So what's an average day in Port like?

Glad you ask!

Well, if you want to start at the very beginning of the day, I'm often woken up in the middle of the night by a confused gallo (rooster), an agitated perro (dog) or a talkative perico (parakeet). It depends how paranoid I am, too. When the dogs are barking a lot, that means there are people around, and people shouldn't be around at four in the morning. I think I have managed to sleep straight through the night at least a few times, but I'd rather wake up in the middle of the night. That means I'm well-rested and not sleeping too heavily.

I typically get up for the day around 5:30am. I try to participate in some sort of healthy activity like going for a run, attempting to do yoga or doing some exercises at home. There's a gym about a five-minute run away, so I go there occasionally, mainly on Saturday. Just want to get the blood flowing in the morning.

After that, I get out the pot and oatmeal and get that ready. I can't tell you how pumped I was to find out that there was oatmeal in this country, and at a price reasonable enough that I could eat it everyday! I'm somewhere around 70 straight days of oatmeal, which I realize is very ridiculous. I didn't even have that kind of a streak in the States! Breakfast isn't a big thing here, so options are limited. Thankfully, I was able to create my American oatmeal here to Port. It started out just as oatmeal, but I'm building it back up to the old monster it was: eggs, soymilk (well, powdered soymilk), honey, cinnamon...I'm basically just missing pasas (raisins), but I think I might have found an economical source for that too! If only there was Calcium- and Vitamin-D-fortified Florida's Natural Orange Juice to accompany my oatmeal. Sigh.... :)

After breakfast, gotta renew the water source in the house. For that, we have our pozo (well) from which we can pump water into the tank that sits on about a 12 foot tower in the back of the house. The pump can run for about fifteen minutes before it overheats. If I understood the explanation correctly, the machine is actually a pump for oxygen tanks for divers, if that makes any sesne. I could be mistaken, but the moral of the story is that using it to pump water up to a tank isn't really what it's supposed to be used for. So it needs like 10 hours to cool down after it's been running for 15 minutes straight, because that's not what it was made for :). That's so Nica!

I usually find some way to entertain myself for the next hour or so before I go to classes. Usually I take a shower...just kidding - I always take a shower! A cold shower of course. Midday showers are better than morning showers because in the morning it actually is a littly "chilly" (about 65/70 degrees fahrenheit), so cold showers don't always feel great. Taking a midday shower means you're probably sweating, and the heat of the day usually helps to heat up the water in the tank, so it's not so cold. But I don't wanna go to class stinky in the morning, so taking a shower at lunch is not really an option! Then I have half an hour or so before I actually head to classes, so sometimes I just dawdle (if that's a word), sometimes I read, sometimes I sweep. Depends on the day.

The work week is four days long, and Friday is my planning day, so I can figure out what I'll be doing the next week. But (big "but!") we've only had like three or four weeks of regular class since we got here in the middle of September. Whether it's been the threat of political uprising, the celebration of things like Día de la Autonomía (Autonomy Day, which is a-whole-nother topic) or Día de los Difuntos (Day of the Dead), or the threat of weather (hurricane or normal rain), there's always been at least one day when I was supposed to be working that classes didn't happen. Come to think of it, I think I've had about as many days not working as I've had working in the last five weeks. Also very Nica!

When I do actually go into work, I try to teach English to primary school students at Colegio Niño Jesús for about forty minutes first thing in the morning. I say try because it usually doesn't go too well. That's not just particular to me either. The kids are not what you would consider well-behaved and often need to be reminded by their teachers to keep the noise down. Sometimes they take an interest in English for about five minutes, but then they realize it's work just like any other class and they lose interest. So the other 35 minutes is just trying to keep things under control and throw an English lesson in sometimes :).

After that first period, I head over to Escuela Maureen Courtney to work with Carlos for the next hour of classes. Carlos is in the nivelación (catching up) class, which means the staff felt he wasn't benefitting from the normal classroom environment and needed some different attention. Carlos can't identify letters worth a lick, and sometimes I just don't know what to do. I can work with him on three letters for a whole hour and he might get one of them by the end of the day. Maybe! But there's no way he'll remember it the next day. When he's not working with me, he's in class copying down notes that the teacher puts on the board. I'm not sure what he does with these notes, since he can't read, but at least he's well behaved and tries really hard. The kid has an amazing attention span to be able to work with me for that long, and he really seems to want to learn, but it just doesn't stick! I don't know if I'll see much more of Carlos. Word on the street is that his family owes the school his colegiatura (school fees), and he didn't come to class at all this last week and a half, so his family might be keeping him at home so they don't get harassed about payments. Sad :(. But, if anyone has any good ways to teach a kid to identify letters, syllables or words, I'm willing to try anything at this point!

