Happy Thanksaction!

Some of you may remember the phrase ¡Feliz Día de Acción de Gracias! from high school Spanish. It does indeed mean Happy Thanksgiving. Being the nerd that I am, though, I like to think about the translations and how the words that are used in different languages imply different practices. Well, in all honesty, Thanksgiving isn't really celebrated here in the Nica. There are actually a lot of preparations taking place for the Feast of the Virgin Mary, or Purísima, which starts this weekend and runs through December 8th. It's a pretty big deal. And our choir practice schedule shows it.

But...I'm writing about Thanksgiving, because I'm still gringo and hold close to my heart my Northamerican holidays. So if you want to translate Día de Acción de Gracias, it would come out roughly to "Day of Action/Act of Thanks." That really doesn't mean a whole lot in English, but I like the use of the word Acción, because I feel like "giving thanks" is often turned into simply saying what we're thankful for. But Thanksgiving is more than just saying. It's doing. It's an acción. So here are my thoughts on Thanksaction:

Praise God for all of the wonderful blessings you have in your life. Recognize the unique gifts that each one of us presents to one another. Appreciate the simple things that we often take for granted, such as security within our homes, support from friends and family members, and clean clothes. Hug someone who you haven't seen in a while. Human touch is powerful. Share your talents and skills with someone who can benefit from them, and ask for nothing in return. Listen fully to the words of someone your elder, and learn from what they say. Reflect in silence and allow God to speak to your heart. Spend time away from cars and concrete and notice the beautiful things nature has to offer. Look inside yourself and focus on all the good things you can offer the world. Contemplate how you might become a more complete person. Give your time to someone so their labor might be less. Open your heart to change that makes the world a better place. Be willing to change yourself if necessary. Ponder what it means to Give Thanks, and know that it is all of these things. ¡Feliz Día de Acción de Gracias!

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!

Not for those with a weak stomach

So I had started to write about just what exactly I do around here on a regular basis when something came up this morning. I was starting to work on laundry when one of our little mouse friends decided to scoot past me along the wall. We've been trying to solve this mouse problem for a while now. We bought poison a few weeks ago and found one dead mouse in our laundry room a few days later, but holes were still getting punched in our food bags (Dry spaghetti? Oats? Seriously, what is this mouse thinking?). So we figured out that the mice were using the hole in the wall where the sink plumbing runs in order to get into and out of the house. Ok, so we put more poison down there. Well, we hadn't really seen much of the mice until today.

So, obviously the goal is to get rid of the mice. I don't know a whole lot about mice, but I don't really want to chance one biting me so "getting rid of," in this case, means killing, and probably killing pretty brutally. So I follow it along the wall and it hides behind our leftover roll of barbed wire. I move that and he hides behind of the legs of the laundry sink, and he's obviously trying to get to his hole in the wall. So I redirect him back to the other wall where he hides behind a broom. Fortunately, we have about a foot-long block of wood sitting in the laundry room, so I pick that up, move the broom and when he starts to scurry, take a whack!

Somehow I connected so he's kind of hobbling toward the back door to get outside, so I have to hit him again, because now it's a matter of putting him out of his misery. So I whack him again, doing my best to hit him on the head so it's quick, but he's still moving around. I pushed him outside in the back of the house and gave him the third hit that ended his day...and life.

After we found the first dead mouse, it was a sense of accomplishment. The mouse was causing problems, we decided to address the problem and we got rid of the problem. It was easy because it was like it was the mouse's fault for eating the poison. It was indirect. This time, it was very direct. I not only watched the mouse die. I participated in it's death. Hell, I was the main antagonist.

Some of you may think, Big deal. Dead mouse. Well my mind doesn't operate that way when I kill something. I immediately felt like crap. I'm thinking, all this mouse is doing is living it's life, causing me the minor problem of poking holes in food bags, and here comes the big human with the stick to put an end to things.

This is the problem I have with war. Yeah, I'm taking it there. I'm not gonna sit here and say I have the solution to ending international (or even intranational) conflict without using force, but war to me is an ugly thing. To me, sending troops off to war is like putting poison out for mice. Sooner or later, something's gonna end up dead. It's easy to put the poison out, because it detaches you from the situation. You don't have to do anything, and the outcome just happens. That's how it is for national leaders. Presidents, dictators, whoever. They send troops off to fight their fights and don't have to see the consequences directly. I'd like to see how a national leader would react if, instead of the enemy killing their troops, the troops were released home to the leader so that he or she him- or herself would have to end that soldier's life. How would that change the game?

So, of course, about ten minutes later another mouse scurries by me while I'm doing laundry. I'm still literally upset about having killed what I have to assume is this new mouse's brother or sister, so there's no way I'm killing this one. But I'm also not just gonna let it keep eating into our food bags. This mouse is moving pretty slow, so I'm figuring I can catch him. He gets into a corner and apparently is trying to act like I don't see him, so I grab one of the old rice sacks we have in the laundry room, throw it over him and pick him up, as he squeals for his life :(. I chuck him into the bucket we use for getting extra water from the pozo and let him sit, trying to figure out the best solution for getting rid of him.

Well, about an hour later, he's laying in the bucket panza arriba (belly-up). Apparently, he got into the poison we had set out. That would also explain why a mouse was moving slow enough that I was able to grab it.

Three dead mice. Two indirect and one direct kill. On some level, I know it's kind of silly to get upset about it. How many mice get killed in a day by how many people? I guess it's the bigger picture of respect for creation and my wondering about what makes one species superior to another that makes me think about this more than you might think about it. I just hope there's no more mice to have to make a decision about...