dragged onto my feet and into the middle of the circle, having no idea whatsoever what was going on. He asked where I was from and then said that his brother was from Virginia and that it was x km from California. He asked me if that was right and I had no idea, so everyone had quite the laugh that he knew more about my country than I did. I was then told that he would set his head on fire and I would have to help him and he gave me some rapid confusing instructions on what to do. He had me practice with no fire, but I hadn’t really gotten the message of what I was supposed to do. He had his daughter try to show me, but she just goofed off so the wife demonstrated how I was to put a towel over his face and head. He then had me sit down for a bit while he circled the crowd and got coins from them as he spouted out some propaganda. He kept joking around, and it was unclear if the money was for poor kids or his family, or for both, as he kept saying. I sat there having no idea how long this was going to last. I was smack in the middle of the crowd, everyone staring at the gringa in interest. Eventually he finished his money round and came bit, lit his stick on fire, counted to 3, rubbed it on his head so that his hair was flaming, counted to 3 again, and then I threw the towel over his face and hair to put out the fire. Everyone cheered and the show was over. His hair was definitely a bit singed and the whole act was really odd and confusing, but it was definitely not how I expected to spend my afternoon! On the way out, I kept hearing the word gringa, but I don’t know what they were saying about me. News spreads here really fast and they love to talk about anything out of the ordinary, I hope people don’t point me out on the street!
My kids this morning were fun, but they are so badly behaved. The teacher showed me the weekly schedule, which has ridiculously huge blocks of not much to do, and I talked to her about the need to have much shorter segments with structured activities. She seemed to understand, so hopefully things will start to change. But today, we had 1.5 hours to review colors (using only a clown toy and whatever little games I could come up with), and then it was supposed to be another 1.5 hours for song time. I was with a group of 4-6 year olds, some of whom knew their colors pretty well, but most of them just kept running off and beating each other up and refusing to listen. I tried to teach them Old McDonald translated into Spanish, but they do not know how to sit still unless they are yelled at by one of the teachers and thrown into a corner, often not even knowing what they have done wrong. I got a few of them to participate, and did it again a bit later too, so hopefully they will at least be able to focus on something for a short time.
The other volunteer and I took a group of eight outside with some hula hoops. I gave them a little lecture before we went outside that they needed to listen to us no matter what when we were out there, and they all agreed. They had fun chasing the hoops and getting their energy out, and I showed one of the girls how to use her hoop as a sort of jump rope and she liked practicing that. But the kids kept running off where they weren’t supposed to. They didn’t care at all when we threatened them with losing their outside privileges. Tried to get a game of red light-green light going, but they had no focus and wouldn’t even listen to the rules of the game. We’ll try again when we don’t have any toys outside with us – though one of the boys was absolutely awful the entire time and I told the teacher that he can’t come outside with us anymore. Getting them back inside was of course a struggle.
We then took the tiny guys to lunch, but lunch wasn’t ready so they were expected to sit in their chairs for 20 minutes doing nothing. I played a bit of touch your nose with one finger, touch your ears, etc for those who were responsive, but half of them were in their own little world. When the food was finally ready, they ate their soup better than the day before, but their segundo was steaming hot and ridiculous to expect them to eat, so that meant more waiting and crying and violence. I wish these kids had a little bit more structure and discipline instilled in them so that I at least could start from somewhere above the bottom, but even sitting in a circle is impossible to do, let alone have everyone focus on an activity for even a few minutes.
No comments:
Post a Comment