jueves, 25 de febrero de 2010

The Month of Love

So the theme of February has been love being that on Feb. 14 we celebrated Dia de Amistad y Amor. It has been a crazy month packed with all sorts of exciting and dramatic events. Our classes have been good minus a few that are crazy and hard to control. Some of the highlights of this month have been:

--the secret angel exchange for vday (we had 3 diff groups we exchanged with: the internas/sisters, alumnas de noveno grado, maestras/hermanas) it kept us busy but it was fun esp. when our angels gifted us with chocolate :)
--gina's three gigs in suchitoto; the weekend was a blast and we ate like royalty.
--our vday meal for the sisters and internas. we cooked a pasta meal and i think we could have fed like 60 ppl ha! it was a lot of work but everyone enjoyed it and it was a ton of fun
--the beginning of Cuaresma, Lent, and enjoying the journey with the sisters and internas
--having our best class of the year w/ our worst group even though they were good because sor marg. guillen was with us, we still enjoyed it!

I'm sure there are many more highlights but for now that's all I have. Happy Thursday!

sábado, 30 de enero de 2010

Officially a Temporary Salvadorena

Well it wasn't fun nor cheap but we did it folks. We are now legal and according to immigration we will have temporary residence for a year. We have to return in April for our residence card and so hopefully their "investigation" goes well and they clear us to stay. It was a dagger to our finances but what other option did we really have, we don't have the time or money to leave the country every 3 months. Enough about that for now being that Gina and I have mulled over this for days now and we are over it, ugh!
Our school year has started and we are officially teachers! Scary, isn't it? Gina and I have 7 refuerzo English classes which basically are reinforcement classes. In total we have close to 300 students! We have enjoyed it thus far and everything has gone well. There a few obstacles such as having 50 girls in a room with construction right outside the door but we have managed so far. We also are the basketball coaches and thus far have only had around 8 girls. We're ok with that. We hope to recruit some more in the upcoming weeks. As Gina wrote in her blog we've had some drama with the new internas but we're hoping that they will adapt and become comfortable in the next few weeks. The height of the drama was one night after dinner I was talking with an "antigua", an interna who has been here for years, and all of a sudden she pulls me and says vamos a ver que esta pasando. We see that the antiguas had lined up on one side and the new internas on the other and were shouting and pointing fingers. I was like uh what's going on? Ha!?! They were talking so fast, the only thing I understood was algo sobre una guerra con ella y ella. Thankfully Gina returned from dinner and helped step in to do some crowd control. We let most of them have a turn but we had to end it otherwise they would have gone all night! Not everyone was happy but the girls agreed to end this "bonding session" with the sign of peace, aren't they the greatest? At least they were communicating, right? Well wish us luck :)