Tidbits Around Sucre

6/10 3pm
My A lesson the other day went amazingly well, I was really surprised. Most of the kids readily said A when I asked them what letter a picture of their paper started with, and they really enjoyed gluing everything to the paper. A few of the younger ones in the group had a hard time focusing on the task and mostly just played with the glue, but most of the kids seemed to understand and like what we were doing. The oldest girl, Maria Elba, glued down one of each picture and then went to the window using other cut outs of these pictures to trace them – she’s only six, but they were near perfect tracing jobs. A few of the others caught onto this as well and did some tracing, and all the kids stayed at the table for about an hour, which was really, really surprising but awesome. We’ve made it a routine to go outside after snack and there are usually quite a few squabbles outside and tons of disobedience, but that day, they somehow all played together nicely and calmly. No fights, no children trying to climb over the fence and escape, no crazy screaming, no refusal when it was time to go back inside. Quite the odd morning, a complete reversal of the usual. I had hoped that the next day would be similar but nope, it was in the air to be wild again! I started the B lesson with a review of A and the older ones in group were able to remember words we had used the day before as well as other A words, and got engaged in B as well. But many of them (aka the boys) decided to be complete rascals and thought it was more fun to run around the room screaming and attack each other. They have at least a small amount of respect for the teacher and will stop doing something bad if she yells at them – probably from the threat of being smacked – but the kids had no respect for Nicky or I. Using our presence as an opportunity to escape to who knows where, the teacher disappeared and we were left with a bunch of misbehaving wild children. Two of the boys in particular kept grabbing pencils and drumming them on the table as they screamed – the scene was ridiculous and deafening, but the somehow tuned this out girls stayed at the table with their gluing and coloring, showing us their work every once in a while for reassurance. I’m perfectly fine teaching the lessons, but given that the kids won’t respect us, it would be nice if the teacher stayed around to at least attempt to maintain order! She disappeared the entire morning, and when it was time for us to get the kids to wash their hands and walk to lunch, it was just Nicky and me there to accomplish this very difficult task. Chaos ensued and we couldn’t hear our own screams over theirs, nor did silence work as they maniacally ran around attacking each other and making as much noise as they could. Fun stuff.
I was going to do C today, but the teacher who usually has the middle group wasn’t there and it would have been one teacher left with about 20 one to three year olds. Not happening. So the older ones went on a walk all morning and I stayed in with the little guys. Did some coloring with the older of the group, as well as a bit of passing a ball around the circle and singing some songs. They were so much more well behaved than the older kids, except for two of the older in the group who later in the morning got really rowdy and thought it was hilarious to not listen. Tackling each other was more fun. There are no rules here at all about keeping your hands to yourself, inside voices, sharing, etc – anything goes, and scolding is very inconsistent. There was one baby girl, about one and a half, who was sitting there crying hysterically. Today was her second or third day and she was petrified to be away from her mom, but they did nothing whatsoever to comfort her. Their theory was that in another day or two, she would just adjust and be perfectly fine. I held her for a long time and she eventually stopped crying, but she would start again every time I left her side, so she spent the morning with me and the three year olds. I got her engaged in a bit in our activities and there was about an hour where she didn’t cry, which was awesome. When she later started crying randomly and I sat her in my lap, the teacher told me to leave her there to cry because otherwise she wouldn’t get accustomed. I said something about how the transition to being there should be gradual and done with the comfort of an adult, she wouldn’t just suddenly be happy after several days of crying in the corner. When Aileen stopped crying and picked up a crayon, the teacher seemed to see my point, hopefully it sticks. On and off there have been pedagogy students coming to evaluate the kids and today was their last today, so they brought a cake. We sat down the kids and let them dig their fingers into sticky slices of cake – though I had to hand feed Aileen hers – and then took the little guys to lunch. With bellies full of cake, getting their lunches into them was an ordeal and they preferred to run around like crazy instead of sitting nicely like usual in their chairs. Then all the older kids came in and were completely insane, having just been given candy as well and eaten all of that before lunch. Who knows what the teachers were thinking there! It was again a picture of complete chaos and given that the teachers did nothing about it but laugh, there was really nothing I could do but let it be. The transition to primary school for these kids will be interesting and probably pretty harsh!
The other day after lunch, I helped Isabel with a project for her English class, and it was such a nice relief from the challenge of my night students. I just helped with a bit of pronunciation and translating some difficult phrases as well as getting a general understanding of her reading assignment. Everything clicked the first time I said it and it was just such a change from my English classes. This week, the first class has only had one girl coming every day, so I’ve been giving her private lessons on wherever she wants help, but it’s still frustrating that even the present tense of the verb to be has yet to sink in. In the second class, we did a bunch of grammar review the last couple days. The 12 year old is really good at long sentences and understanding what’s going on, whereas the guy in his 20s has a ridiculously hard time and although he can often translate things from Spanish to English, getting any grammar into him is pretty impossible and stalls up the class for the others. They have a test tonight, so that will be interesting to see the results of.
Yesterday afternoon I took a micro to La Glorietta, a castle a few km outside of Sucre. Started off with a little history intro about the castle and its inhabitants by the museum guide, but only caught bits of it because he spoke quickly in Spanish to the group of us and I had no background to begin with on what to expect to hear. There was hardly any furniture in the castle; it was in a museum elsewhere and may be moved there eventually, but the architecture was really interesting. Very intricate ceilings, tall windows and doors, expansive mirrors, spiral staircases, stained glass, and multiple towers. I walked up the stairs of the central tower, tightly round and round and round the central column, having no idea how much further it was. The only light inside came from the circular windows on the edge of the narrow tower every couple of turns. Dizzily made my way to the outlook at the top, where I could look down onto the rest of the little castle as well as far out into the hillside.
On the ride back, I decided to stay on the micro and head to the Mercado Campesino on the opposite end of the city. It’s a huge outdoor market with absolutely everything there. I wanted to see the traditional food market, so stayed on the bus past the massive electronics and clothes sections, but then the bus wound up towards the terminal and I got off because I had gone too far. It was getting late, so I wandered a bit and then took a micro back to the center, never finding the food market, but still having an interesting experience of watching the city pass by.
The other night, went with the girls from last weekend to a café for happy hour desserts – two for one. Unfortunately it meant two of the same thing, but with four of us, we still each got half a slice of really good chocolate cake and half a filled crepe. Yum! But that was pretty much dinner that night, it was so much food. Another time, went out with some other Fox volunteers after English classes and ended up joining with a pretty big group of foreigners with a Sucre meet-up of Couch Surfers. Tonight, some of us are going after classes to a vegetarian restaurant that is supposed to be really good. I have this weekend to spend around Sucre and then Monday is my last day with my kids and students. Then it´s on to the next legs of my trip with a mining town, the massive salt desert, a wild west-like land, and then a month in the jungle.