So we had just gotten back from watching a movie in Managua, and we caught a microbus ( little van made for about 20 people but they fit about 40 in it making most people stand) back to Masaya. On the way home there was a woman standing behind me who hit (not tapped) hit my shoulder and told me to move because she needed to get out. There was absolutely NO room for me to wiggle my ass around ANYWHERE to let her through. I told her that once the bus stops, we will all get out and allow her safe passage out. She continued to hit my shoulder telling me to move over; patience running low, I explained that there was no room, and not to fret, as she will get out at her stop. This was not good enough for her. She then began to push me and yelling for me to move, then pushing and yelling and pushing and yelling. I had had enough, and most people who know me know that when I confront people who really piss me off, I like to make a big scene, so off I went. Putting my thumb and pointer finger together (for more dramatics I suppose) I spoke loud enough so that everyone in the bus could hear me ask her, “ Por el amor de dios, no tiene orejas, mujer? Acabo de decir que no hay maldita espacio para moverme para que salgas. Hay que esperar hasta que pare el bus, si no quieres esperar puedo ayudarte salir por la ventana. Ten paciencia y maldita respeto para los demas” (sorry for not using accents and stuff, but laptops suck for those) which ruffly translates to “ For the love of god, do you not have ears woman? I just got done saying there is no god damned space for me to move so you can get out now. You will have to wait until the bus stops, if you don't want to wait for that, I can help you get out through the window. Have a little patience and some god damned respect for everyone else.” So when the bus stopped she began to push her way out so I stopped turned around and gave her one of those “Ima slap you in the face bitch” looks. Once we got off the bus she threw her money at the man collecting the bus fare and said there was no F*%@#*$ space..blah blah blah. So we got back on the bus and everyone stared at me for the rest of the ride home. After that (what I like to call) little cultural integration, our stop came and we got off.
On our way home it began to rain...hard. Since we are still young growing boys, we needed food to aid in the growing process so we decided to combat the rain and walk to the nearest comedor (place that sells mediocre tasting food to go) once we reached the comedor, it began to rain like nobody's business. We got our mediocre food and decided to eat it there under the shelter of the tin roof to see if we could wait out the rain... we were wrong. Having begun raining even harder, we thought we could pick up the pace and make it home quick...we were wrong again. The water had now risen onto the sidewalk and Matt and I only had on sandals so we thought we better hurry. We came to the intersection 2 blocks from my house, and we all gasped to see the rough water that lie ahead. We had three options. Option 1: Call the US marine guard to help helicopter us back to my house. Option 2: Spin around in circles and turn into our hero alter egos and fly to my house or option 3: Try to walk through the rain and get as least wet as possible. Sooooo we got out our phones to dial the US marine guard but the number was busy. Damn it. With only one real option left we began to spin around for our “hero change” until Matt and Peyton collided heads. Double damn it. After waving goodbye to Noah and 7 pairs of each animal in his ark flowing down stream, we hiked up our shorts and began the life changing journey back home. Matt went first, at 6'1”, the water in the intersection was up a little over his knees, so I knew I would be in trouble. I jumped in and began crossing the street. I came across 2 men on the way. One was offering to baptize anyone for a low fee, and the other man, a local drunk (Moises), crazily hitting a walking stick on the ground I supposed hoping to part the “sea” like his old Hebrew counterpart Moses. Big surprise, it only works in the movies, and old fiction Books. Barely getting across the intersection alive, I took what I thought to be my last breath.... and there it was... the other side. As I stepped up on the other sidewalk, fighting the current of a thousand yesterdays along with the freezing katabatic arctic winds, my damn sandal began slipping off my foot. “Don't let go Jack” it said to me. As soon as I promised to never let go, there it went flowing down the river like the old paper boats my dad used to make for us on rainy Wisconsin days.(Everything floats down here...get it? The movie It? No? OK) Completely upset for the loss of my dollar pair of Old Navy white shower sandals Danielle bought for me 2 years ago, I took my other sandal and threw it at the water in hope to tame the beast. I'm sure by now, my sandals are either in Costa Rica, or the giant land mass of garbage (the size of Texas) floating in the ocean near Hawaii. They will truly be missed. (a ceremony will be held in their memory. TBD). After giving Peyton a few rescue breaths to revive his almost dead body, we continued back to my house...me...barefoot.
