Lovely Students

So, last Saturday in my fanaticism for Xelaju the city soccer team, I made one too many a tripod with my fellow fans and tore several ligaments in my ankle. Needless to say Xela is less than handicap accessible so I've pretty much been kickin' it at home, Luckily I have the best boyfriend in the world with the best students to BOOT.
I feel so very lucky.

CARNIVAL!!!

This past Tuesday was perhaps the most fun workday I’ve had since I chaperoned a group of 25 kids to Six Flags last year. It was Carnival. You know… parades, beaded necklaces, scantily clad Brazilian ladies…well, not quite. Guatemalan Carnival (at least the kiddie version) is more like a mix between Halloween and a countrywide game of tag using confetti filled eggs (cascarones con pica pica).

Rather than my typical button-up shirt and jeans, I chose a slightly more bold ensemble, a rented gorilla suit, which complimented Alyssa’s homemade puppy costume quite well. Unfortunately I didn’t realize quite how hideous I looked with my mask on until I saw pictures of the action afterwards, which explains why so many of our students recoiled in terror and fled upon seeing EL GORILÓN or the “monster gorilla”.

Some of Alyssa and my official duties on this special day were to judge the annual eggshell art contest, announce the winners, dance in full costume in front of a group of approximately 200 kids and 100 parents in order to encourage our students to do the same, and to smash dozens of confetti stuffed eggs on the heads of our students, their parents, teachers, administrators…etc. Quite fun indeed!

Anyway, this was how we celebrated Carnival in the morning, with the preschool-6th graders. The afternoon, which is when our middle and high schoolers are in the building, took on a much more awkward vibe. I was instantly transported to my middle school days at school dances as I watched the students try to bust a groove as inconspicuously as possible, given the fact we had turned the school’s patio into an impromptu dance floor, replete with reggaton blasting at full volume.

Naturally the older students were far too cool to wear costumes to school, which made me feel a bit ridiculous wandering around in full gorilla regalia, so I eventually ditched the garb and went back to my normal, email writing, google document sharing development officer self for the rest of the day. What a pity!

Magic School Bus

So this last weekend we took a trip to Guatamala city or Guate with some friends in a camioneta, otherwise known by the gringo community as chicken buses. As you may have gleaned in my last post, camionetas are your 1970’s American schoolbuses reincarnated in Guatemala, fixed with a truck hood and pimped like you wouldn’t imagine. The more Jesus decals, stuffed animals in the widow, basically the less visibility you have, the better, mas gallo (macho) and just plain rockin’ your camioneta. So being the hip cats we are, we got on a camioneta with our friends that had about an inch of usable window space to return to Xela.

The entire ride I was transported back to 6th grade when I had just moved to a new school (read: only had one friend) and had plenty of time to observe the dynamics of the bus. Well last Sunday I learned that in Guatemala they’re no different—just some slight modifications for the adult world and a lot less space. Remember when you sat three to a seat in second grade? Well think four grown ass adults to each seat with one person cramped in to the space between.

So just like Daniel Peterson, the kid who ALWAYS fell asleep within five minutes of the class trip beginning you have your SLEEPERS. Inevitably the heaviest Guatemalan or gringo woman or man on the bus will fall asleep—and find a home on your shoulder for the rest of the veering windy ass ride (forcing you to hold both their weight and yours)

Next comes the MUSICALLY INCLINED—as in the chick that was constantly on her I-pod singing along to the song you least wanted to hear. In 6th grade it was Britney’s "Hit Me Baby One More Time". Here it’s the twenty three year old dude singing along to the High School Musical Album.

And then there’s the NUDGER, you know, the person who slowly nudges you more and more so that you have less and less space (space being an especially precious commodity on a camioneta ride). Gotta love the nudger.

At the back of the bus it’s the BADASSES. In 6th grade that kid was my boyfriend (briefly), and boy did the bus driver hate him. He smoked pot and blew it out the window, threw paper airplanes to the front of the bus, and sang the most obnoxious songs known to man. And on this particular bus ride the ‘basasses’ happened to be our friends…they whistled as the driver rounded extreme mountains curves, pushed each other all to one side as the bus turned and in general shocked the last category of bus goer….

