Mala Kalikimaka? Maybe We’ll Just Stick With Feliz Navidad

Aside from my absolute inability to wake up on time and the ever-present mountain of homework, the beginning of this week is little inspiration for a blog entry. The end, however, is slightly more interesting. Thursday, I said goodbye to my little ones on my last day of teaching.

It’s interesting to see their perspective on different cultures. When I was a kid, I absolutely adored learning words and phrases in different languages, especially for Christmas. I was always the goofy kid with a paper wreath on my head slinging burnt toast on Saint Lucia’s Day (today incidentally) and I’m still the enforcer of all things Polish on Christmas Day. Maybe it’s because I’m over-educated or maybe just because I live in the ultimate melting pot country. But these kids saw absolutely no difference between Happy Christmas or Boze Narodzenie. They said both were French. By the same token they thought Bonjour was Arabic so go figure. I don’t know if I was giving them a sensory overload with two days of world culture lessons (Geography on Tuesday – Did you know that South Africa is apparently part of Australia? Who knew?) but I made it clear that learning Hello in 14 languages was only for fun so one can only hope. It was partially a ploy for a fun, more relaxing week for them but by the same token, I honestly don’t think they learn much beyond the next province. I had to know the important points of the Kenyan economy by third grade and it takes my seventh graders ten minutes just to find Kenya on the map. It’s a different world, my friends. So that’s all for my cultural tangent of incredulity.

Anywho, after that, we decorated Christmas trees on the board and I taught them to make paper snowflakes (the lesson plan of choice for all of my friends teaching here). It was absolutely adorable since they don’t actually get snow here (only on the mountain peaks). Every picture they know of winter or Christmas has kids ice skating, snowball fights, etc. and they were SO meticulous in their designs. At the end of class, when I gave them stickers and put my address on the board, they in turn handed me all kinds of gifts from gum, a paper crown, letters and stuffed animals – all of which obviously belonged to them at some point. In the second class, a few of the girls made little speeches thanking me and saying goodbye. It was honestly one of the most touching moments of my life. I took a ridiculous number of pictures of them and walking to the bus with about a third of them mobbed around, hugging me was not the easiest way to say goodbye – the tears were fighting to come out – but it was a great sendoff.

Twenty minutes later, it was back to the real world for the written part of my Quichua exam and out to lunch for shawarmas with Jenna and Summers. Has anyone in the states even heard of shawarms? They’re these Middle Eastern chicken wraps that are to DIE for. I don’t know how I’ll survive without them. In any case, Thursday night, I had a Bible study with Bruce that we’ve been trying to organize forever and afterwards, Jenna, he and I went out to the Cuban music place where we actually got up the guts to dance. (The good Ecuadorian salsa dancers can be rather intimidating there.)