Fotos recientes/Recent photos

Calaveras de azucar

View from La Bufa in Guanajuato

Selling tickets in Plaza Civica

Ginger, with a very unfortunate lizard.

Dia de muertos: 1 y 2 de noviembre / Day of the Dead: November 1 and 2

    Hola! Hemos estado trabajando mucho para nuestros eventos del Día de Muertos en Jalpa y en La Palma. La semana pasada, en las escuelas, hablamos de las celebraciones tradicionales que han experimentado los nios, escribimos calaveras literarias y hicimos crucigramas de términos importantes de esos días especiales. Afuera de las escuelas, Catherine, Erin y yo hemos organizado las cosas para las fiestas del la organización en ambas comunidades. En Jalpa, porque no hay tanto apoyo de las familias, sólo vamos a hacer una pequeña fiesta para los alumnos, y esperemos que vengan algunas padres y madres de familia tambien. En preparación, ésta semana vamos a hacer y pintar calaveras de papel mache como un proyecto de arte que pueden mostrar a sus familias. Ya estoy preparándome para un gran desórden, especialmente en Jalpa...

    En La Palma, tenemos un evento más grande. Vendimos boletos los últimos dos fines de semana para que vengan gente de San Miguel y otros turistas a conocer el trabajo de la fundación, apoyar a los estudiantes y ayudar nuestro programa de becas. Los niños van a mostrar proyectos de arte, y mi coro va a cantar una versión de “La llorona” (vamos a ver como sale – son muy tímidos..). Unas familias van a presentar sus altares y las mamás traerán comida tradicional como el atole, el pozole, los tamales y los bolillos. Tenemos la ayuda del maravilloso guitarrista Salomón y su novia talentosa Cinthia, quien va a pintar las caras del coro como Catrinas y Catrines. Ojalá que vengan muchos; los estudiantes han trabajado mucho para hacer el evento y creo que va a ser muy chido. 

     Hey! We've been hard at work the last couple weeks planning our events for Day of the Dead in Jalpa and La Palma. For those of you that don't know, Day of the Dead is a traditional Mexican celebration honouring departed friends and family members. It is a Prehispanic custom which has mixed with Catholic European traditions to form a celebration not found anywhere else in the world. It is NOT Mexican Halloween. Day of the Dead actually takes place over two days, November 1st and 2nd - the first being a day for children and the second a larger, more general celebration. Families make altars for their loved ones, covering them in flor de cempasuchitl (marigolds, I think?), pan de muerto ("bread of the dead", a special kind of sweet bread), crosses made of salt, calaveras (candy skulls made of sugar and marzipan), and laying out offerings of all the things the dead ones loved in life... including cigarettes, tequila, or certain kinds of food. In some parts of Mexico, families may exhume and clean the bones of their deceased relatives every year. Judging from the looks on the faces of my primary class when I told them that, it doesn't happen in Guanajuato!

     This year, we are having two events: one in Jalpa, just for students and their families, and one in La Palma, for which we sell tickets in San Miguel to raise funds for our scholarship program.  This week we'll be making paper mache skulls with our students in both communities as an art project they can show off to their families and hopefully to some visitors from San Miguel or elsewhere. My middle schoolers are going to have their first choir performance, too - they'll sing "La llorona", a traditional Mexican folksong, with the accompaniment of the talented Salomon on guitar and, hopefully, I'll add some spooky keyboard effects. We'll see how it goes.... they're pretty shy. The moms in the community are bringing mountains of amazing traditional food for the guests, and we'll have four altars set up in the front yard by various families. I think it'll be a really special, moving event, and I hope lots of people come because our students have worked hard to prepare for this. 

The ex-hacienda, now an uber-fancy exclusive hotel for the super rich, in Jalpa

Iron and Wine

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a bag of liquor with a lime freezie attached!

