Teaching, planting, and cooking empanadas...

Olá! Buenos Dias! Como está?

(and you reply "Bien, y vos?")

How is your corner of the world, wherever that may be? Here in Paraguay, it's good.  The weather is a little bipolar (literally), but I'm enjoying almost every minute of it, except the getting out of my warm bed bits...We went from 90's one week to low 50's and rainy the next.  Supposedly it's going back to the 90's in a day or so.  This is good news because my Kinder class is joining with the ESL teacher's ninth grade special needs class to grow a garden. I am so excited!!! My kids are a little miffed that they can't play "The Witch of Colors" through the garden area (a confusing game I have yet to figure out, despite the fact that they play it everyday), but they are definitely intrigued about helping Senor Rosalino (the campus gardener) put some seeds in all that tempting dirt!

Observing and drawing plants on the playground (there are lots)

 

 

 

This is the way we plant a seed...

 

Gentle, gentle!

 

Life isn't terribly exciting at the moment. I get to work for devotions at 6:40 and from 7:00 to 3:15pm I have kids in my classroom.  I've started tutoring after school for two siblings who have parents that speak very little English.  Basically I am helping with homework and reviewing the day's lessons with them.  It isn't terribly hard, but it is providing an additional income that will make it easier to pay for Master's classes and hopefully allow me to do some real traveling during school breaks!

Lesson planning for my class is an interesting challenge.  One of my students goes to tutoring school after school every day, so he's already mastered some of the basics that we are covering.  Another student is somewhat younger than the others and her English is still emerging.  Trying to balance group work to address the needs of all my students is hard sometimes.  Also, since I am still needing to work from teacher's books most of the time, I have to adapt the lessons to meet the resources I have available in Paraguay.  Honestly, I am thankful that there are several teacher's manuals for each subject avaliable and I can pick and choose from each one as I please! Some of the older ones have less "fancy lessons" that I can update to meet the needs of my students.

Silly faces! We know the parts of our faces (and the five senses)!

Why does he have ears on his neck?

"Because he need to listen well"

What a work wall looks like when you only have eight students.

It's only about five feet long, but I still had to spread them out!

(And those are legal sized pieces of paper!)

It is a little strange sometimes, because a few of the teaching materials are what I remember learning from as a kindergartener.  My phonics and writing books are exactly the same, even the workbooks! I imagine it's a bit like becoming a teacher in a school that you used to attend.

Mostly I am enjoying having afternoons to myself to work or read and go on outings with my neighbors. We often walk places, like the mall, rather than take the bus, which makes trips a little longer and allows for more conversation.  A ten minute walk to the grocery store is much shorter when you have someone to talk to on the way!

I am really enjoying the community at ACA, the school.  The teachers are very supportive of each other and the administration, being made up of former (and for the moment, current) teachers, is very supportive of the teachers.  I really enjoy spending time with the teachers and it makes being in a new country, living alone in an apartment much less lonely.

It's a little unnerving how fast I've settled in.  Good, but unnerving.  Our welcome packet detailed the stages of culture shock, and I've been through it before, but it's like I either haven't started really going through it yet, or I went through it really fast.  I'm definitely thankful I haven't had problems yet, but it's still a little disconcerting.  I guess I'll just have to wait and see how the coming changes affect me?  Soon, very soon, I'll have a roommate and if I get two I'll be moving downstairs to a new apartment.  I can't wait to meet my roommate, we've all been waiting and praying for her!

Either way, I'm adjusting really well so far.  I'm doing my best to learn spanish, and it's not going to badly.  Those two years of high school spanish that I thought I hadn't learned anything from seem to be coming back in little bits and pieces.  Plus, my neighbor Elizabeth is really nice and willing to translate any word I ask her. She also helps me learn useful phrases for general life, like the numbers (just knowing 1-10 isn't that useful when most things cost at least 2,000 Gs), and how to order food and buy items.
I'm also having fun cooking, with what little skill I have.  I've found that empanadas, Katie-style, are very good. They are easy to make, if a little time consuming, and I can make a bunch on Saturday night and then just grab them in them morning to take for lunch. Plus, I can fill them with whatever veggies and meat I end up buying at the market. I don't know how the general U.S. hasn't discovered them yet!  Forget cupcakes, do empanadas!

