Cinco de Mayo

5/5
This morning Juan and Vilma came over a few minutes before 8:00 since I wasn’t at school yet. They brought pink, red, and green paper, glitter, and red heart glitter, and had Kitxia bring green straws and others bring glitter so they could make flowers and cards for Mother’s Day. Juan showed everyone (including me) how to make the flowers, and all 10 kids made a flower and those that had time also made a card. It was kind of hectic, and I ended up getting glitter dumped all over me by one girl a couple of times, but in the end they turned out really well – check out the photos!
After class, I spent a while trying to get my internet to work – when I tried to open a page, it would only come up with a Tigo page saying telling me to choose which plan I want to buy. I called Tigo and told them I should have another month still left (I’ve had it for a week, and the little USB stick comes with a week), and the guy said to try it again in 5 minutes...a while later it still wasn’t working, so I went to the hotel to send some emails. After that, I went home and had lunch and called Tigo again...this time the lady said that it’s coming up because there’s a problem that they’re working on, and it should work later. She said to try it around 3, and if it still wasn’t working, then they were still working on it (tried it at 3:30 and it still wasn’t working, so hoping it comes back so I didn’t just pay $65 for a week’s worth of internet use!).
I spent the next hour on a walk – walked to the beach and then really far down it and back. When I was on the beach, there was a family with a HUGE fish that they’d caught. Like, HUGE. It was so fat! I also saw a guy out in a little canoe, who I think was also fishing. On my way back, I also saw several washed up jellyfish. I wished I had my camera – it was so pretty again today – sunny, with a bright blue sky, puffy white clouds, and the water was a pretty greenish-blue. I’ll have to hope it’s like that again tomorrow, and then take my camera! I went to play with Martyn’s class after they finished at 4pm again today, which was fun – they’re a good group of kids.
This evening 17 people showed up for the adult class! What made me happiest about that is that everyone from last night was there again today – plus we had three brand-new people! Today we reviewed and then went over “I like__”, “I don’t like ____”, and introduced the days of the week/weekend/today/tomorrow/yesterday/next/last, and the months of the year. At the end of class, they played a spelling game where each team gets a stack of 26 cards with A-Z, and the first team to spell the word which Martyn says aloud gets a point. I think that overall, the classes are going well – the students are eager to learn, and are a great group of people. Martyn tends to get frustrated that it’s not the exact same group of people each night, as new people come and some aren’t able to make it to every class, but I think that’s to be expected here – it’s just like with our English program kids – they’ve got a lot going on, so it’s to be expected that they won’t always be able to attend, and I think it’s always great to have new people join us, even if they have a bit of catching up to do! I think next week I will tell them that if any of them feel like they could use more help, to let me know, since I don’t work many hours and am happy to work with them outside of the two hours a week allotted for the class. Since I know a lot of them don’t have much free time, not sure what the response/turnout will be, but I figure it’s better to offer it, and if it works out, great!

PHOTOS: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/fbx/?set=a.10100359599097428.2804941.10735354&l=518b6851df