Potato bugs from our insect unit!

Hello all and happy springtime (though I think I may be a little late?) – here you don’t really see the seasons change so much you know.  Well, this week has been a cloudy, drizzly, rainy, and stormy one – sometimes both literally and figuratively… I just started a new unit this week on insects, and spent the last week focusing on caterpillars and butterflies, with various books, crafts, puppet shows, acting, etc. yet the kids just couldn’t seem to get that the ugly worm and the beautiful butterfly could possibly be the same animal.  With Rodolfo’s help, I made a toilet paper tube cocoon covered in cotton, a fuzzy pompom ball caterpillar, and popsicle butterfly to put together a trick.  On Thursday, I read La Oruga Muy Hambrienta (The Very Hungry Caterpillar) and acted out the book with my pompom caterpillar eating all the food (with sound effects of course – the kids think that’s the best part) and then stuffed him in his cocoon, and the let my colorful inkblot butterfly emerge from the toilet paper tube at the end of the story.  Then the kids did it in our puppet theatre after I was done.  I still don’t know if they totally got it, but they had fun playing a “magic trick”.  But even every year as I teach it, it still just astounds me every time thinking about the process – that an animal can change so much.  I wish I was able to catch a caterpillar and show the kids the whole progression, and watch it myself.  Sometimes I wish too that I could just do the same when I’m down and jaded – roll up in a cocoon and hide for a while, then just emerge again, fresh and beautiful and renewed.  Even more I think I wish this for my kids.  That all the ugliness and negativity that’s been beaten into them for so long could just disappear and roll away like old skin, and they can just fly away into the world beautiful and untouched, seeing themselves the same way I see them, as gorgeous and amazing as they are.  Anyways, teaching this subject gets me all contemplative like, but we also made butterfly bracelets (also out of toilet paper tube – I got lots of donated tubes for my toilet paper tube zoo and have lots of leftovers) and egg carton caterpillars.  I’ve also learned to sing Baby Bumblebee, The Little Caterpillar, The Itsy Bitsy Spider, and The Ants Go Marching In, in Spanish and so we’ve been having lots of insect sing-a-longs too. 

The rain is pouring and pouring outside the window, and it makes me think of the rainstorms that happen throughout a week here, but also the silver linings that follow (or should I say rainbows?) which are the salvations that keep you going.  Like.....

When you think you can’t stand another plate of beans and rice or you will throw it across the room (as Samuel actually did last week), and then you come home to Dave’s homemade fresh salsa, after picking veggies from the NPH garden.  Or get invited over for a meal at Marijo's – Friday night was fresh squeezed passion fruit juice and a huge delicious dinner.

Or when you think you’ve had enough with the kids and they just have no respect, and then Erika stuffs her favorite toy into your hand saying “Take it, I love you, you’re the best teacher I ever had”… or the crumpled handfuls of wildflowers come, the notes and drawings, the hugs and kisses or when they come running from out of nowhere screaming your name and jump into your arms… all these little things that are what keep you here day after day.

When you think you just can’t get along with some of the people anymore…. Like when Tia Susanna yells and yells in my face and I say why are you mad at me, I just want to talk to you about disciplining the kids… and she responds “Mad?  What would make you think that I’m mad, my lovely daughter?  I’m not mad, this is just the way we talk here…”

When you think the kids just aren’t getting it at all, then they all just blow you away, like on Friday when every one of my (verbal) kids recited all the days of the week, all the months of the year, and all the classroom rules (okay some did have a chindilin of help) – but I was so excited and we hugged and cheered and celebrated so much, they just all wanted to do it.  I thought we were on such a roll, so I said and now the letters!  But when they sat with their mouths hanging open, I realized I was pushing my luck. J

When the kids seem too violent, too aggressive, like they just can’t or won’t get along, then we have Peace Circle (Friday we switched it up to a sticker ceremony) and they just plaster stickers onto one another, not themselves, and congratulate, compliment, thank, and love on each other more than I could ever hope for. 