Mango curry filling

(weird, but not bad...it would have helped to have all the ingredients in the recipe)

About two weeks of lunch (I am thankful for my freezer!)

Life in Paraguay #4: When you have a shower head heater, lower water pressure means hotter water. When the water coming through is cold, you might as well give up dreams of a hot shower and say thank you for lukewarm. When the water in the tank is warm to begin with, hot can translate into scalding very fast, so watch out!

Prayer requests:
Pray for my roommate, she'll be traveling here this weekend! Pray for safe travel and quick assimilation, so she can jump right into teaching Jr. High math!
Pray that the school will find the teachers God has for it, so administrators and teachers don't have to do double duty to cover the classes.
Pray for my patience with the students and my own inexperience.

Why I'm glad this isn't VeggieTales...

Or: "How to survive in a Spanish speaking country when your Korean student knows more Spanish than you do"

1. Learn the fine art of hand guestures. 
Aren't you glad God gave us hands and arms (unlike the Veggies)? Between my very small (but growing) vocabulary and a lot of gesturing, I've managed to have several conversations with the lady who cleans my classroom (including communicating the need for bleach in my classroom during a pink eye outbreak).  Hands are marvelous things. :)

2. Start practicing Spanish!
You know how when you were little and your teacher told you to "read, read, read"? Like "Read signs, read cereal boxes, read magazines"? Well, apparently that applies to learning another language, too.  I've found that just reading signs or notices on the bus and practicing sounding out the words until I can read them fluently has make it way easier to remember words that I hear too.

3. Make friends with people who speak fluent English and Spanish.
They can translate things for you, help you practice asking for things, or (in my case), help translate notes home to parents (I always get the Pre-K aid to translate one copy then I copy her's onto the other notes, for the practice).

4. Google (translate) is your friend.
Whether it's translating the instructions on the cleaning fluid, or reading an article about a strawberry festival.  Google is a great help.
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So that little infomercial kind of sums up a lot of what I've been learning the last month: practice, have fun, and ask lots of questions.  It's kind of crazy to think that I've officially been here a month!  In the past, I would be packing up my backpack and steeling myself for a miserable 20 hour plane ride.  Instead, I'm sitting in my apartment contemplating the fact that I managed to go a whole month before I lost my keys (I am sooo glad the previous occupant made a spare key to my apartment!) and the pile of laundry on my bed that I really need to put away in my closet. In other words, I'm loving this place.

It's been a crazy couple of weeks, what with the start of school and everything that goes with that. I went back to the strawberry festival with my friends for the "official" opening.  That was lots of fun and we pretty much bought one of all things strawberry and kind of passed them around so everybody got to try some. It was great. The sugar high was nice, but we all were very tired on the bus ride home.

The little girls here in Paraguay all learn traditional dances in school, so I got to see the girls in the town perform some very traditional pot and fan dances. It was pretty neat.

The 15th was the day celebrating the foundation of Asuncion. It was also our last school holiday until Thanksgiving. My grand plans of sleeping in and then making lesson plans pretty much turned into sleeping in till 7:30, a little bit of planning, and a lot of reading for fun. The sun's schedule is kind of confusing here.  It starts rising about 6:15am and then starts setting about 5:15pm.  Basically you can't really sleep in (especially if your room faces east) and you start getting sleepy at supper time. Oh, well, it means I don't have to walk to work in the dark at 6:30 in the morning, though I'm starting to wonder what time it will rise in the summer!

I've really getting settled into my apartment, and I'm learning the quirks of it. I may end up moving downstairs to a three bedroom apartment in a few weeks, if the school gets another teacher, but it's still nice to be settled in here.

