another exciting Saturday night in Dolores...

Here´s a pic of me and my #1 chica, Iris. She doesn´t look very happy, it´s true, but that´s cause we just finished a round of English homework.

She wanted me to help her transcribe a song in English because here, kids in high school can choose to do a song-dance routine (in English) instead of taking their midterm English exam! The other day I got to go observe a class where this was happening...it was really bizzare. The kids from first-fifth year all divide up into teams of about 5 and pick a song, choose costumes, and correograph it (don´t know how to spell that) , and perform it for a grade in front of the whole class. The winning teams from each of the grades perform against eachother, and then the winning teams from all of the high schools in the department perform against eachother, and it eventually turns into a national competition. CRAZY. Anyway, I think my fellow gringos and I have been invited to judge the final competition between the grades in the high school here. The hardest part is trying not to laugh...One of the teams did ´we like to party´by the venga boys, except for when they sung it it sounded like they were saying ´we look sporty´...obviously the entire meaning of the song was lost. Other teams chose songs like ´man i feel like a woman´by shania twain, and other pop-rap songs by people like nelly and ashanti. verrrrry entertaining.

Today we had our site fair in Diriamba (which is actually a future site for one of the trainees in my group!). My top picks were Leon, Leon... Matagalpa, Matagalpa... and San Rafael del Sur, Managua. They are all very different from eachother. Leon, Leon is a huge college town...lots and lots of students come from all over to study there...the architecture is beautiful...there are some beaches relatively nearby...lots of rich culture...some tourism...but it is HOT HOT HOT. Matagalpa, Matagalpa is a little bit cooler, and a really big city. I´d be working with a big school with lots of counterparts. The really cool thing about this site is that it is a big coffee center (real coffee, not the instant kind), and people work there as coffee tasters. These people really want to learn English as it relates to describing and marketing coffee, and I feel like I´d be pretty good at that (cough cough, Taylor Books 4 life, cough cough). The third site is San Rafael del Sur, which is a beach town. I´m not sure if it has a port or not, but it´s hot, and has ocean. And opportunities to work with youth. They also just recently discovered oil there, so that means lots of money, resources, and opportunity for speaking English in the near future (SUSTAINABILITY!!).

There are at least 15 different other sites though...I´m making a conscious decision not to be upset if PC doesn´t put me in any of my top 3...it´s bound to happen... It´s really hard to say that you have a preference about where you want to spend the next 2 years of your life when you´ve never been to any of the places you get to choose from. But, I´ll keep you guys posted - we find out next Friday afternoon.

Well, I guess I´ll go sit in the rocking chair outside my house.

Elizabeth