6/1/11 9:30pm
At lunch today, paid in advance for the next two weeks of lunch at Freya’s (a grand total of about 14 dollars for up to 12 full lunches, depending if I am here or traveling on Saturdays). They have a ton of regulars there who just pay in advance each month and have a little subscription card. Turns out that Isabel is one of those people – I ran into her there today - so will meet there for lunch everyday. It’s so nice to be guaranteed a full vegetarian meal each day without paying a ton or worrying about finding a place that will accommodate me. The main dish today was pesto spaghetti, and I love their vegetable quinoa soups that we get every day (though the grains and types of veggies vary). After lunch, we sat in the park and I helped Isabel with her English readings. They were ridiculously difficult for someone who is just learning English – it was a reading on Puritan writers in the US colonies and had quite a few metaphors and old poetry that took me a while to interpret before attempting to translate to Spanish for her. We went through a couple pages of her reader word by word, sentence by sentence, making sure that she understood all of the ideas, but it was quite crazy how difficult it was – seemed like a reading I would have gotten in a high school or college history class and not something that should be given to people learning English.
At the vet, waited literally ten minutes for the thermometer to take the temperature of a pup, poor thing. I might buy them a new one because that’s pretty ridiculous. There were two young canine patients today while I was there, and both got several cocktail injections and were on their way. One had GI issues and the other, a respiratory infection. They were both told to come back tomorrow for more injections. From what I could tell, the owners aren’t usually given meds to give at home, they just come back daily for more injections until the issue is resolved. The costs to the owners are ridiculous cheap – there are no set prices and there doesn’t seem to really be any charge for the exam. One of the pups today got a vitamin injection, a steroid injection, and one other, and the total cost was 30Bs, which is about 4 bucks – just the cost of a meal or two, or two movie tickets. I asked why the costs were so low and the doctor said that was all people could afford, but they have their cell phones and such, so I think it’s more of a matter of that’s all they are willing to pay/that’s all their pets are worth. I don’t understand the vets can make a living with that little, as things are cheap here but still, with the staff and supplies and such, it doesn’t make much sense to me.
The first English class was again a private lesson to the same student. She didn’t do the homework that I had given her, but we did it in class instead and at least she remembered what we went over yesterday. The second class was really, really frustrating. Three students showed and we were doing exercises to practice what we had gone over the last couple of days. The skill level in the class is so varied, though, that it’s impossible to do an exercise as a group without having one person be completely lost and another bored to death. The fastest learner was a boy of about 12, and the guy having the most difficult time was probably in his late 20s. Even when we explained the activity that we were doing in Spanish, he had major trouble understanding what it was we were doing, whether it was matching a question with its appropriate answer or filling in the blank. Cinthya and I ended up having the three students each work at their own pace and went around and helped them. It got really, really frustrating when after I went over he/she/it does and i/you/we/they do multiple times and in different ways using both English and Spanish, the sentence always started with ‘he do’; the point just didn’t get across. Neither did the concept of creating sentences using a model and just changing the verbs based on what subject was being used. It’s hard to grasp that this doesn’t make sense to someone even when it is presented in their own language, as we tried it multiple times in Spanish before changing to English. Also, it would be most effective if I taught almost entirely in English, but I just get blank stares if I try that, so say everything in both languages instead and most of what I say in English is probably ignored. Doesn’t help when the students only show up half the time so people aren’t ever on track with others in the class!
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