Site Struggles

Work here in site has been incredibly tough for some of the reasons that I had anticipated before arriving in-country, but didn’t really know the degree of what tough meant. I’ve been having some successful class sessions with my counterpart, Aura Estella, in the public school. The students are working on their business plans for the local competition here in Rivas on September 5th. I have to say that most of the students here can’t see the value of the La Empresa Creativa course thus far, but part of that is their unwillingness to put effort into learning the concepts. Aura Estella has been able to motivate this group of students to produce their products at the least, which can’t be said for the group from last year. Business groups will be judged on the creativity of their product, business plan, and best presentation. Some of the products/services have been throw pillows, pillow cases, yarn boxes, balloon gram cards, and beauty services (manicure/pedicure/hair straightening). These have all been done before and the students aren’t exactly being creative. When I did my volunteer visit in Estelí, I had already seen these products being created and the quality wasn’t much better either. Aura Estella and I are spending our time in class working with individual groups and I’ve also set blocks of time aside on Wednesday and Friday mornings in the library for groups to ask questions or have me look at their business plans. We’re also looking to solicit funds from the community to a faire-style competition for the students in the auditorium. Pretty much having a counterpart who is willing to learn and is motivated makes a huge difference. I can’t say the same for my other counterpart at the private school, Flor. She has some serious organization skills and can’t remember which class she needs to teach, doesn’t start on time, and goes off-topic during class. I had one planning session with her and we had discussed putting some of the material on poster paper and having students interact my reading a portion and then sharing with each other what it meant. We had agreed that she’d do 2 sheets covering a portion she felt comfortable explaining, and I’d do 4, going over the process of the competition for next year and why the course is useful. I showed up 20 minutes early to class just to make sure we had time to go over material if either of us had doubts, and she ended up showing up 10 minutes late, asking me which class she needed to teach. I am really hoping that this will be a one time occurrence but by the way the students act about punctuality, something tells me that this is a regular thing. She also doesn’t write material on the board such as key terms, etc so the students walk out of class with either a blank page or a page of doodling from boredom. This will definitely be part of my classroom analysis report that we’ll have to go over and hopefully work on.

Opportunity International has been slow to get moving here and the project specialist hasn’t showed up here in site for a week now so I’ve been reading literature on the organization. I can’t tell if this project is going to take a month or a year to get going but in the meantime, I’ve had 2 meetings with Casa de Mujer to figure out if we can offer a business concepts class to a group of women who have some knowledge of business and a group of youth who might not have any. They wanted me to start a class right away but an analysis of a group’s ability and knowledge is key to the success of the course so we’re trying to figure that out first. I hope that we can come together on our short term and long term visions for Rivas and take pride in those little successes.

The people/family I am staying with during these initial 6 weeks are interesting. They’ve got their rhythm of how they live their lives and I definitely feel like I’m interrupting it so I spend as little time in the house as possible. I am still looking for a place to rent but there aren’t a lot of options here so I’ll have to discuss the situation with my APCD when I see her in Managua tomorrow.

I have an awesome El Salvadorian family that I hang out with pretty much everyday when I eat my meals. Edwin, Susana, Kevin, and I just went to the Mercado (open air market) to get some used bikes yesterday. I now have a mode of transport around the city.