The Black Keys

Laying down the law

     Let's have a bit of background first... I went straight from work on Thursday night to Mexico City, where I stayed for a night before going to Cuernavaca for a concert by Los amigos invisibles (check them out! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_elMlX4CAtY). I returned to el D.F. early Saturday morning and spent the next two days and nights at the incredible but exhausting Corona Capital music festival -  90,000 hipsters and counting. On Sunday night, I went straight from the festival grounds to the bus station and spent the night on a bus and several hours on a bench in the Queretaro bus station, finally arriving home in San Miguel at 9 a.m., just in time to catch a couple hours of sleep before work. It was an amazing, stellar weekend but I was (and still am) definitely a little worse for wear, with a killer headache, a cold, and sleep deprivation. So imagine my delight when, at the end of a tough class in Jalpa, our newest students jam the door shut with sticks and lock us in the building! Thanks to the assistance of our mischievous but ultimately sweet student Jovani and our trusty driver Richard, we were finally able to escape with most of our dignity but very little of our patience intact. 

     Jalpa is a tough class... the kids are a little wild, and there is very little in the way of family and community support. It's unfortunate, because we have some difficult but sweet kids who really want to learn, but whose classes are constantly interrupted by more disruptive students. After a hellish class on Wednesday, Erin and I decided today to lay down the law, going over the rules the students created themselves, separating a particularly chatty group of girls with a lot of attitude, and refusing entry to students whose behaviour was violent or exceptionally disruptive. Evidently, they didn't like it. Still, there were bright spots, like the always-tough Manuel, who, after letting off some steam on the soccer field, came to apologize to us for his behaviour before class. There was also the noisy and energetic Adrian, who asked me if we could have English class again soon - it's nice to know that in between driving us crazy, some of these kids really want to be there. 

     Anyways, we're not giving up. Although Richard, a volunteer driver for five years, says that it can't be done, we're going to turn this class around in no time. And I'm going to get a free dinner out of it too when he loses our bet. 

Fotos recientes...

At the bullfight - the female matador

Classroom in La Palma

The schoolyard - I'm already in trouble with the boys for kicking the soccer ball into a cactus.

Mojigangas; one of San Miguel's endless parades

Families watching the bullfights from their roof.

Sobrevivimos! We made it!

     Well, it's the end of week one in the classrooms and we are still alive. And unlike my first week of teaching in Colombia, I wasn't even driven to tears once! Things actually went pretty well, and my classes seem like they're full of really great kids. While there are two teachers, and we both work in every class, I plan and teach the morning primary and middle-school classes in la Palma, while Erin has the (considerably more rowdy) afternoon primary class in La Palma and the primary class in Jalpa. 

     My primary class contains seven very shy students between the ages of 8 and 12, although we expect seven or eight more students from Tierra Blanca, a nearby pueblito, to trickle in next week. This week we worked on basic introductory things like rule- and goal-setting, icebreakers, and getting a sense of the kids' levels of literacy in Spanish and English. I think this is going to be a good group. They're definitely a lot calmer than their afternoon counterparts, none of whom embody even the slightest bit of shyness. Two classes and it's already easy to identify a gossipy clique of fifth-grade girls and Juan Pablo, the 9-year-old holy menace ironically named for the Pope. 

     The middle-schoolers are pretty typical middle-schoolers; they're expert eye-rollers with impressive under-the-table texting abilities. They're a nice bunch of teenagers, though, and I think that once they come out of their shells a bit more we'll have a lot of fun. Yesterday was our first music class and I would actually consider it a success! We discussed different types of music and why music education matters, and by the end of the class we even had some pretty well-developed definitions of terms like tone, rhythm, and beat. We did some singing, which was mainly a lot of giggling, and then we brainstormed song ideas for the Christmas concert. Since I let every group of students generate a list of possible songs, I have a pretty bizarre weekend of music ahead of me. I'm definitely going to be using my executive power to veto Justin Bieber and One Direction. Still, it was great to see the students get excited about music. Even the boys were singing! 

     We're all pretty exhausted right about now; we've worked a lot this week and things are only going to get busier from here, especially with the Dia de los Muertos events creeping up on us and trying to plan for the Christmas Concert. I'm looking forward to a weekend of cool stuff at the Cervantino festival with my coworker Catherine and learning to play my donated electric guitar with the lovely and talented Salomon and Cinthia tonight. They always have tequila, too.