First Days

My first couple days in Guatemala! Well, everything went well with flights and everything, I got picked up by the other interns and now am living with Martha's family. Martha is the director of the school where I'm working, which is across the street. I live on the top floor of their building, basically just a room on the roof. Its nice because it has an amazing view across the city...the problem is that in order to get to the bathroom I have to go through three other bedrooms, the living room and kitchen, down 40 steps, into a separate house in the back, and through Martha's son and daughter-in-law's bedroom--so I'll try not to drink water before I go to bed :) There's about 15 people who live in the house, all the kids, in-laws, grandkids, as well as three or four "adopted" little kids whose parents died so Martha took them in. They are all very very sweet.

This morning I went over to the school with Martha and her daughter Melissa to help and kind of see how everything worked. At least thats what I thought I'd be doing. But when we got there, we went into a classroom with about 25 kids between 1 and 8 years old, and they started explaining how the teacher just left a few days ago and isn't coming back, and I would be teaching the class. So they left me there to teach, and I got to figure out how to control 25 hyper kids in a tiny room with nothing to work with. So I taught them a Bible verse and tried to draw that out as long as possible, and I taught them some songs and we played games, and they had little notebooks where they practice their letters so we worked on letters for a long time too. I was so happy when three missionary men came in with a video and English lesson, because I was starting to run out of ideas!! Overall, it went really well. The biggest challenges are 1) There is such a wide range of ages, some who can read and write and some who can't, so whichever group I'm working with, I lose the attention of the others. The other challenge is that they have practically no materials to work with. Not enough pencils for everyone, no markers for the white board, theres almost nothing there except a bucket of toys, an extremely random collection of about 15 books that aren't even for kids, and they all have a notebook where they practice writing their letters. So now I'll have to get creative, because I get to be their teacher until Martha finds a replacement. There's a whole lot more I could write about right now, but the internet here is dial-up and I don't want to spend too much time on it. I'll see if this afternoon I can go to a Libreria to buy white board markers and pencils for tomorrow.

I'll post another update soon!