A few "little things" I love about Paraguay, and my apartment:
A. I can walk to the grocery store in ten minutes, and it's not uphill (walking back with heavy bags is less fun, but still). This is good since food here doesn't have a lot of preservatives, so you can't shop too far in advance.

After 5 days in the cabinet...bread stays in the fridge now!

B. The showers have faucet heaters.  No wasting water while you wait for it to heat up.  LOVE THIS! America should totally switch to this system, it saves a ton of electricity because it only heats while you use it!

C. Produce is cheap here.  Like, really cheap.  Like a couple of dollars for a week's worth of fruit.

1 kilo of sweet strawberry festival (very fresh) strawberries. 

It was very hard not to eat them all in two days. Yum!

D. My classroom has lots of windows and between opening the doors and the awesome seven level fans, I haven't needed the air conditioner yet! Plus, the playground is nice and shady.

I love the swings on this playground.  They are very kid friendly.

E. I have a gas stove. Granted I did manage to blow up the cover the first night, but since then we've gotten along great!  I baked cupcakes last night in 15 min.  Seriously, that's it. And they were perfect.

15th time lighting my stove...and I made sparkly playdough. 

I thought that was very "me" and my girls about died with happiness when they saw it.

F. I have awesome neighbors and coworkers.

G. I have a crazy, awesome bunch of students. There are eight different personalities that somehow all manage to get along (most of the time).  It's fun learning how to manage each personality to get the most from that child.  I also enjoy the many hugs I get everyday (though, I'm anxious about the fact that I was holding the child who started the pink eye in my class on the day her eyes started itchig...). 

My girls

H. I also really love that I can pray with my kids. I really, really love this.  Last semester one of my 4th graders was upset about her mother having surgery and the only comfort I could give was a hug and a silent prayer.  This week a child was worried about her grandfather getting surgery and I was so thankful I could pick her up and say "would you like to say a prayer with me for him?". Not gonna lie, by the end I was about as teary eyed as she was.
Well, that's about all the news I have for now.  I've made it a month and I'm looking foward to the next one!

Life in Paraguay #3: Meat and bread/carbs are dietary staples here.  Typically they are eaten together. For example, if you buy a chicken (pollo) empanada with meat in it you will probably get a roll to go with it.

Prayer Requests:
Another teacher has officially been hired and she will arrive a soon as her visa comes through, please pray for her safe travel and quick assimilation, especially since she will be picking up several weeks into the school year.
The school is hoping to hire a few more teachers to fill much needed spots.  Pray that God will bring the right people quickly.
In a small school with lots of cross-grade level interaction, infections travel fast.  Please pray for the health of the students and teachers.
My students are in the process of learning the vowels as the basis for reading. This is a little frustrating for a few the native spanish speakers because in Spanish the vowels have only one sound each, and those sounds are not the same as in English. Please keep their continued understanding and learning in your prayers.

The First Week of School

Sorry about the delay, I left my laptop cords in the office last Tuesday and I couldn't get them until school started...and I've been crazy busy since then!

So, the first few days of school have gone well.  I really love my students and my classroom.  We are working on a few behavior issues (like following directions), but what can you expect from five year olds at the very beginning of school?  Especially in a culture that is somewhat more lenient with discipline than I'm used to.  All in all my students are all very sweet and good natured.  They were all in Pre-Kinder together so there is already that feeling of a community in the classroom.

"Teacher, you're so beautiful"  :)

I've always said that I love teaching boys...well, I'm glad that's true because I have five of them.  I have five boys and three girls, and for all but two of them English is a second language.  They learned English last year, so most of them are very fluent, though one is still struggling to learn it.  Luckily I have a student with an American parent and a Paraguayan parent, so she is fluent in both Spanish and English and can help translate when necessary.

Their favorite place in the room...

