Preamble Ramble. March 22, 2010:
What do the following have in common: Weeds in the garden, stacks of ungraded papers, trees to prune, and tales to be told? Well, other than all sharing space on my interminable to-do list, they all get taller as time goes by! (except for the stories, which I always pass on with pin-point accuracy rooted in reality down to the last nitty-gritty detail!) Actually, as I think about it, perhaps that is my main problem in life right now, summed up in one word: detail! As a teacher, you can’t ignore the details, but you have to learn to pick and choose your battles. For those of you who know me, I’ve never been good at picking much of anything (other than my nose, and certain kinds of fruit) so I invariably end up letting the battles pick me, which as some of you may know, is a good way to get yourself killed.
For example, I was recently elected to be the director of campus maintenance, something I could easily allow to turn into a full-time job. I have two student workers right now, and I’ve kept them busy organizing and cleaning the tool shed, repairing broken tools, and taking inventory, as well as helping me with the mowing. I’m also suddenly receiving requests to fix people’s light switches and unplug everyone’s sink. Every work period (morning and afternoon) I have a bevy of students that gets sent to me for work assignments, and it is real easy to get bogged down walking them through the details of each job I want done. But you can’t over-explain the work assignments I’ve been finding out. I assigned some girls to level a recently cleared area so that it can be cut with the push mower later on, and I failed to mention that they should not fill the hole with the valves that control the water system for the staff duplex. (Which, by the way, was quite some distance from the area I asked them to level! They probably heard the word “holes” and went looking for holes to fill!)
A slip of the tongue in class two weeks ago cost me hours of time this week. The literature class that I teach is for both juniors and seniors, and I attempt to tailor assignments to each level. We meet for class only once a week (officially), but I have to plan and explain enough homework to keep them busy until the next Thursday. On Mondays I supervise a two-hour guided-study session where I can answer questions and give individual help. The theory behind this setup is to encourage self-motivated, independent learning and responsible time-management in the students.
Anyway, in my brilliance, I decided to design my class with some built in weekly homework including journaling, reading, and vocabulary building. Unfortunately, as I was assigning the number of pages the students were to journal, I used the word hoja instead of página.. A página is your normal, regular page. An hoja on the other hand is the entire paper, both front and back. So when I gave the seniors five hojas and the juniors four, you can imagine their response. But students always complain, I know that. And I’ve learned I shouldn’t change my mind on account of a few complaints, especially on the first day of class! You make a decision and you stick to it, otherwise those rascals will run you and your classroom! So they wrote. Eleven seniors and eleven juniors. Twenty-two notebooks. Ninety-nine hojas. One-hundred-ninety-eight pages.
“I don’t have to read all of these completely” I told myself. “I’ll just read a page or two of each, make a few corrections and comments, and move on.”
An hour later I had wallowed through one and a half notebooks. But boy, did those kids write! A few of them really surprised me and went all-out. At the beginning of class we had sung the hymn “Santa Biblia,” followed by a mini-lecture on the importance of thinking about the lyrics and a phrase-by-phrase analysis of the first verse. One of my senior boys responded with ten pages of journal analyzing and explaining the lyrics of one of his favorite hymns one line at a time, interspersed with personal experiences, stories, and commentary. It was one of the finest pieces of work I’ve seen in a high school literature class, not only because of the creativity and relatively error-free syntax, but also because of the spiritual maturity and depth. Another student had several short, creative essays on everything from current politics and how Bolivia fits into the One World Order, to chive, a typical Bolivian seasoning made from yucca.
Of course, not every journal was such a joy to read, but they were good diagnostic material, and I’ve compiled a list of things we need to work on, one of which is the everlasting sentence. Most students are quite adept at splicing a dozen circles’-worth of tangents into one very fierce string of unorganized thoughts with enough barbs to hang you up with your reading comprehension until the cows come home.
So between grading journals, teaching class, giving piano lessons, and directing campus maintenance, I’ve been keeping occupied. I’ve been meaning to update you all with one of these mass emails for the last four weeks now. If you thought my emails were long before, I apologize. (I did take out the section about the mission congress in Colombia, because I haven’t had time to finish writing it yet) Hey, at least you don’t have to read 22 of these! I still have three of last week’s journals waiting for me.
The following takes place between March 2, 2010 and March 22, 2010. (Sorry Mr. Bauer :).
March 2, 2010
School starts in eight days, and we are feverishly trying to complete the girl’s dormitory and the classroom buildings, buy more desks, tables, and chairs, clean up campus, and do the initial paperwork, including the annual curriculum plans that must be submitted to the government. More students have arrived in the past two weeks, and its good to have the extra help with the construction and with reclaiming campus from the jungle. A couple weeks ago Mr. Cornelio and the kids harvested the first stage of the rice we planted last fall, and in between thunderstorms, the girls dry out the kernels on tarps while the boys help pour the floor of the girls dorm underneath more tarps, thunderstorms or no. (We pour with wheel-barrows, just to clarify, and advance at about 2 rooms a day.)
