Today is Lesbia's birthday.
Lesbia is a friend that I made last summer when I was living in Granada. Every morning I walked 30 minutes to a school where Lesbia taught English, and helped her with her class. This was not a public school--although public schools in Nicaragua are "free," kids still have to buy uniforms and school supplies, and many can't afford those things. So a group of people in a particularly poor neighborhood started their own school called Carita Feliz (little happy face), with funding from some rich guy in the Netherlands. It's still a pretty modest enterprise, with classes taking place at long picnic tables under aluminum awnings surrounding a small courtyard with a few struggling plants. When it rains (daily), it's hard to hear anything over the sound of rain pounding on the awnings. But kids show up day after day, and while the classes aren't as efficient as I imagine those in public schools would be, the kids do manage to learn.
Lesbia's English class moved at a leisurely pace. After all, she'd only been studying the language for a few months herself. Most days, she would write vocabulary words on the chalkboard, guide her students in pronunciation, and play matching games with English and Spanish words. The kids were eager for tasks to complete. They would pass me their notebooks and tell me to write down questions for them to answer (What do you eat for dinner? What is your favorite color?). Then they would look up words in my dictionary and copy them down, with amusing transcription errors (Samuel wrote that he ate "rice and bears" for dinner). If they were getting restless, we would do things that they considered more fun, like comparing the noises that animals make in Nicaragua with those that they make in the U.S. (woof woof vs. guau guau, cockadoodledoo vs. kikiriki). Or I would draw pictures of objects in their notebooks and they would use the dictionary to label the pictures with English words.
One day two little girls, sisters, came into Carita Feliz. They looked terrified, so I invited them to sit at the English class's table (which was closest to the entrance). They were so shy that they couldn't raise their voices to a level that I could understand. The other students in the class interrogated them and told me that they were 7 and 9 years old, and were at a first grade level. They couldn't read. There was another class going on for kids learning to read, but the girls were scared to go to it (the English class, with me and Lesbia, had a 1:5 teacher:student ratio, while the other class had one teacher for about 20 kids). So they stayed. At first, I thought maybe they could learn English words verbally, but since they were too shy to repeat any words that I said, that didn't work. I realized that they probably needed to learn to read before taking on another language, so we started with the alphabet. I've never learned how to teach, and I felt bad just having them copy pages of letters. So we played games. I would use my finger to write a letter on their backs, and they would have to tell me what letter it was. This got lots of smiles, and they seemed to remember the letters better. By the time I left Granada, the older sister was sounding out consonants paired with vowels, and the younger was still working on the alphabet.
A few days after I left Nicaragua, I got an email from Lesbia saying that she had lost her job. This was devastating, because unemployment is so high that it was unlikely she could find work anywhere else. Although the teaching job only paid $40 a month, that money meant Lesbia could take English classes and attend beauty school. It's been a year now since she's had a job. I got an email a few weeks ago with great news: she was at a bar and ran into the owner of Carita Feliz. He recognized her and they had a beer and conversed in English. He was impressed and... she got her job back! She's supposed to start at Carita Feliz in early August. I'm so unbelievably happy for her.
Lesbia is a friend that I made last summer when I was living in Granada. Every morning I walked 30 minutes to a school where Lesbia taught English, and helped her with her class. This was not a public school--although public schools in Nicaragua are "free," kids still have to buy uniforms and school supplies, and many can't afford those things. So a group of people in a particularly poor neighborhood started their own school called Carita Feliz (little happy face), with funding from some rich guy in the Netherlands. It's still a pretty modest enterprise, with classes taking place at long picnic tables under aluminum awnings surrounding a small courtyard with a few struggling plants. When it rains (daily), it's hard to hear anything over the sound of rain pounding on the awnings. But kids show up day after day, and while the classes aren't as efficient as I imagine those in public schools would be, the kids do manage to learn.
Lesbia's English class moved at a leisurely pace. After all, she'd only been studying the language for a few months herself. Most days, she would write vocabulary words on the chalkboard, guide her students in pronunciation, and play matching games with English and Spanish words. The kids were eager for tasks to complete. They would pass me their notebooks and tell me to write down questions for them to answer (What do you eat for dinner? What is your favorite color?). Then they would look up words in my dictionary and copy them down, with amusing transcription errors (Samuel wrote that he ate "rice and bears" for dinner). If they were getting restless, we would do things that they considered more fun, like comparing the noises that animals make in Nicaragua with those that they make in the U.S. (woof woof vs. guau guau, cockadoodledoo vs. kikiriki). Or I would draw pictures of objects in their notebooks and they would use the dictionary to label the pictures with English words.
One day two little girls, sisters, came into Carita Feliz. They looked terrified, so I invited them to sit at the English class's table (which was closest to the entrance). They were so shy that they couldn't raise their voices to a level that I could understand. The other students in the class interrogated them and told me that they were 7 and 9 years old, and were at a first grade level. They couldn't read. There was another class going on for kids learning to read, but the girls were scared to go to it (the English class, with me and Lesbia, had a 1:5 teacher:student ratio, while the other class had one teacher for about 20 kids). So they stayed. At first, I thought maybe they could learn English words verbally, but since they were too shy to repeat any words that I said, that didn't work. I realized that they probably needed to learn to read before taking on another language, so we started with the alphabet. I've never learned how to teach, and I felt bad just having them copy pages of letters. So we played games. I would use my finger to write a letter on their backs, and they would have to tell me what letter it was. This got lots of smiles, and they seemed to remember the letters better. By the time I left Granada, the older sister was sounding out consonants paired with vowels, and the younger was still working on the alphabet.
A few days after I left Nicaragua, I got an email from Lesbia saying that she had lost her job. This was devastating, because unemployment is so high that it was unlikely she could find work anywhere else. Although the teaching job only paid $40 a month, that money meant Lesbia could take English classes and attend beauty school. It's been a year now since she's had a job. I got an email a few weeks ago with great news: she was at a bar and ran into the owner of Carita Feliz. He recognized her and they had a beer and conversed in English. He was impressed and... she got her job back! She's supposed to start at Carita Feliz in early August. I'm so unbelievably happy for her.
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