The TATTLETALE. In elementary school this was Miss Ana-never-a-hair-out-of-place McQuin whose mom was a teacher and who was guaranteed to get at least 5 busers in trouble each morning. As Guatemalan’s are extremely passive—the tattletale usually takes on a more moderate approach—but no less effective. In other words, deadly, heart stopping stares of disapproval.

And what am I on these little adventures? Same as in 6th grade, the READER, who befuddles everyone with my bus activity.



Til next time chillins,

3.8 EARTHQUAKE HITS CHICAGO

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/us/11chicago.html

Look who's got all the seismic activity now! And to think folks from Northern Illinois are scared to come to Guatemala because of the earthquake risk...ha :)

A Few of My Favorite Things

The best parts about walking to work in Guatemala so far?

Every day is like a first grader’s fantasy….

Psychedelic rainbows everywhere you turn

.........and the MOST PIMPED school buses you could never have imagined!

But my absolute favorite part? I can look up any time and remember I climbed that.

A la gran... A primer in Guatemalan Slang

Hello all, in this first installment of "A la gran..." I want to share a few insights I've learned in the past month living, working and communicating with Guatemalans. More particularly, I'd like to shed a bit of light on what differentiates the Spanish spoken here from Spanish spoken in the rest of Latin America and certainly from what we gringos learned in school.

BTW, for this post, I will assume that readers will have at least a bit of familiarity with Spanish.

So, to begin, the most important difference between Guatemalan Spanish and the Spanish spoken in say, Mexico or Puerto Rico, is their use of what's known as the voseo. This basically means that they have an additional, more casual, form of saying "you" (in addition to usted and tu). This form is used among friends of all ages, but particularly young people (i.e. our students). Lucky for gringos and other folks who are trying to learn Spanish, once you get the hang of using Vos instead of tu (which exists in Guatemala but isn't really used much) it's actually easier because there aren't any irregular verbs in the present tense (woo hoo!)

All you do to form the "voseo" is take the r off the end of the infinitive, replace it with an "s" and accent the last syllable...always. For example instead of worrying about stem changing verbs like venir and tener, which would normally be " tu vienes" or "tu tienes", all you have to do is do like I said and make "vos venís" and vos tenés". IT'S THAT EASY!!! The only tricky (i.e. irregular) verb is ser, which instead of "tu eres" is "vos sos"

And just so you know, Guatemalans aren't alone in their use of voseo, its used throughout Central America (Honduas, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica) as well as in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. So it's useful stuff to know!

Anyway, enough conjugating, let's move on to the fun stuff, for example, the name of this blog post.

A la gran... Basically this is the all purpose expression meaning "awww crap" (or stronger depending on what comes next). For example, if you say:
A la gran puchica, that's pretty harmless-meaning something along the lines of "oh shoot" However if you want to kick it up a notch, you can finish it with

A la gran puta, which means something along the lines of "oh shit" (or worse)

In a similar vein, the word puchis means something akin to "wow" or "awesome"

Perhaps the ultimate Guatemalanism is the use of the phrase Chapin, which means Guatemalan. For example, Soy 100% puro chapin= I'm 100% pure Guatemalan.
Unfortunately I'm not too sure why the word Chapin is used to mean Guatemalan, I've heard everything from the fact that 17th century Guatemalan oligarchs wore shoes/sandals called chapines when they travelled to other countries in Central America to the fact that Chiapas was once a part of Guatemala and it sort of sounds like "chapin". If anyone does actually know, please enlighten us.

To end today's post here's one more useful phrase that has an interesting history to boot. For example, if you're stepping out in traffic, trying to cross the street despite
the fact that every single driver seems like they're either training for the Formula 1 or trying to get bonus points for hitting pedestrians in some warped real-life version of Carmageddon II: Carpocolypse Now, you're likely to hear the phrase "aguas"-- most likely as a huge chromed-out 1970s school bus nearly conks you with its side view mirror, which proudly exclaims: VIVA JESUCRISTO: REY DE REYES, or something similar.