Today I am in town buying diesel for the generator (about $2.44/gallon), checking prices on sinks, and looking for two-inch schedule 40 PVC pipe for the girl’s dorm bathroom. Unfortunately it is nowhere to be found, so it looks like a trip to Brasil may be in the works, otherwise we’ll have to order the pipe from Santa Cruz, unless we decide to just go with the cheap thin stuff. The school truck is out of commission for a while with some kind of electrical ailment, so getting supplies to the school is a bit more complicated. Thankfully one of the brothers from the church has hauled a couple of loads for us with his truck. Other than that, we’re stuck hitch-hiking or taking the busses.
March 3, 2010
On my way back from town yesterday, I was waiting at the parada de los pobres for the bus, when a big square of a man offered me a ride on an equally square truck, loaded with cargo well above the cabin. Offering rides is normal here, and everyone charges five Bolivianos (same as the bus) for the thirty kilometers out to the school. I wasn’t sure how he planned to secure my 55 liter tank of diesel, but as the bus was another 15-20 minute wait and might not even be willing to take my fuel, I decided to go for it.
“Your tank will ride here, and you sit here” he said, indicating a solitary tire, the only article visible above the tarp-covered mountain of cargo. I sat on the tire with the diesel cradled between my knees. We took off, and it didn’t take me very long to realize that I was in for a wild ride. Mr. Square was a Jehu, but even worse, his method of avoiding the potholes was a jerky swerve at the last possible second. He reminded me of a kid fresh of the merry-go-round. Is he trying to throw me off of here? I wondered. I felt rather like a mounted officer on the front lines, or a solitary camper trying to hold down the tent in a bad storm. I could envision having to ditch the diesel to avoid toppling to my doom. Fortunately, there were some cargo straps to cling to, and the inertia of 55 liters also worked to my favor, and we soon passed the worst section of road and arrived at la tranca. While we waited for the officer on duty to lift the gate for us, another truck pulled up beside us, and the driver offered me a ride.
“That would be great!” I said.
“Hold on just a minute, and I’ll help you move your tank to my truck” he said.
“NO way!” it was Mr. Square. For some reason, he was adamant that I ride with
him.
“Nothing against you,” I said. “I’m just nervous about riding up here with no way to secure all this diesel. It almost fell off back there!”
“Don’t worry!” he said. “The road is good from here on, and I’ll drive slow.”
The other driver had backed off at this point, and since I had no one to help me move the tank to the other truck, I stayed put. As we started down the road, I realized that “slow” for Mr. Square was more like the fast end of normal, and I couldn’t help but wonder if his driving reflected an insecurity about his likely pedestrian pace. Thanks to God, we arrived at the entrance of the school driveway without incident.
So, in other news, I’ve been upgraded to a different house this school year, complete with a shower and flush toilet, the latter of which leaked at the base until I reset it this morning. That and a few dozen million other projects are crying out for attention and I wonder if I will ever have time to prepare for my classes: literature 3 and 4, voice choir, and piano lessons. And yet here I sit writing you this update…
I also want to start a book-selling program (also known as colporteuring) for students who are interested, I just don’t know where I’ll find the books I want. I did find out I can get some nine-volume sets that include Steps to Christ, Ministry of Healing, Counsels on Stewardship, and the Conflict of the Ages series, all for 100 bolivianos, or about $14.00, but they all have the same cover design, not exactly ideal for selling door-to-door. The container in the States that we’ve been planning to bring down here has boxes of donated Spirit of Prophecy books, but it will cost thousands of dollars to ship, and who knows when that will happen. I guess God does, and He has his timing. I’d like to coordinate with the churches in Guayara, but the pastor there is resistant to anything outside of the official church program, and so Keila tells me that if I start a colporteur program I’ll probably have better support from the local pastor if I invent another name for it. Funny how a difference in a name can change a person’s mind without changing much of anything else at all.
March 4, 2010
Turns out to be a good thing I went to town Tuesday and even better that I came back the same day. Yesterday all the bus companies started striking. They’ve blocked the road into town and won’t let any vehicles go in or out. It seems the government just passed a law that any driver of public transportation who is pulled over and found to be under the influence will be jailed, have his vehicle impounded and his license suspended for life. In retaliation, all the bus syndicates have declared a national huelga. Ruan got into town yesterday by taking some back roads on his dirt bike, and he says the men at the tranca are guarding the road with rifles and drinking their cervezas as they please.
March 7, 2010
The roof sheeting from Santa Cruz still hasn’t arrived for the Girl’s dorm, but it should be here any day. Raul, one of our 3rd-year boys from La Paz said the girls should be happy about their incomplete habitations — they’re going to have a million-star hotel! The girls aren’t laughing.
