Such A Different World

6/7/11 9:45pm
Yesterday at the vet was a very interesting experience. There wasn’t anything going on for the first couple hours, so I showed them the Pacific Petcare website and they were fascinated by the pictures of the hospital and fancy equipment. We were all just dawdling around and the vet student, Vicente, was playing around on his guitar. He was attempting to sing Jason Mraz’s I’m Yours in English, but had all the words jumbled together and funny. So we found the lyrics online as well as a Spanish translation so that he could understand the song – though a lot of the translation was really off because it took things too literally, so I attempted to translate the actual meaning for him. We spent a long time going through the beginning of the lyrics and working on the pronunciation.
Eventually, we had a couple patients, the last of whom was what made it such an fascinating evening. It was teacher’s day and there were no English classes, so I stayed at the clinic till almost nine. Around 6:45, an eleven-year-old Irish Setter named Leo arrived for a procedure – it was scheduled so late because the older doctor needs to be present for any procedures and he is out in the countryside all day. He gave a Ketamine cocktail both IV and IM to a point where Leo was pretty out but still moving around a bit. No sort of monitoring was done at all, not even with stethoscopes, which was a bit scary with an older dog and no labwork to ensure that anesthesia was even safe. When Leo arrived, it was clear that the procedure was to remove a huge growth on his eyelid, so I was confused when they first turned their attention to his ears once he was out. I thought maybe they were removing papillomas from the ears, but it turned out he just had an ear infection. They called it very severe and spent a really long time cleaning it out and applying topical antibiotics and steroids, though nothing oral or topical was sent home. One of the surprising things about this infection was how assertive they were that it was such an awful infection – it was clearly infected, but there wasn’t much inflammation and I’ve cleaned countless ears with much, much worse debris – maybe the different weather, different standards, etc. The older doctor did most of the cleaning, and the vet doing his residency sort of thing was allowed to help at times (as compared to the US where it was always us techs who did the cleaning). They wore masks as they cleaned the ears, but took them off for the growth removal part of the procedure, which was really odd. We kept flipping Leo back and forth as they would clean one ear, then the other, and then go back to the first. It took much, much longer than a similar ear infection would have taken to clean in the US with the solution that we used. I was mostly just weirded out, though, that they were doing all this while he was under anesthesia – it would be so much safer and cost effective to do it while he was awake. I asked about this and they said that they always treat ear infections with the pet under anesthesia because it causes too much suffering to do it while they are awake. That was definitely an interesting perspective and yes, it’s definitely not a pleasant experience for them, except for the occasional dog who appreciates getting that awful itch scratched. But if we were to tell owners in the US that we needed to sedate or anesthetize their pet for an ear infection (minus the occasional dog with major aggression or anxiety issues), hell would probably break loose over the money, risk, and plain idea of doing that. It’s a very different way of thinking about and doing things in the veterinary world, not doing much anything at all aside from shots while the pet is awake – though they do reuse a needle multiple times on the same pet, which must hurt like crazy from how dull it is. So a very different line is drawn in terms of what is acceptable to inflict on our pets. Yet at the same time, there are countless street dogs in awful condition who won’t get an ear infection or even broken leg taken care of no matter what, and the dogs with owners who can’t afford to take them to the vet. I asked what would happen if a dog came in with an ear infection but the owner couldn’t afford to pay for the anesthesia, and they seemed appalled that I would suggest cleaning ears while the dog was awake. I tried asking several times, but never got a straight answer, so not quite sure what happens there - if they give in and do it without anesthesia, deal with the money loss and treat the animal as they usually would, or refuse to treat the animal in the name of not causing suffering, though of course still leaving the pet in misery with a bad infection. Very thought provoking to see the huge differences in vet med between here and California, not only based around finances and equipment but also around morals and recommended procedures and care. The complete lack of spays and neuters here is a whole other issue, with not having the money to do the surgery, though that really not making sense in the long run with the resulting massive overpopulation and pregnancy complications. It was definitely a good experience with the vet, very different from what I’ve seen and done in both Peru and California. But it was way too exhausting to go every day straight through from 8 to 8, so I’m not going to be going anymore while I’m here in Sucre. Finally had time today to do my laundry!
