School, Billiards Tournaments, and Eco Groups

Since it's been a while, I figured I'd give an update on what I've been up to the past few months...

February marked the official start of the new school year. At this time I still had plans to work with most of the same teachers from the previous year. However, over the past month, many changes have taken place. Already weeks into the new school year, one of my multi-grade teachers got switched from teaching 1st and 3rd grade, to 1st and 2nd, leaving me to work with only one teacher in that school. I am also only working with one teacher in my other multigrade school, with grades 3-6. So that leaves me with having to work with four teachers in my not-so-favorite urban school.

At the beginning of the year, I was solidly working with one of my teachers from all of last year and two with whom I began at the end of the year. One of the new teachers worked out, while the other, after countless visits to his house, finally admitted that he didn't want to work with me. Many teachers, despite constant discussions about the point of my work and how we need to work together, co-planning and co-teaching for our work to be sustainable, still seem to miss that memo and think that my sole purpose here is to give their science classes for them so that they can leave the classroom and hang out. So when this teacher finally realized that this was not the way I roll, he suddenly didn't want to work with me anymore. Go figure.

Then one of my teachers with whom I worked all of last year got moved to teaching adult elementary classes at night, leaving all 50 (or is it 60? I lose track) of her 4th graders with a teacher who's just getting back from sick-leave. This, please note, was already a month into the new school year. So I may or may not be working with this 4th grade teacher, with whom I worked last year and didn't have too much success. Luckily, though, I will start giving night classes for adults which I'm really excited about. It'll be quite a change to teaching kids and I'm looking forward to being able to do more disciplined activities that some of my kids can't handle.

So that leaves me with four to five teachers, and as we're required to work with six, I need to pick up two brand new ones from my urban school (the only two with whom I haven't worked) and start from scratch. This is incredibly frustrating because I spent all of last year developing "confianza", or trust, with these teachers, so that this year would be a breeze. But now starting all over again with two new teachers and rushing the two-year process into one will be a challenge. I'm going to explain really well what my work is all about and my expectations to avoid some of the confusion I most recently dealt with.

Besides teacher frustrations and getting backtracked with my work in the schools, I've had some notable successes or hopefully soon-to-be successes that are still in progress. In March, my sitemate and I held a billiards tournament to promote HIV/AIDS education and prevention. Since men who frequent the billiards halls are considered high-risk individuals, this is the perfect place to hold this type of event. I'd like to take credit for thinking of such a brilliant idea, but these tournaments are actually pretty popular among health volunteers not only in Nicaragua, but in other parts of Latin America too. Neither one of us is a health volunteer, but Peace Corps encourages any kind of work we do in the HIV/AIDS field, and this seemed like a pretty cool event. Although only eight people participated in the tournament, we had about 60 people in attendance who heard the info sessions and received the information. We had some PC Health Volunteers, a representative from the mayor's office, and doctors from the Health Center come to the event to give info sessions and do free HIV testing. Condoms were distributed and the top two players in the tournament received a monetary prize. Overall, I think the tournament went well, especially as it was the first tournament of its kind that was held in town and that my sitemate and I really worked on involving local community members so that it can be done again once we're gone.

Lastly, luck must be on my side because the environmental representative in the mayor's office, Yaquelin, was able to stay and we've got a number of things we've been working on. First, the formation of ecological groups in each school who will eventually receive info sessions from us and will decide among themselves what kind of environmental projects they'd like to independently take on. Also, the anti-trash burning campaign continues, and now that it's been banned in the schools, we'd like to incorporate the eco-groups and get a community awareness campaign going. Yaquelin and I will also be attending a 4-day workshop together (which just so happens to be at the beach) for learning about project design and management so that we can hopefully get a trash management project going at least before I leave in November.

Seven and a half months until the end of service and I can really feel the clock ticking. I hope to have at least one main accomplishment that I can always look back on and really feel like my service was worthwhile.