I’m not either, as we hike the two kilometers out to the portable asadero, pushing a wheelbarrow full of tanks of gasoline and water, a sharpening kit, block and tackle, and machetes. My socks are slipping with every step, farther into the toes of my rubber boots where they chafe against the blisters I won on this same hike last Friday. I’m on my way to move another downed log and set up the saw to cut more 2x2’s for the pearling on the roof of the girl’s dorm. The world’s a sauna, and I think the portable sawmill should rather be called an asandero, because I’m asando(roasting) after a mere 15-minute walk, and it’s still early. The sun flashes through the foliage like gold eyeteeth, and I trudge through a corridor of steaming green that sweats just from the simple exertion of feeding itself. Like the sun, the grasses show their teeth and punish my skin as I brush against the orilla. This is my third day in the last four of working with the sawmill, and my forearms are red and cut like the future stakes that I know are grazing out here somewhere in this madness of snarled pasture, returning to its natural state only months after its baptism by fire.
When we arrive at the downed log via the path I had the kids blaze with their machetes, it takes nearly the whole morning just to move it into position using the block and tackle and a tripod of hardwood four by fours. The next step is to set up the saw. The frame is light, and assembles quickly, but it takes the rest of the morning to get everything square. We return to the school for a hot lunch of steaming rice and beans, refill our water bottles, and hike back out to the work site. The kids are really slowing down by this point. One boy in particular has a very rotten attitude about today’s work requirements...(to be continued)
March 9, 2010
As soon as I grabbed it I knew there was something drastically wrong. My tortilla was crusty! You know, the kind that crack when you fold them, or shatter when you try to wrap your burrito. I don’t want this tortilla, I want a nice soft one that I can fill with my beans and salad! I told myself. But it was too late. I had the tortilla in hand, and I would eat it, si o si, as I well knew from childhood programming.
And then came a brilliant epiphany: this tortilla was a lot like the leftover piecrust mom used to bake with sugar and cinnamon! No sooner thought than said, my idea gave rise to an invitation from Tara to retrieve the missing ingredients. (We were eating our takeouts from the cafeteria at Ruan and Tara’s house, as we often do.) So, I went to the cupboard, fully expecting to soon indulge myself with a creative, impromptu pastry. The cinnamon was an easy find, but alas, the sugar was another whole rummage- around.
“Where would I find the sugar?” I had quickly tired of scanning the shelves of various containers and bolsas of seasoning, flour, and other varying culinary supplies.
“In the plastic box there on the left” Tara informed me.
The plastic box on the left however, was full of medio-opaque bolsas, forcing me to read the labels in order to ascertain the contents. Flour, baking soda, milk powder, unknown substance: I quickly ran out of shelf space to place the baggies as I removed them from the box, so I replaced them all in the box, and took the whole mess to one end of the table, right next to a stack of books and papers. Bad mistake. As I lifted one of the bags, another bag fell against the side of the box, poofing milk powder all over the papers and books. I lifted the offending bag to refold the open end and clip it more securely when Lyli interrupted “Kody, look out! It’s still spilling!”
Sure enough, some more milk powder caught in the wrinkles at the folded end of the bag were cascading into the plastic box. After finally subduing the rogue milk-bag, I went to dump the loose powder out of the box.
“Just put it in the cat’s dish” Tara suggested. “She likes it.”
I approached Marmite’s bowl on the floor next to the stove and bent down to empty the milk powder. Thwack! I had failed to consider the overhead cabinets that extend out past the stove and over the animal’s dishes, and my head rebounded from the bottom cupboard door, like a ping-pong ball according to Tara, although I contest that my rapid reflexes enabled me to withdraw from the point of impact with such rapidity.
Finally I uncovered the bag of sugar at the bottom of the box: simply large, brown crystals, but it was sugar nonetheless, and I would have my pastry. The bag was unopened however, so to avoid further mishaps, I handed it to Lyli to open, which she did without incident.
At last! With a sprinkle of sugar crystals and a dash of cinnamon over my crusty tortilla, I opened my mouth for the first delicious bite, when Lyli, who at this point was in the middle of an animated story, said something that made me laugh one of those short, spontaneous snorts that exits through the nose, right over my uplifted tortilla. Sugar and cinnamon scattered all over the table.
By this time, all of us were laughing, and I felt like a complete fool.
I would have been better off to just be content and eat my tortilla plain and crusty!
“Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I (or my tortilla are in), therewith to be content. I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound… (Philippians 4:11-12).
March 22, 2010.
I had big plans to finish this email today. I was going to write some stories from working with the sawmill as well as tell you about the mission congress in Colombia last February. But, things just happened, and looks like it will have to wait. I hope that something you read in all this madness was a blessing and an encouragement. Thanks again for all of your prayers and support. Please pray for our students and for this school year that we may do the will of God and experience His transforming and creative power working in our lives in a visible, tangible way, every moment of every day. Blessings!
