I wanted to give a quick update to my loyal blog followers. Not much has happened since my last blog post, but I think short frequent updates are better than long spread out ones.
I guess the most noteworthy thing was a visit from the Peace Corps Nicaragua Country Director. It was kind of out of the blue Alison was visiting me Friday when I got a call from our country director Carol. She is very nice; she hosted my entire group of Nica 54 over at her house for Thanksgiving. Other than that I have really had much contact with her. So as you can imagine when I receive her call on Friday I was a little surprised. She told me that she and her daughter were heading up to La Dalia to stay an eco lodge for the weekend, that was nearby and wanted to stop by and say hi to Alison and I. Alison and I cleaned up my house for her visit, which was very nice. She loved my house and the area where I lived especially the cooler mountain air. After chatting for a while she took us out to lunch at a nearby restaurant. Alison and I both really enjoyed her visit.
Other that not much is going on. My community English class is going really well. This week I broke up the class into two groups, a beginner group and an intermediate/advanced group. I will teach each group two nights a week. Last night was the first night of my beginner class we spent the evening practicing the English alphabet out loud and spelling our names. We finish with a few basic introductions and salutations and then put it all together with a dialog from our textbook. It’s a good dialog because it covers everything that we learned but I think it was little too long and caused a bit of confusion. Although I am glad that I split up the class because I feel the students will actually learn more now. Tonight is the first night with the intermediate/advanced students, who are mostly just the university students that have been coming from the beginning. I plan on doing more conversation activities to help improve their speaking skills. I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.
I am still having difficulties with my counterpart, unfortunately. I have talked with her but she is still not really listening to me. This as I am sure you can imagine is very frustrating. I have tried different approaches to talk with her but she doesn’t seem to want to change her teaching methodologies or accept a different role for me in the class. I feel like I’m living the proverb “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”. She is not rejecting all my ideas but majority of them. Another really frustrating thing is when I make suggestions about planning and grammatical corrections she always gives some excuse about how it is my fault for why something is wrong or not working. It is a real constructive working relationship as you can see. However I am hopeful that things will change by the end of this month. Luis my other (fluent) counterpart will be back from his two month training in Atlanta so I am sure he will be anxious to share all he has learned. I have worked with him before and get along with him great.
Also I will have a site visit from a 3rd year TEFL volunteer at the end of the month as well. She will talk with both my counterparts and also my school principal. So I am hopeful she can help straighten out the problems with my female counterpart. My boss was supposed to come up and visit but apparently that fell through so the 3rd year volunteer is the next best thing.
Next week I will be heading back down to Niquinohomo for a week for a 3 month check up our Spanish. It will be nice to see all of my friends from training again! Then afterwards a group of friends is coming up to La Dalia with to check out my house and site as kind of a homecoming party. It’s going to be a lot of fun! That while I am gone a new health volunteer is coming up to La Dalia for her site visit, she will be working with maternal house and giving talks to the pregnant women here. Alison and I are really excited to meet our new sitemate…there is even a rumor that she could be from Oregon!
I’ll be sure to keep you all updated to what happens
Hope everything is going great up north!
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