Anyway, aguas basically means "watch out" or cuidado/ojo in Spanish. According to numerous unconfirmed sources, this odd phrase stems from the colonial days, well before flushing toilets and other related luxuries. Basically after taking care of business in the nearest bucket, earthen vessel...etc, folks would carry it over to an open window or balcony, yell "AGUAS" to warn any passersby and toss their undesireables into the street/alley below. So, due to linguistic convenience, in the last few hundred years the phrase has been generalized a bit from "watch out for this huge bucket of urine and feces I'm about to potentially throw on you" to simply "watch out!!"

cool huh?

hasta la proxima,

Chris

For Those Who Dare to Read: Freire Unwrapped

Paulo Freire, the Brazilian philosopher and educator, can be extremely hard to unpack sometimes. But, guys and gals, the man is worth it—and I say that not just because he inspired the teaching methods that our current job uses but because reading him and learning about him will COMPLETELY change the way that YOU think about education, specifically your own education.

So with my shoddy BA philosophy training, I’m going to try to break down Freire here as best I can in a series of blog posts. Though Pedagogy of the Oppressed is his most famous, I want to start out with some of the practice behind his theory which he details in Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to those who Dare to Teach, as I think it puts the theory in better context as we start to learn about it, and also applies directly to our jobs, fancy that!

Freire makes 10 main points in his series of letters:
1. A teacher is also a learner
2. “It is impossible to teach without a forged, invented, and well-thought-out capacity to love (23)”
3. Teaching cannot be identified with parenting because it undermines the capacity of the teacher to protest, and as a legitimate, valuable, and absolutely necessary profession
4. Reading is intrinsically linked with writing and vice versa
5. Teaching is not a last resort profession, but rather must be considered a profession of the highest calling and most significance
6. Teachers must practice humility (or 'armed love' p.74) paired with tolerance, as Freire defines tolerance--- “Tolerance does not mean acquiescing to the intolerable; it does not mean covering up disrespect; it does not mean coddling the aggressor or disguising aggression. Tolerance is the virtue that teaches us to live with the different. It teaches us to learn from and respect the different (76).”
7. Good teachers who are true to their calling must have the ability to admit when they are scared and wrong to their students—namely that they are human.
8. The relationship between the educator and learner must be of respect and mutual learning, never authoritarianism—in its most basic sense this means listening to each other
9. Discipline must be a conversation between students and teachers about what is acceptable to both for the best learning environment possible
10. Teachers must recognize that students have ‘unschooled’ skills and knowledge that they learn from practice rather than theory (i.e. skills that they've learned in their community, on the streets, by observing daily life in their home)
11. Respect for the cultural identity of both the students and teacher is paramount

I’d be very interested what your responses are to these theories---for me they were a revelation. Freire made me realize why I endlessly battled with my high school English teacher (her discipline was never a conversation but rather a feigned superiority) and why Teach for America teachers that I know do and do not enjoy the experience. Mainly though it makes me so very thankful for the teachers (including my parents who are English professors, and my most influential teachers) that I have had, good and bad because they truly taking on a profession of the highest challenge and most difficulty.

On that note, shame on you Obama (and your administration) for cutting government spending on education when we need it the most and making teachers jobs across America even harder.

Tales from the Front (of the class)

So here we are, 2 weeks into the school year down here in Guatemala, looking back at the failures and triumphs of our first 2 weeks as Elementary School English teachers. Despite never receiving any actual training as teachers, I feel like over the past 2 weeks we've managed to get off on a good foot, setting daily routines from the very first class and keeping our 4th, 5th and 6th graders more or less under control. Despite hearing that it would be difficult to get the kids to complete homework assignments, we decided from the very beginning to have one assignment due each week that they receive Tuesday and hand in on Thursday. Incredibly, well over 80% of the kids have turned in their 2 homework assignments thus far!

Actually, it was quite funny when I announced the very first day of class that they would be receiving a homework assignment, obviously the announcement was met with a cacaphony of moans and groans "Profe, pero es el primer dia de clases", they lamented. However when it was revealed that their assignment was a wordsearch (or rompecabezas, which translates literally as 'headbreaker'), they began to cheer and demand I pass out the homework right then and there. Surprisingly, it appeared to be quite torturous for them to restrain themselves from completing the wordsearch until after class!

