Week 2: Livin´ on Reds, Vitamin C, and Malarone
Monday
Monday was basically the same as my last three days of work - wake up and dress, instant coffee, walk to school, teach one class for four hours with a half-hour break in the middle, go home for lunch, and stay in my room working on stuff for the rest of the day, unless I emerge to go to Puerto Lopez for the Internet. The kids were just as rowdy as the others, but now that I´ve come to expect that, I´m doing a better job of coping.
After lunch, I embarked on yet another new experience: washing my clothes by hand in a washtub. I´ve built up quite a pile of laundry in the last two weeks, so after learning how things worked from Vanessa, I spent the afternoon playing washerwoman. All things considered, I think I did a pretty good job of it - the smells were gone, and I didn´t see any lingering stains. I only hope that the clothes that call for dry-cleaning will survive the experience.
There´s no dryer, but there´s a jungle of clotheslines all across the back yard, so it was easy to find space to hang everything (though I did have to clean pollen off some of the lines). Since it´s hot but arid here, I hope that I won´t have to do what my mom and I did when we washed our clothes in Costa Rica: "learn to re-define ´clean´ and ´dry´". By the time I was done my back ached, and I went back to my room to rest.
Tuesday
Tuesday was awful.
I worked with the second grade, the youngest kids I´ve worked with yet. Most of them were okay, but there were two, a little boy and girl, who are perhaps the worst-behaved children I´ve ever met. They go around bothering the others, trying to run out of the classroom, disobeying direct orders, and flat-out refusing to do work. If they´d said they were having trouble, or complained that it was hard, I would have sympathized and tried to help them, but sullenly refusing to even try is something else. I generally like children and want them to like me, but working with these two, especially the boy, is the first time in my adult life that I can remember seriously wanting to hit a child. I didn´t and wouldn´t, but the fact that I even felt the urge is saying something.
When I asked the homeroom teacher if the class was often like this, she said they always were, and called them "horrible".
After the kids returned from recess, lessons had to take a pause, because a public nurse had come in to administer vaccinations. When I was these kids´age I was going through leukemia treatments, so I was sympathetic to fear of needles, and helped to hold and comfort those who were scared. The one exception was the little boy from before, who refused to cooperate not out of fear, but out of the same sullen brattiness - I can tell the difference. I confess that I got a mean sense of satisfaction out of seeing him get the shot.
After the nurse left, I tried to resume lessons, promising the children that if they all copied the words I had written on the board, I would read them "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish". I knew some of them might have trouble, but as long as they all tried, I planned to read it anyway. But, of course, my two nemeses refused to do any work (the boy claimed he couldn´t write because his arm hurt, which I knew was a lie because not only were the others doing fine, but the shot wasn´t in his writing arm), and since I´d said that I´d only read if everyone did the work, I told the students that I was sorry, but I wouldn´t be able to read the fun book, and it was these two´s fault because they wouldn´t do the work. Mean, I know, but I thought that if I couldn´t get them to behave, guilt and peer pressure might be more effective.
It turned out to be moot point, because the lesson was disrupted by outside forces. A bunch of older students were helping clear a field next door, and right outside our window, they found a big snake under one of the overturned picnic tables. There was shouting and talking and general chaos, with my kids climbing up on desks to see outside, until the janitor came and killed the snake with a shovel. By then class was almost over and all the kids were wound up, so they all just sort of milled around until I was able to leave. I asked the teacher about possibly talking to the kids´parents, if they were always so badly behaved, but she said it would be hard, and it would, since the parents don´t usually come with the kids to school.
On a happier note, my clothes all dried just fine, although they´re a bit stiff because I didn´t use fabric softener. I can live with that.
Wednesday
Today was better than the past ones. I still had class all morning, but it was a class I´d worked with before, so I got to expand the topic to colors, adjectives, and verbs. This gave the perfect chance to read "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish", which was a big hit. I told the kids that they didn´t need to understand all the words, just that it would help to see the words I´d taught today being used, and I translated many as I went along.
In even better news, Gaston came around and gave me a schedule he´d created: starting tomorrow, I´d only be teaching a class for 45 minutes at a time, working with five classes each day and meeting with each grade twice a week. A much, much better plan, and I´ve started making plans to type up and copy vocab lists for the students, since they won´t have time to copy everything anymore.
I went back to Casa de Flor in the best mood I´d been in for days, and set to work thinking up new ways to organize lessons. My throat started to feel sore as the day went on, but I thought it was because of the soda I´d had earlier, and kept drinking water, hoping it would feel better.
Thursday
My new and improved schedule for today turned out to be pointless. I woke up this morning not only with my sore throat worse, but with a stuffy nose, a headache, and a small fever. It would have been a mistake to try and teach in this state, because it hurt to talk, and with my nose stuffed up I couldn´t pronounce things, which is a problem when you´re trying to teach a language. I told Flor of my state over breakfast, and she agreed with me, so I went out to the school to tell Gaston, knowing it would be better to show up so they could see first-hand that I was sick. Gaston wasn´t there, but I spoke to one of the senior teachers, who told me to go home and rest.
I took her advice and spent the rest of the day in bed, writing stuff and drinking orange juice that Flor made. I also read through the list of diseases in my traveler´s health booklet, trying to see if my symptoms matched any of them. They´re not the symptoms of dengue fever, I´m vaccinated against almost everything that can be vaccinated against, and I´ve been very good about taking my Malarone, so what I have is probably just the local cold/flu strain, especially since schools are an excellent reservoir for that. I´ll wait a few days, and if my symptoms change or I don´t improve, I´ll call Marianne and see about visiting a doctor.
In the meantime, I´ll blob.
Friday
My symptoms were worse on Friday, but at least I didn´t have any new ones. Once again I went to the school to say that I was sorry, but I was sick and it would be hard for me to teach because it hurt to talk. This time Gaston was there, and he sent me home without fuss.
Thus began another day of blobbing, sustained by Ibuprofen and orange juice.
Saturday
I woke up on Saturday feeling a little better. My throat was still sore and I had a cough, but my fever was gone, and my aches were down to a twinge in the joints. I still spent most of the day blobbing, but after lunch I stayed out for a few hours, watching Sky High (a Disney movie about a school for superheroes) with Denise and Vanessa. I now have proof that some of these movies are bootlegged - this one was obviously filmed in the theater with a video camera, down to there being a silhouette of seats across the bottom and some people getting up to leave at one point. But, considering all the movies and TV shows I´ve sort-of-illegally downloaded off the Internet (if they were available I would buy them legally, I swear!), I have no place to say anything.
I think I´m on the mend. I´ve had some ideas for making pictures to use in class, possibly from coloring books and the like, so if I feel up to it tomorrow, I´m going to take the bus to Manta and go shopping. Ah, adventure.