My kids were challenges today as usual. I tried to work with the older ones on learning to write their names, and a few of them did a good job and stayed focused, but most just sat there and refused to write a thing, flat out ignoring me when I encouraged them. I had bought letter stickers and a few of them got really into telling me the letters of their names so that I would give them stickers, and then trying to do it over and over again to get more stickers, but the others were uninterested or didn’t know the letters in their names at all. At a certain point, I had to just give up and let some of them scribble on their papers because there was no way they were going to pay me any attention. Tomorrow will be quite the test. I’m going to try and start going through the alphabet to teach it to them in a more engaging way than writing each letter a million times to fill up a paper and that’s that. I googled around this afternoon and printed out black and white images of things starting with the letter A in Spanish, as well as a bunch of upper and lower case As. It cost a bunch to print and photocopy these, but it seems like Fox will let me do it for either free or really cheap. So if the kids respond to the activity tomorrow, then I’ll keep on going through the alphabet, but if not, I don’t know what else to do with them. I bought a bunch of mini glue bottles and hopefully I can get them to sit around the table tomorrow morning, talk about things that start with the letter A, and then glue my cut out images and items on paper and color them. Fingers crossed!
And on to the last part of each of my days, teaching English. Yet another huge area where things are drastically different. I do my best to go through the lessons in an engaging way and get things to stick in their heads, but it just isn’t working. First off, the book and the general structure of the course are pretty awful. They are creating robots rather than people who can have conversations. They attempt to learn to follow generic model sentences and speak only in those, when they are able to even do that. When I try to transition into more conversational ways of saying things or do anything outside of a strict model sentence, they are completely lost. I don’t know if I had an especially amazing book and teacher when I was learning Spanish, but it was so, so much easier to move from rigid structure into more creative and open writing and speaking. It’s pretty much impossible to get them to move away from the molds or even understand anything that is said without being in a certain structure. They don’t have an understanding of what conjugations or infinitives or any grammatical things are, and are just dazed when I try to explain using examples from Spanish. I know that when I first started French it was hard getting used to the different grammatical concepts, but at least they were taught! In the book that’s used in this course and apparently used internationally as well, there are mostly themed chapters on what to robotically say in x situation. There are the interspersed grammar bits about possessive pronouns or how to use ‘to be’ or ‘to have’, but there’s really no solid grammar, nothing on creating sentences, subject-verb agreement, using the present tense, the basic things that have always been presented in my language classes. Doesn’t help that the teacher’s English isn’t great and I’m constantly correcting the grammar of the things she says to the class! I guess languages do come fairly easily to me, but I still have a difficult time seeing how hard it is for them, for example, to see that when something is plural in Spanish, it is usually plural in English – even direct translations where the structure is the same are often too challenging. One of the biggest problems is that they are just being fed phrases and memorizing them, but not understanding at all the workings of the language. Also, their education system is clearly not very strong so it’s hard to teach a new language when they don’t have a very solid grounding in doing basic book exercises in general.
The first class today had just one student again, though a different one this time, and she is apparently taking a basic English class through her university and wanted help with that. She has to write a skit in English with three others in her class and written about half a page so far. I explained all of her grammatical mistakes, and then we worked on writing more. Normally, in a skit, you would follow a theme, make it a conversation with a flow. Whether your native language or a brand new language, it seems common sense to have topics relate to each other and not just have choppy unrelated sentences. Especially when you have a personal translator to help change what you are thinking from your native language to a foreign language. But the skit went a bit like this – people greeted each other and asked where they were from, all good. Then it went on to whether they ate fish, how many brothers they had, and if they liked football. All completely disconnected and not part of the same conversation. She pretty much just came up with random sentences in Spanish and had me translate them to English, though I tried to get her to figure out the translations herself. I can’t grasp why someone, especially in a college setting, would have such difficulty stringing sentences together into a coherent conversation in their own language. All she had to do was input the Spanish into the Elana translation engine and there would be a skit that made sense in English! In my very beginning French and Spanish classes, we often had to do skits and they were hard without knowing many tenses or words, so they were sometimes very simple, but they at least followed a common theme and all the sentences fit together to make it a rational piece. I don’t mean in any way to bash the intelligence or culture of the people here and I hope it doesn´t seem that way; I’m just a bit bewildered over how different thing are, from learning and teaching styles to the way my kids’ and students’ minds seem to work in general.