Since that first day, we've made sure to bombard the kids with all sorts of fun and relatively brief activities, so as to keep them engaged and entertained. For example we've modified the classic "telephone game" into an English pronunciation exercise, invented a version of soccer where students take turns shooting goals on Alyssa and I and must translate a single word or a full sentence depending on whether they make it or not, in addition to lots more fun activities. Last Thursday we took advantage of the linguistic simplicity of the Beatle's "Hello Goodbye" to practice salutations as well as such important words as high, low, yes, no and a bit of verb conjugation. Filling our curriculum with fun, engaging activities has worked so well that kids have been literally begging us to come into their classrooms on Fridays for an extra session of English enrichment.

Of course there have been some challenges too. A big one is that in each of our classes, there is a pretty large variance in the level of students' familiarity and proficiency with English. For example, there are students who have lived in the US for over a decade and speak English fluently, alongside some first year students at the Colegio who have never before been exposed to English. Therefore, we're trying to put an emphasis on group activities that allow students to learn from each other while building community in our classrooms.

Another challenge has been navigating the treacherous waters of emerging prepubescent crushes, note-passing and other related silliness. As two young potentially-attractive teachers, we've found that in our 5th and 6th grade classes, almost 100% of the girls prefer asking me questions to Alyssa and obviously the boys prefer Alyssa's responses to mine, whereas the 4th graders by and large don't discriminate. We're taking steps to try to prevent these innocent little flirtations from being distracting by refusing to give students the standard salutation (male to female or female to female) of a kiss on the cheek. Also we've made it clear that the next note that gets passed in our class is going to be made into an impromptu english translation exercise, so unsurprisingly we haven't seen any notes passed since the first day!

Anyway, all in all teaching has been a real blast so far and will hopefully only become more rewarding as we begin to see the fruits of our labor and get to know our students better. We'll be sure to keep you all posted!

hasta pronto,

Chris

Gringo Grudges: Behind the Madness

Through several (ok reasonably two or so) years of traveling through ‘developing’ countries in both Latin America and Africa, I’ve had a reoccurring experience, which many of you may share. It first happened when I went to South Africa and while doing research on ‘slum tours’ I noticed that our all white group dispersed quickly and frantically---not fleeing from a perceived purse bandit or falling piece of corrugated tin but from each other. God, what umlungus (Zulu word for white person) I heard someone exclaim. And then when I was in Sierra Leone it happened again, after weeks of seeing no other foreigners my friend Alaina and I became indignant at seeing other a New Yorker in the market, inventing diabolical missions for them in our minds eye, ultimately leading to a sassy tell off to one white bar prowler who can now only be referred to as the Lion. And I have to tell you the experience has been no different in Latin America. As witnessed by the great penchant for travelers to call themselves and other travelers gringos, with mocking and disgust, and for hostellers to look for unique, traditional experiences (read: nice, clean experience that are required to be devoid of other gringos), the extranjeros of Xela are no exception. Foreigners here in Xela seem to constantly stick to ‘the gringo’ spots while secretly wishing they were somewhere else (exhibited by the bored and longing looks out the door of said establishments). And the golden rule of gringos I’ve observed so far? Never, and I mean never look another gringo in the eye.

So the question arises, exactly why do gringos hate seeing other gringos abroad SO much? I think that ultimately the answer is more complicated than I can unravel in a blogpost, but in my own aversion towards other travelers I’ve found three root causes of this gringo grudge.

The first is a kind of hidden, unconscious finding of oneself-through-a-place-colonialism. Rockwell Gray writes that travel experience arises from the most basic features of our human condition, namely the embodiment of our ‘animalism’ and motility. That travel, like many philosophers have said of God or justice, is a catalyst to make us understand something about our nature, most basic and social, that we did not before. And after all is said and done, this travel (when done right of course), which has prompted some kind of self-realization, takes on almost mythic significance in our lives or we want to think it has. Our adventure becomes our Mecca of sorts. “We convert landscape into sky and legend, lending it much of what we wish to find there, Man the inveterate explorer brings with him the capacity to endow a place with wonder and romance,” Rockwell Gray writes. In order to enlarge our sense of place, our identity among the globalized and terrifyingly fluid nation states, we transverse space not in order to claim or create property but to create place and identity and, let’s face it, other gringos get in the way of that place and identity that we’ve colonized for our self identity. The quest to colonize a country or city as marker of self identity, to make how many hidden business and citizens of said country or city one knows the indicator for how unique and individual one’s life/experience/person is, inherently negates the inclusion of other countrymen and foreigners into this narrative. One just can’t feel transformed in the same way when there’s that pesky reminder from home sitting across the café sipping on the SAME DRINK YOU ORDERED.