Once inside my house, we peeled off our cloths and headed for the shower (not all together of course.....or did we? ;) ) as the water we just got done walking through probably contained 300 different staphylococcus strains, 15 different STDs and a partridge in a pear tree. We needed to scrub our feet well, don't want any fungus. Upon leaving my shower I spotted a few cockroaches that made their way into my home to find refuge from the rain. Grabbing the new can of Raid, I decided to begin a Holocaust-like genocide of these nasty insects. BIG MISTAKE. As soon as the Raid disbursed into the air and those four roaches began to shake and die, one would have thought I had awoken the scorpion king, as 50-60 cockroaches from the drain began running, nay, crawling for their lives. They were ALL OVER the walls, climbing in my sink, trying to climb on us. HOLY SHIT I had never seen such thing. It almost made me believe in god. OK OK OK it didn't but YOU WERNT THERE, YOU don't EVEN KNOW!!!! After completing the holocaustic genocide of the huge quantity of roaches, and using almost the entire can of Raid, I swept them up into a pile and took a picture for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!
A couple of weeks ago, my old counterpart that I worked with last year, the English “department head” told me she wanted to have an English singing competition at the school. The reason I no longer work with her is because when we co-planned for classes, she would give me the book, and tell me to create the class while she walked away and did nothing, or had “important” English meetings to go to. After I completed the plans for class, I would tell her what I thought would be a good idea to do. After we were both on the same page, we would go home. Then when I got to class to teach the class I planned, I would begin and then she would tell me that SHE had already taught that class, so I had to create another class ON THE SPOT, and she wouldn't even help, she would sit in the back of the room and do nothing. So I decided that I'm not going to to her job any more and I stopped working with her. OK back to the English competition. So a few weeks ago she told me that we were going to have one, but she didn't know when but she would let me know. I told her to let me know in advance so I could ask a few other volunteers to come and help be judges. Well last Thursday she told me that the competition would be held the following morning at 10 AM and the afternoon at 3:30PM. She reminded me about 20 times and told me, “Now remember to call your friends because you said you were going to have your friends come”. So I informed her that I needed to know in advance because the other volunteers have their own schedules, but I would ask them anyway. Turns out they had off, so they were able to help. The next morning when we got to the school, my old counterpart had not even figured out a place to have to competition. In the end, we had the competition in the small computer lab. There was not even enough room to turn around, but the one good thing was there was air conditioning. So we were told the criteria on which to judge the songs, rhythm, pronunciation, content of the song, and enunciation. They were to be judged out of 100 points. Liz, Diane and I decided that content if the song was not a good indicator so we were going to give everyone the maximum 25 points because I could care less what the song was about, just as long as they sang. Before the contest started, 2 other English teachers came in to be judges as well. After everyone sang, (no Latin American Idols at my school this year) we calculated the points and I went over to the other English teachers to see what scores they had given them to add the points in to find the winner. They had told me that they didn't give any points, but they knew who they wanted to be the winners. The two English teachers of course chose their student to win, and they were telling me that our judging was bad because “so and so used a guitar” and “they sang a rock and roll song” so they shouldn't win, and they completely took the judging into their own hands. I explained that we were told to judge on certain criteria, and that no one never said you couldn't use a guitar or sing rock and roll songs. They wanted their students to win because if their student won, they would look like good English teachers. So I confronted them both and told them that you cannot just pick your student because you know them, as this would be a popularity contest and not a talent contest and if this is how the judging was going to be, I wanted no part of it. (The winners they chose earned 4th and 5th place (out of 8)). They were upset with this, and decided to leave and didn't return for the PM judging. Oh well, I could really care less how they feel about this because that is the point of having many judges and then adding the scores together to find the over all winner. Maybe thats how contests and Ahhhemm ::::elections:::: are done here, but it is not the right way.
