Teaching in La Selva

I´m sitting in an internet cafe, nicely exhausted after a day (or to be strictly correct, a morning) ´s work. Since T and I have been back from Costa Rica, we have been working for 2 days a week at a rural primary school. It's fab! Our working day starts really early, as we have to get up at about quarter to 5, and to be at the house of one of the teachers by half past 5. From there it´s an eerie (is that how you spell it?) walk through the deserted street of Xela to the terminal Minerva bus station. This bus station is like nothing I have ever seen before, and I may have mentioned it before here. It doesn´t get light until about 10 past 6, and so we approach in the dark. There are huge piles of rubbish everywhere, many of which are on fire as people gather around for warmth. I'm never quite sure exactly who these people are. Perhaps they are the vendors that crowd around the buses as they pull in and out, selling things like newspapers, crisps, cold drinks and cooked food. Perhaps they are the busdrivers waiting to go on shift, or perhaps they are homeless people. I honestly don't know. In the dark it's difficult to tell. Our bus leaves at 10 past 6. There's only one bus up to the village of La Selva in the morning, and it's operated by the same driver and conductor every day, which is nice. There are also the same people on the bus every day, and we greet one another, peering bleary-eyed through the gloom. The first hour of the bus journey is comfy enough, and sometimes I manage to doze off as the sun climbs higher in the sky, and melts the frost on the ground. Once we reach the town of Palestina, the bus turns off onto a dirt road, and begins a slightly precarious ascent into the mountains where the village of La Selva nestles. We climb for about 45 minutes, turning up enormous clouds of dust. The country is so dry and parched here. I can almost hear the ground crying out for water. Everything is dusty brown, with hardly any green anywhere. It's really quite strange. A number of older people on the bus wear surgical masks to try and keep the dust out of their noses, and I think I might invest in one too! There are also a number of forest fires ranging in the Quetzaltenango region. None of them are close enough to Xela or La Selva for me to have actually seen one, but I have seen and read about them in the local paper. It seems that there is a real problem in fighting the fires. I guess for a lack of firefighting equipment like planes, and of course the lack of water. All of the rivers are dry. Anyway, at about quarter to 8 we are deposited outside the school gates in La Selva. The school was built by a charity called Inter Vida, which is a Spanish charity building schools all over Guatemala. Almost every rural school I have seen has an Inter Vida sign outside, and is painted is the custom Inter Vida blue and yellow. The school is nice enough. A brick building with three classrooms and an office. For more info about what InterVida does, visit http://www.intervidausa.org/ T and I help Olga teaching grades 4, 5, and 6. Olga usually teaches the 3 grades at once, with all the challenges that entails! T and I help with reading, maths, and science, and I teach them some english too. This experience at times makes me want to become a prinary school teacher, but then I remember that british children are evil, and it´s only Guatemalan kids that are this lovely, and well behaved, and enjoy being at school. I love their faces when I´m teaching them some English words, and they are all shouting them back to me, at the tops of their voices!! They are #so# lovely! School starts at around half 8, and continues until break at half past 10. At 11 it´s back into the classroom until half past 12. In the afternoon the children go back home and work with their parents, who are predominantly farmers. Today, when we tumbled off the bus, there was a man waiting outside the school gates with a pick up truck containing some boxes. These were the government supplies that Olga had told me about. The government is supposed to provide a snack to all school children, many of whom are poorly nourished, and don´t eat much in the morning. The delivery containing boxes of wafer biscuits and cornflakes. Apparently this delivery is received approximately once every 3 months, although the teachers complain that the supplies are insufficient to last that long. Today was certainly the first time I had seen any food provided by the school. The teachers complain that the government is corrupt and is stealing the funding for the school and using it for other purposes. I also wonder whether food gets lost along other parts of the supply chain. Who obtains the food? who distributes it? Who drives it to Xela? Who delivers it to each of the individual schools? With the poverty as it is here, what is the possibility of a little food being taken here and there to feed their own families? Last week, we were thrown in at the deep end, when Olga had to take one of the children home, and left us to teach the class for an hour and a half. It was kill or cure, but thankfully we survived (having planned an english and a science lesson - phew!!!). Who would have thought that I would be standing up in front of three classes of children, and teaching them in Spanish??? Bad Spanish, but Spanish nevertheless, I am quite chuffed! :o)