¿Mira bella que buscas?

So finally, I am feeling tons better and I can talk about more exciting or at least fun things than poor healthcare and education systems. So when I was in Managua, we went to an open air market called Wimble (not sure about the spelling on that) that had great wares of all kinds. There were beautiful rocking chairs, jewelry, shoes, clothes, wallets, you name it and it was there. I wish I had another whole suitcase to fill because there was so much cool stuff there that I would like to take home with me. As you walk through the stalls, the vendors all cry out for you to come inside and see their wares. ¿Mira bella que buscas? Pregunta me, yo tengo aqui, pasa, pasa. It’s a little overwhelming having tons of people fighting for your business, but you get used to it, and it's nice to have everyone calling you beautiful! As you can see from the following photo, there is a lot of high quality leather goods many featuring images of Nicaragua, Ruben Dario (a famous Nica poet), or my favorite thing to find, El Che (who is apparently hugely popular here). I really want to find a leather diary, so hopefully when I go to the large open air market in Masaya I can find one that I like.

This week throughout the illness I still managed to get some important pieces of my work here done. On Monday we completed the parent surveys in a stunning choreographed madness that took two hours to complete 50 surveys with my five helpers. Parents attended a “reunion” basically a meeting to help them understand the program better and I shuffled groups of 5 in and out of a room where my five “becadores” (scholarship students) helped to record the parents’ answers to the survey questions. The power went out, but that didn’t deter our little group and instead we moved head on completing all the surveys with five minutes to spare. I wholeheartedly couldn’t have done it without the help of the students so I bought them some caramellos in thanks on Tuesday. I also got the final list of kids for the pen pal program and we will be moving forward with that project after next week’s school vacations. I will help the kids here to make a video diary that will help them to introduce themselves to the kids in the US. I am really excited about this project and the staffer who moved to the main office will continue to work on it after I am gone so that the kids can keep in touch.

On Thursday, the school simultaneously celebrated the transfer of one of the office staff to the oficina central in Managua and teacher’s day. There was great food (which I finally got to eat since the doctor took me off my liquid diet and allowed me to eat real food again), fun, music, dancing, and games. It was really great to see the staff let their hair down and enjoy teacher’s day. As I have said before teacher’s here make less than $200 a month and don’t receive many benefits. But on teacher’s day they were happy just to receive a small gift from the school honoring their work and each teacher made a little speech about why they were there. It was really motivating to see that they genuinely cared about the kids and the program and they believed that they are making a difference. I hope to remember this moment in the future when I feel like I am not appreciated for my work. As these teachers showed me, it’s not about the gratitude; it’s about the work itself and knowing that you make a difference. Working with kids can be discouraging sometimes, but on teacher’s day none of that was evident, only the great dedication, camaraderie, and support that this group of teachers had for each other and the work that they did. As you can see from the photos below they had a great time. First they played a game with two teams where they couldn’t step outside of lines on the floor and had to complete various requirements like lining up males on one end and females on another. The best exercise was trying to pass a ring down the lines of the teams using only pencils in your mouth, no touching. It was a hilarious exercise that took over 20 minutes to complete and engendered much yelling and cheering as the two teams were highly competitive. Finally we ended with lots of dancing and music before heading home for the night. I have great video, but can't get any of it to load online because the internet is so slow here so I will have to share it when I get home.