misery

I am riddled with parasites.

Or at least it feels that way. My hair is itchy, and I{m convinced I{ve caught nits from the children at the orphanage. Worse than that though, I wake up every morning covered in horrible bites all over my body. I am completely baffled as to what it could be, and have become an obsessive, scrutinising my bed and all blankets carefully on a daily basis, hoping to catch sight of a flea or other animal that might be causing my misery. T, of course, has no discomfort, and wakes every morning with an unblemished body. #snarls#.

This morning, in desperation, I ditched my environmental principles, crawled into the chemists shop and begged them to help me. The girl behind the counter told me cheerily that my bed is probably full of fleas, small ones, too small to see. Then she sold me a big can of spray. I don{t even want to think about what damage I have done to
a) the environment
b) my bedding
c) my lungs and
d) my life expectancy by spraying this stuff, and if I don{t wake up bite free tomorrow....

Apologies for the long delay. I haven{t been able to get onto this website for some reason, maybe there are just too many people spending their lives typing blogs! Things are hotting up for christmas now. There are tacky carols on the radio, and I{ve even spied an enormous inflatable santa claus on the outside of someone{s house (I honestly thought I had left that sort of thing behind in the UK!!!!). I still can{t get the hang of it being Christmas though. I mean, the weather is gorgeous. It{s so hot! It can{t be christmas, it{s wrong. The people here have never seen snow, which makes it all the more strange that so many of the decorations I{ve seen feature snowmen!

T and I went to a talk at our spanish school on Wednesday afternoon. It was given by my teacher, who is a really cool woman - I like and respect her very much. She only teaches spanish at the language school in November and December because the rest of the year she is a teacher at a village school up in the hills. The lecture was about the rural education system in Guatemala - it was a real eye opener.

Apparently, most of the schools in the cities are private ones, where rich ladinos (people of spanish descent) send their children. In the rural, indigeonous areas, education is provided by the government, with disasterous consequences.

Olga outlined the 4 principal problems that she sees as a teacher in a rural school. The first is that the children are undernourished. They come to school without having eaten much, if anything. The result is a lack of concentration, and an inability to recall any information. After a national strike by all the teachers in rural Guatemala, the government agreed to provide a breakfast for the children. Now they receive a small biscuit and a glass of juice. Frequently supply doesn{t meet demand, and when it does, it hardly constitutes a good breakfast. For the children of many families, this meal is the sole incentive for them to attend school.

The second problem is a shortage of teachers. This isn{t because there aren{t enough teachers in Guatemala, but rather that money for the teachers salaries mysteriously disappears before the schools receive it. In a school with 110 pupils and 6 classes, salaries for only 3 teachers have been received, instead of 6. Olga is faced with teaching 3 different classes at one time.

Thirdly, Olga outlined the shortage of materials. The government has recently boasted that all schools are fully equipped with the textbooks, pens, pencils, notebooks etc that they need. Olga{s school has 3 textbooks between 30 students, and no pens, pencils or notepaper. The government propoganda has resulted in bad relations between the teachers and the parents, who assume that the teachers must be stealing the text books, or the money for them. The reality is that the money for these items is never received.

The fourth problem is concerns the structure of the families in rural Guatemala. Their source of income is from agriculture, and by a similar system of exploitation that operates in the UK with supermarkets, the farmers receive very little for their produce, which is in turn sold on at a much higher price. Therefore, it{s really important to the families to have "all hands on deck" to work. This results in children dropping out of school. Apart from working on farmes, many of the children, together with the men of the families go to the USA to work illegally and send home wages. Paltry wages in the USA are less paltry here due to the exchange rate, and so this is considered to be a viable option for the struggling families here. In Palistina, the village where Olga teaches, there are only 4 men. All the others are in the USA. Larger families in the rural areas mean increased pressure on resources. One of the women of the village has 21 children to feed. Inbreeding within the village is also a problem, and virtually the whole village is related. Olga fears that this contributes even further to the lack of achievement in school.

Trevor and I are hoping to help Olga at the school in January when the term starts, and also to set up a small fund to help pay for text books. It would only cost 400 pounds to kit the whole school out with all the textbooks needed. Tragically, money for this sort of thing has already been given through government aid, but has subsequently been lost, or used for other purposes outside of the education system.