The second is a feeling of absurdness and general out of placeness, i.e. The if-there-are-people-who-look–like-me-it will-draw-attention-to-how-Teva-wearing-awkwardly-out-of-place-I-look syndrome. This comes from feeling generally out of place in a new society, country, and landscape. I think anthropologist Victor Turner describes this phenomenon best with his concept of liminality, a state in which one is neither here nor there, is betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony---in between, displaced and out of bounds. This feeling, of being between cultures, not knowing one’s place can lead (and often does lead) to a rejection of one’s race, roots, class, and peers---and ultimately a rejection of one’s fellow gringos.

And the third is really a self-righteous individualism, the idea that we can’t learn something from everyone, and that every meeting is an experience—not just encounters with people from the culture we’re obsessing about in this moment. But this kind of dismissal of other people is dangerous—it ‘others’ one’s fellow traveler creating a self-assured superiority. As philosopher Cesar explains, “the Other looks at me not as he is ‘in the midst of’ my world but as he comes toward the world and toward me from his transcendence (361).” Folks, when we ‘other’ other gringos the only thing that can result is unfounded and unnecessary snobbery.

If you’ve succumb to the above-mentioned elitism, don’t worry I’m no gringo-hugging saint either. I am as guilty of this gringo aversion as the next backpacker. In my hay-day I could lay the cold, oh-is-THAT-what-you’re-doing-here stare on an umlungu so fast your head would spin.

Lately, though, I’ve been a little more tranquilo and I suppose I’ve realized, fellow gringos, that we have a lot to learn from each other. And more than that, in order to learn anything we must be willing to learn from each other. As Freire writes, “It is impossible to teach or learn without the courage to love, without the courage to try a thousand times before giving up (Teachers as Cultural Workers 5).” And I guess in my quest to embody this philosophy in my daily interactions with students, I’ve come to realize that it’s not a bad pointer for life either.

Bienvenidos!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At long last, after 2 months on the road in the western US selling posters, and 2 more adventuring through Mexico, Alyssa and I have made it safe and sound to our destination, the incomparable, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Here we are/will be doing development work for a non-profit school, El Colegio Miguel Angel Asturias, in the coming year, as well as teaching a few sections of 4th, 5th and 6th grade English enrichment.

The school is a truly inspirational place, founded by an indigenous Guatemalan named Jorge Chojolan, it aims to do no less than transform the Guatemalan educational system through the creation of a network of progressive nonprofit schools throughout the country. The school we're working at, which is in Quetzaltenango (aka Xela- pronounced Shay-lah), is the pilot school in the network and has been a great success. Many of our seniors this year will be the first in their families to have graduated high school (and are committed to continuing their education at the university level...a real rarity here)!

Anyway, this year will surely be a huge learning experience and we're both extremely excited to keep you all abreast of things via this blog, which we will both be posting to regularly. Stay tuned for updates about our awesome 4th, 5th and 6th grade English classes we're teaching, our development work for the school, weekend travels, musings on la nueva vida guatemalteca and much much more.

Oh yeah, one more thing...being the first post and all, I suppose an explanation of the blog title is in order. Does the name Antonio Cipriano Jose Maria y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz ring a bell? No? Well he's better known as Antionio Machado , a Spanish poet whose best known work includes the stanza :

Caminante, no hay camino
se hace el camino al andar

which is to say:

Wanderer, there is no road
the road is made by walking

I was first presented with this poem in the mountains of the Mexican Southeast while spending a week in the Zapatista village of Oventic, and upon further reflection have come to realize some of the tremendous significance contained within these two lines. Hopefully in the coming months, through the thoughts and experiences shared here by Alyssa and I, we all might come to understand the wanderers within ourselves a bit better...

hasta la proxima,
Chris (aka Profe Cris)