So today I gave another art class, and in the afternoon went to the Casa Materna sat around for an hour waiting with a psychologist for a meeting to start, only one participant arrived so it was a no go. The art class was a blast. The previous one hadn’t gone so well. Trying to get 11 year old boys to sit down and paint shades and tones.
Yesterday was much more interesting. I was in one of the rural communities, where I have the only remnants of a functioning youth group. Myself and the five girls met to plan a class about “How to make a good decision” which we were going to give in the high school.
I’m not going to lie, I was highly skeptical. I thought it was a highly condescending topic, and to compound the problem I have absolutely no Spanish vocabulary to tackle the topic. I can talk all day about pregnancy, the stages of pregnancy, warning signs of complications, HIV/AIDS, the importance off vaccinations, and nutrition all day long, but this topic. Na-uh.
We had the class in second year in the high school, the students aged from 14 to 15. In the main activity we had the class of 45 students break into 6 groups. Each group was given a scenario to think about, come up with your options, and choose one. For example one card said something like “you and your friends are out at a fiesta. They are drinking beers, but you don’t want to because they always make you feel sick. Your friends insist that you drink, otherwise you’re not a ¨Real Man¨ what do you do?” Maybe the students didn’t understand the assignment, but none of the groups seemed able to complete the assignment.
In this specific scenario the boys decided that they needed to drink because they didn’t want to loose their friends. That was it. End of discussion. Not one of the 8 kids in the group could come up with a single other option. It took a lot of poking on the teachers’ part to get any conversation going. It seemed that one person would come up with one option, and that’s as far as they got.
I think the problem was that I took for granted that A. I’m older and with things like problem solving I’ve had more experience than your normal high school sophomore B. In school here its copy- paste- regurgitates- repeat; creative problem solving has no space or funding in the schools. C. I have minimally functioning Spanish. I’ve gotten really accustomed to the deer in the headlights look that I get all the time. The combination of the three, my arrogance in assuming (what’s the saying, when you assume you make and an ASS of U and ME) that this was easy, and my lack of real understanding of their understanding, pretty much hindered the activity. I caught up after class with one of the teachers who was participating, and she said it went really well, that I just need to learn the vocab (damn Spanish! You think after a year I’d have this figured out). So maybe if I can organize, and maybe learn to break the steps down into more basic steps I can maybe reach at least a couple of the 45 students, and that alone I feel, could give me some more meaning to my being here.
Mar 22, 2010
Mar 1, 2010
Food.
My body seems to have pretty much adjusted to the food here. I will get cravings for beans and rice, and my body doesn’t crave as much as it used to the fruits and vegetables that were readily available back home. There has only been really on food that didn’t sit with me well. It’s called Mondongo.
In my first few months in site, I went to visit a nurse that I work with. They were eating Mondongo soup. I had a hard time with its smell let alone even eating it. It was this stinky tough oddly colored meat floating in a sparse broth accompanied by a couple vegetables. Trying to be polite I quietly gagged the hard rubbery/sponge like substance down. I swore to myself that I would never again put my self in a Mondongo-eating-situation ever again.
Well yesterday I went to visit with my old host family, and to my great disappointment, they were eating, ta-da, Mondongo soup. I had forewarned my host mother that I previously had a traumatizing experience with the said soup. She informed me, that this soup had been properly prepared and that ¨you don’t eat Mondongo soup from just anyone.¨ We had walked a few blocks across town in the blazing heat (we’re getting into summer here high 80s 90s at night) to the mother in law of her daughter who cooks and sells beans, cheese, tortillas and on this specific day, mondongo soup.
So there I was sitting terrified at the table (Apparently I wasn’t doing such a great job at hiding my contempt for the soup) sipping at the broth. When people make soup here, they keep the vegetables and meats in large pieces that are taken out of the soup and placed on a plate to cut up and eat. The first thing out the broth was the Mondongo. It sat there squishy and white doing everything but tempt me. I finally worked up the courage to try the meat once it´d cooled down and assumed a more solid form, and to my surprise, hey it wasn’t so bad! The soft squishy brownish-purple part isn’t the best, but the white rubbery bit actually tastes kind of like chicken. So I guess the take away lesson from Mondongo is that hey, sometimes you just get a bad first impression, and it never hurts to give it a second chance.
Oh I didn’t mention; Mondongo is the stomach of a cow. It has to be prepared and cleaned properly or else it comes out hard and stinky, when you want it to not smell and be nice and soft. I’m not going to order it when I go to a restaurant, but if it’s offered up as a free lunch, I now know that I’ve got at least a 50/50 chance I can stomach it (no pun intended).
My body seems to have pretty much adjusted to the food here. I will get cravings for beans and rice, and my body doesn’t crave as much as it used to the fruits and vegetables that were readily available back home. There has only been really on food that didn’t sit with me well. It’s called Mondongo.
In my first few months in site, I went to visit a nurse that I work with. They were eating Mondongo soup. I had a hard time with its smell let alone even eating it. It was this stinky tough oddly colored meat floating in a sparse broth accompanied by a couple vegetables. Trying to be polite I quietly gagged the hard rubbery/sponge like substance down. I swore to myself that I would never again put my self in a Mondongo-eating-situation ever again.
Well yesterday I went to visit with my old host family, and to my great disappointment, they were eating, ta-da, Mondongo soup. I had forewarned my host mother that I previously had a traumatizing experience with the said soup. She informed me, that this soup had been properly prepared and that ¨you don’t eat Mondongo soup from just anyone.¨ We had walked a few blocks across town in the blazing heat (we’re getting into summer here high 80s 90s at night) to the mother in law of her daughter who cooks and sells beans, cheese, tortillas and on this specific day, mondongo soup.
So there I was sitting terrified at the table (Apparently I wasn’t doing such a great job at hiding my contempt for the soup) sipping at the broth. When people make soup here, they keep the vegetables and meats in large pieces that are taken out of the soup and placed on a plate to cut up and eat. The first thing out the broth was the Mondongo. It sat there squishy and white doing everything but tempt me. I finally worked up the courage to try the meat once it´d cooled down and assumed a more solid form, and to my surprise, hey it wasn’t so bad! The soft squishy brownish-purple part isn’t the best, but the white rubbery bit actually tastes kind of like chicken. So I guess the take away lesson from Mondongo is that hey, sometimes you just get a bad first impression, and it never hurts to give it a second chance.
Oh I didn’t mention; Mondongo is the stomach of a cow. It has to be prepared and cleaned properly or else it comes out hard and stinky, when you want it to not smell and be nice and soft. I’m not going to order it when I go to a restaurant, but if it’s offered up as a free lunch, I now know that I’ve got at least a 50/50 chance I can stomach it (no pun intended).
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