It's fun to listen to my students though. They will randomly use Spanish words in the middle of sentences in English.  Even my students who speak English as a first language start speaking "spanglish"  in the heat of a soccer game. We have to remind them to "use English" on the playground, because part of the purpose of the school is to help students become fluent in English, so using English is actually a school rule.

My classroom is nice, and almost finished...I expected an empty classroom, but was pleased to find it full of teachery things. The only problem was that it was full of about 12 years of teachery things. I've been through most of it and sorted through what I want to keep and toss out. I still have some stuff to go through when I have time, but that will have to wait for a while.

On Day 2 of cleaning...

Finally finished (mostly)! 

How to hide curriculum boxes in a small class: disguise them as stoves!

Thankfully, my classroom also has plenty of toys, which is a real blessing in the afternoons.  Pre-Kinder and Kinder end school at 1:20, but the high school doesn't get out until 2:30.  This translates into most of my kids staying late.  So far, none of my kids gets picked up until 1:30 and I still have about five of them at 2:00 when I can send them to the playground. Thankfully, they don't seem to mind playing with trucks and dinosaurs until then (in fact, they usually groan when I announce it's time to clean up).

The word you are looking for is "creepy"

I'm still definitely loving my neighbors. It's great to have a community right there that you can talk to when you have a problem or need to borrow something.

Two of the couples that are my neighbors and I went to a strawberry festival in a nearby town last weekend.  Well, technically it was the pre-cursor to the festival.  Apparently the festival isn't until the 14th.  We are hoping to go back because 1. The strawberry jelly and strawberry foods are Amazing and 2. Apparently the president and minister of the interior will be there. Needless to say though, we all came back very full of strawberries!

The coolest part of the day though was actually the afternoon.  The strawberry fields are just outside of a town known for their pottery. After we were strawberried out we walked the few miles to the outside of the town and went into a pottery store.  The store owner actually gave us  a tour of the back part of the store and we got to see how they made the different kinds of pots. It was so cool!  He showed us how they made the really big pots (from two to six feet tall) in pieces on the wheel and then put them together to make one pot. We had intended to walk all the way back into the town, but we were getting pretty hot and some of us were starting to get a sunburn so we stopped at this store.  I'm really glad we didn't end up walking all the way back, because it was a lot farther than we thought.  The sun definitely would have been down by the time we made it back!

The Huge fire kiln

He showed us how to make the bottom of the pot (without getting at all dirty!)

Just a small taste of the many, many pots in the store!

I am really glad to be working here in Paraguay. It's been a really great experience so far, and the people at the school are very friendly and helpful. I can't wait to see how the rest of the year goes!

Prayer requests:

Pray for the school to get the rest of the teachers that are needed.  At least two are hoping to get here soon, but really the school needs four total. Especially high school science.  Teachers and even administrators are having to double up and cover classes until a full time teacher can be found.

Pray for the health of the teachers and students.  Between cold, damp nights, warm afternoons, and working with children, a lot of us are teetering on the edge of colds and other sickness.

Request: So, God made me a teacher not a chef.  As such, I'm having trouble finding/making recipes that I can use here in Paraguay. If you know any good very simple recipes you would like to share, send me a message on facebook! I would love to try whatever you think is great food!
Keep in mind though, I have a very limited kitchen, both pots/pans wise and spices wise (think pepper, salt, and oregano).  I would love recipes for fruits, veggies, and potatoes though, they are very cheap and are really yummy here!

One last thing:
A lot of people have been asking for my address, so here it is,

Asuncion Christian Academy
Avenida Santísimo Sacramento 1181
Asunción - Paraguay - South America

(I guess you just put my name somewhere on the letter?)

Keep in mind: you are sending things to South America.  Packages take up to a couple of months, and may come missing things, so don't send anything that you don't want to go missing. There is a safer way to send things through another address, but it's super expensive (about $8 a pound), so unless you really want that address, I'm not going to post it.  Letters may take a week or so, but the mail for letters is much more reliable.  I love getting letters, so feel free to send them!