The rest of the morning I spend helping out with the music taller (workshop). Sometimes this involves me actually working with the kids, and sometimes it just involves me practicing guitar, since I'm learning how to play (and eventually teach) right-handed and some upside-down left-handed. I practice guitar when the kids are practicing the recorder. That's right - everybody loves the recorder! The kids actually like the recorder more, too, because it doesn't hurt their fingers to play it, like the guitar does! But when the new schoolyear starts in January (or February, depending on who you ask) I'll actually be working with the kids one-on-one with this, so hopefully they'll learn to love the guitar :).

After that, I walk back to the house for lunch, which usually involves rice and beans somehow. Rice is definitely a staple. A day doesn't go by without rice, and I'm good with that. I'd probably be ok with rice and beans everyday if I had to. Plus it's cheap, so why not? After eating, I usually have about half an hour before heading back to class, so I study some Spanish or some Miskitu or maybe take a power nap if the dogs were barking too much the night before.

Afternoon is spent again at Maureen Courtney. Couple more English classes a couple times a week, more of the same results. I have at least a handful of kids in the fourth-grade class that take an interest in the subject, so I just end up teaching them and asking the other kids to keep the noise down. Teaching five kids for half an hour is better than struggling to teach 30 for five minutes, if you ask me... It was frustrating at first, but I've accepted that I can't change in one day what the kids have been doing for years.

I also do more individual attention in the afternoon - with Alejandro, who is about 20 and also has significant learning impediments. He's in the nivelación class in the afternoon. My understanding is he got into the education system late, and so he struggles with reading as well. He can identify letters and syllables and eventually words with a bit of effort. If we repeat a sentence enough, he not only reads it, he also comprehends it. We've been working a lot on that lately, because he knows the syllables well enough to get the words out, but he doesn't always know what the point of the sentence is. Another good kid. Super quiet. Pretty sure his first language is Miskitu. Another good reason to learn the language, right?!

Eliezer is the third kid I work with individually, also in the afternoon nivelación. Eliezer has an easy time identifying and reading syllables, but also struggles with comprehension. His reading is robotic, but the good part is he does know the syllables, which is more than a lot of kids in the class can say. He also works really hard and can put up with me for an hour of class, which says quite a bit. Now if only he would do his homework...

I usually get home from the schools around 4:30pm. Since we've only been in the house about a month, there's been a lot of projects to work on, so there's been a lot of that kind of getting stuff done. Just lots of odd jobs that I won't bore you with. We do have a homemade compost bin though. Yeah! Well, we've had a compost bin for about two weeks. I can't say how long we'll have it because it might get ripped off. That would be sad, because it took a while to punch the holes in it. Hopefully the ladrones (thieves) would be smart enough to realize that it wouldn't really serve as a garbage can anymore. Although, I suppose it could be used as a clothes hamper...

Weekends are actually pretty busy. Laundry is handwashed, so doing that once a week leaves about two hours worth of laundry to clean and rinse and hang. I always pray for sun on the days when I do laundry so it dries out quickly! Sometimes it can take like 30 hours to have it dry out. Doing laundry has taken on a whole new meaning, because I'm actually DOING the laundry, instead of having a machine do it for me.

Weekends have also gotten full with choir activities. At first I thought choir would be a Saturday-afternoon-practice/Sunday-afternoon-church activity, but it seems there's always another special celebration to ensayar (rehearse) for. So we often end up practicing on Sunday afternoon, too, and then maybe singing at another event. So Sunday is like my fifth work day.

I guess to answer the question, there really is no average day here in Bilwi! Especially with the weather! Rain days here are more prevalent than snow days in the States. Since most of the kids walk to class from 10 to 45 minutes away, and because there's a belief (founded or unfounded) that the kids get sick when they get wet, only about 20% of the kids show up when it's pouring out. So after about half an hour of debating whether or not kids are going to show up, everyone gets sent home. More recently, the sun has begun to set sooner, so the afternoon classes get let out a little earlier so the kids can get home from school before dark. Always another reason to shortern the day! Someday this might frustrate me, but not right now. For the time being, I'm just taking whatever comes and trying to process my place in the world. I'll have plenty of time to think about it in December when there's no class!