Getting the routine down

Hi, all. Sorry that I haven't written in a while. GVI is certainly keeping me busy!

Here's my schedule on a typical day:

6:20 wakeup, breakfast, and thirty minute walk to the Casa de Avila, where we all meet. Then a busride (20-25 minutes) to Triunfo.

School with teachers: 8:30-1:15. Teachers take off at 1:15. We are responsible for designing and teaching art, PE, and English during the day. Once the teachers leave, we supervise lunch (which we provide), force them to brush their teeth (which they hate), and then spend an hour with them on their homework.
3:00 kids go home
3-4 lesson planning for the next day
4:30 arrive back at the Casa, absolutely dead. From here it depends on the day. Sometimes there is more lesson planning or shopping for supplies, sometimes a meeting, sometimes I'll briefly go home and then return if we're having dinner together. It gets dark super early here, like 5:45 or 6:00, and I prefer walking home to taking cabs.

When I'm home, sometimes I'll play with Melanie and Geraldine, the grandkids, and I have dinner with Martha, who has an endless curiosity for my life in the US. I've been reading a lot, and am currently reading Three Cups of Tea, which I highly recommend. It's about a guy who is building schools in Pakistan, and after this first week, I hope that he put a lot of thought into the teachers and materials for a school. A school has to be much more than a building...

Today I was so frustrated with my teacher, Elizabeth. Clearly, it's hard to manage two grades at once (1st and 2nd), but she does an impressively bad job at it. She clearly isn't preparing anything ahead of time and today gave the kids an exercise where they were supposed to write down their home addresses and phone numbers. The kids live on PILES OF DUST AND ROCKS. They don't have street names, house numbers, electricity, or even toilets. For much of the time the kids are just goofing off while she puruses the government-issued curriculum (that teaches the kids about how a woman's place is in the house and other important lessons). I can tell them to sit down and stop hitting each other, but if they don't have anything to occupy themselves, they'll just start up again. The kids absolutely love anything of the lessons that GVI gives. The other day the first and seconds knew they had PE first, so when we walked in they started chanting "fisica! fisica!" Anything that takes them away from copying from the board is exciting. Yesterday the third grader's homework was to write out all the numbers between 3000 and 4000. What a great learning opportunity!

Although much of the day is frustrating with Elizabeth there, we also have a lot of fun with the kids. Yesterday in PE we were jump roping and practicing relay races. Everything we do with the preschoolers is bound to be hilarious, because they are constantly falling off their chairs or getting into paints or other dangerous things. One of my favorite things is when kids come up to us to show us the English words they know. One of my favs, Jose Antonio, will come up to me a couple of times a day to point to his mouth and say, "Mouf, señorita, mouf!"

With my first week down, I feel like I know the routine pretty well and am going to take a more active role in the lesson planning in the next few weeks. I've also become the interpreter for the other GVI members who don't speak a lot of Spanish.

This weekend I'm going to lie low and recover. The strike only lasted Wednesday, and I stayed in for much of the day. I did see some people shouting and throwing a banana at a bus that had decided to run, and apparently there were nails and glass in the street to punish anyone who decided to drive. 1,000 people were arrested in Lima, and apparently one woman died (not unusal for Lima, where it's normal to murder someone after the results of a soccer game).

That's all for now!