When you miss the American conveniences, you've read every English book you can find (if only I could have read so fast in high school and college as I do here) and you just miss vegging in front of the TV, but then find more amusement laying in bed with your spouse as he gives a running commentary on the worker ants who travel in lines up and down your bedroom walls – and they actually do stop and communicate with each other I swear (which like butterflies are another amazing and interesting species if you take the time to stop and watch and study them).

When I think I just can’t stand another second of living in this international commune like house, and I think whoever thought it could work to stick a married couple in here, with all these different people, languages, belief systems, cultures - how could this ever work?  Well sometimes it just plain doesn’t.  But then there is my husband, when I am about to totally lose it (or already have), to stick me on the back of his moto and whisk me away to the beach yesterday  - even if it is raining, it is just soooo what I needed. (or like last week shopping when I thought I would have a complete meltdown in the line of the grocery store when I had all the ingredients to make chocolate dirt cups for our insect unit and there is no bar code on the very last bag of gummy worms and the salesclerk just absolutely won’t let me have it for any price – and it's not like you can run to Meijer's - sometimes I just need him to pull me away from these cultural conflicts that just make me NUTS)

When passing by the people living in the bateys seems too depressing, the problems seem too big, and there is just not enough you can do, but a dreaded early morning Saturday with Dominican Experience turns into the opportunity to fix up and paint Moreno’s (a fellow Haitian staff member) crumbling house (with a team of 28 high school kids from Montreal) and you realize it’s all worthwhile.  Our next idea is to fix up Freure’s house, another Haitian farmer, who literally lives under a couple pieces of tin, using a bucket for a bathroom and a cup of charcoal as a stove.  Not sure how we’ll make this happen, but you have to stay hopeful right?

Or like yesterday riding home on the moto, after a rainy day at the beach (and hiding out in our favorite pizzeria) when the rain finally clears, the clouds part, and gaps form in the big puffs of cotton overhead to allow perfectly isolated beams of sunlight to leak through, like something you’d only see in a movie, like All Dogs Go to Heaven or something, when at the end the main character dies but the outpour of light floods down from the sky and makes you realize it’s all gonna be okay.  And there's God, and He's telling you, yup I'm right here.

So anyways, that kinda sums it up for the week.  Okay so prayer child of the week will be Moises.  He was the one found in a basket on the steps of a church as a baby so they named him accordingly (like Moses) and he only learned quite recently to walk – which is more like a lopsided run where he falls on his face about every 10-15 steps but he sure is resilient.  I'm pretty sure I haven't picked him yet but I am pretty sure I don't have anyone committed to praying for him so let me know if you want to.  He is blind with cerebral palsy and like I said before, he is like total sunshine to work with (even if he does talk all the way through all my read-alouds).  And despite him being blind, Maria and I always get to hear from him everyday about how lovely we look. J

Okay, off to one of my two choices of public transportation – One, an overcrowded guagua (van) bumping reggaeton weaving crazily in and out of traffic – once it even did a 180 u-turning in front of oncoming traffic – you feel like you're in a movie or videogame or something.

Or the more expensive choice, the 80 cent motoconcho – the motorcycle taxis that I have seen up to 5 on at a time (limbs hanging off all directions), and where passengers will carry on back anything from newborns to kitchen appliances to full-sized ladders.  Usually I'm practically gagging while hanging onto a fat man wearing too much cologne who tries to practice his English and I don't understand a word of it.

Which choice would you go for? J  Usually I pick the latter, but only because I spend way too long writing these emails.  Hopefully someone is reading... Speaking of which, I think I may switch to blogging rather than the Monday emails, less pressure and maybe it will be a little less random than my Monday night banter?  Any thoughts?  Blog sites are blocked at the orphanage but I could try on Mondays or days off?

Well love and prayers to all – enjoy the April showers and the rainbows too!!

Love, peace, and prayers,

Kristin