This morning while I was planning what to teach for my secondary project: a community English class, there was a knock on my door. Right away I knew it was a Nicaraguan because anyone with manners knows about the 5 knock rule. You knock 5 times, ya give it a minute, then follow that up with 3 knocks to let them know you're still there waiting. But NO, the person knocked about 25 times. So opening the door, and gazing into their fake smile (you know those smiles where head is tilted to the side, and their eyes are almost crossed), and their hypnotized look, I knew right away they were religious. Jehovah's witnesses I guessed to myself. Bible in hand, they began rambling their pre memorized speech they get at their weekly “pep-talks” from the “big guys”. All I could think about was, “How in the hell am I going to get out of this?” They went on about how they were from Guatemala and there are about 40 thousand witnesses there, but in Mexico there are about 400 thousand. At some point in time I sneezed, and it hit me, the perfect exit strategy... SWINE FLU! I began to tell the guys about how coincidentally I had met a witness on my recent trip to Mexico. I tried to remember his name but told them I was too sick to remember, because I had a fever and a bad headache, and thought I may have come down with something, so I sneezed to prove my point. After a few open handed coughs in their direction, I stuck my hand out to shake their hands and asked them their names. The one over confident guy's eyes turned to saucers and he stepped back a bit. He began again with his shpeal about how when so and so was 900 years old she did something really important. He asked me how amazing I thought that was, to which I replied, “What I find amazing is that with all the new technology we have today and treatments for illnesses, we can still barely reach 100 years old. They must have had excellent doctors back then.” I had to end with a deep cough, you know one of those coughs from deep inside. Pointing at myself, leaning into the door frame, I thought out loud what I could have come down with, but I didn't worry because I have faith. I have faith that god will help me get over these FLU LIKE SYMPTOMS I RECENTLY GOT FROM MY TRIP TO MEXICO....I just needed to pray. After a another side step back, he handed me one of their little booklets of information, and they bit me a farewell. Like I said reason 844 why I'm going to hell. This week's witness topic is: How parents can help children cope with the stresses of school, homework, extracurricular activities, and trying to get into good college. Hee hee. If your going to bring an American created religion to Nicaragua, you might want to contextualize the content of the booklet. First off, I have never met a student that worried about ANYTHING to do with school down here. You know that ONE homework assignment per month really wears the kids down. As for extracurricular activities such as huffing glue, defacing government and religious buildings and smoking crack in their schools never appeared in this issue, but volunteering in retirement homes and clean-up campaigns do...right.
The other day during class, my counterpart pulls out this little metallic tube looking thing (looks almost like a tire gauge with the gauge pulled off) and tells me to smell it. So being the dumb American that I am, I do and I ask what that horrible smell is. She then informs me that she confiscated it from a student. When I asked what it was, she let me know that a few days ago, she caught a student smoking crack cocaine out of the pipe in the upstairs portion of my school. I guess I had no clue that crack cocaine even existed here in Nicaragua, but she schooled me on the different ways they smoke crack cocaine and then proceeded to point out the student who she caught smoking it, and the other drug dealers in my school. When I asked her why the student was not expelled, she said she didn't have a reason. She then asked me what I thought she should do with the pipe...ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I told her to go dig a hole and bury that shit. How nice would that be to get caught with a NICA-rigged crack pipe when it's not even yours to begin with.
OH youth.....they're our future you know!!!
Speaking of future, I think I am going to go to Granada this weekend, as Liz's friend is here from the states on a pilgrimage to hear our angelic voices sing karaoke. I guess our vocal reputation has made it to the states. Also I need to download some music for my community class. They told me that they want to learn the lyrics to a few songs. In just a few short days, I will be teaching them “Heal The World” by Michael Jackson, “Isla Bonita” by Madonna and a few pre-cocaine Whitney Houston songs.
Well ladies and gents, thats all I got for ya now. Until next time.
Liz and I celebrating.....something.
No comments:
Post a Comment