On Again, Off Again

Dear reader:

As I sit here drinking a papaya batido (fruit juice smoothie) and pondering what to write, the Great Easter Fiasco comes to mind. Let me explain:

Epic fail!!

Semana Santa, or Holy Week, is one of the year's biggest  celebrations here in the Dominican Republic. Ironically given the religious nature of the holiday the majority of people, at least from what I observed, choose to get rip-roaring drunk and dance in the middle of the street (passing cars be damned). While I did not take place in these particular activities, I did enjoy a short yet extended weekend. Why short, you ask? I told my students on the Friday before that there would be no classes on Holy Week under the assumption that the NGO where my class takes place would be closed, and because everyone and their mother had the week off, and also because no one communicated to me otherwise. On the Monday of Holy Week I very enthusiastically participated as an interpreter at a day-long clinic hosted by a group of chiropractors on mission from Canada. It was wonderful to go back to my roots (I was a volunteer medical interpreter and nurse's aide at a free clinic for Hispanic immigrants during college) and to feel that I was lending a helping hand--or voice, to be more accurate. As I was mid-sentence in translating for a particularly thorny case of rheumatoid arthritis, lo and behold I get a call from my Ministry of Education supervisor asking how class was going. I told her my present location was not, indeed, the classroom and ella

cogió cuerdas (literal translation: seized the rope, colloquial translation: got angry) with me. I apologized profusely for the miscommunication and promised to call my students (all 60 of them) to say that class was in session for the next day. Surprise, surprise: out of the few students that responded to my phone calls, only three showed up for "class" the next day. I did my due diligence in planning a lesson, donning my teacher clothes, and marching off to class the next day (Tuesday) as well only to be greeted by, you guessed it: no one! As disheartening as it was to sit twiddling my thumbs in an empty classroom, I did get some good quality reading done, something I have not had time to do in the past few weeks. Chalk it all up to inexperience and severely plugged channels of communication--my Easter week did not go as expected. Unfortunately there are no other long breaks on the horizon; I am going to have to put my nose to the grindstone (to borrow a colloquialism from my native English) in order to survive the rest of the school year!

Moral of the story: NEVER. ASSUME. ANYTHING.

Until next time, dear reader.

Saludos,

Kirsten

On the corner of Stinky and Sick

Dear reader,

After a few weeks of going incommunicado I feel I owe you a blog entry, so here’s a brief rundown of what has happened in my life lately…

Cultural differences can be messy and awkward, as I have experienced in all my travels. I would like to specifically discuss Dominicans’ relationship to something truly messy: their trash. It is not an uncommon sight to witness someone do a drive-by “dumping off” of garbage in an abandoned lot or fling an empty beer bottle into the river.  In the United States I didn’t think too much about my trash; sure, I tried to recycle whenever possible and knew in the back of my mind that all of our twenty-first century detritus goes to a landfill to rot, but the waste removal system in the U.S. is efficient enough that the average person is not confronted with the stark, putrid reality of their own garbage. In the Dominican Republic my experience has been different.  Many people wait until there is enough garbage accumulated to start a fire; others do the aforementioned dumping. I pass an abandoned lot every morning on my way to class and without fail each day there are emaciated dogs and hungry chickens poking through a new bag of trash in search of anything edible. I write this not to fault Dominicans completely for their actions; when there is no public waste removal system in place and little to no education on the subject it is easy to see why people do what they do. But I have come to conclude that respect for one’s homeland includes respecting the environment and that it is not ethnocentric, or culturally arrogant, to question the actions of a friend, in my case, who was about to toss a plastic cup on the side of the road. (By the way, my friend later thanked me for the conversation we had, saying “eso no se hace”, Spanish for “[we] shouldn’t do that”).

Last week I gave my students a national standardized exam. Based on student feedback and correcting the exams themselves I learned what happens when pedagogies collide. The methodology used by the Dominican Ministry of Higher Education in their test is a lot different than what I use in my day-to-day teaching. Because we had two days to review for the exam my students did fairly well, but on the day of the exam I saw lots of befuddled faces and wrinkled eyebrows; they told me “Profe, eso fue una finca de maíz tostado” (“teacher, that test was a field’s worth of roasted corn,” meaning it was very difficult). The comments gave me pause and caused me to reflect on my teaching style. Is it correct or even preferable to “teach to the exam,” as many teachers in the United States might feel compelled to do with high-stakes testing? If my students do not do well on their exams they will leave the course without a diploma, regardless of their attendance, participation, homework grades, or scores on my quizzes and tests. That is the definition of high stakes. I’m still not sure what to do about this dilemma, so any advice from those in education would be much appreciated!

Last week I found myself particularly homesick and run down. I went to bed earlier and earlier each night out of sheer exhaustion and didn’t adequately plan for my classes. My symptoms came to a head on Thursday and Friday with nausea, vomiting, fever and a rash. I stupidly decided to give class on Friday anyways (it was the day designated by my supervisor for the standardized test) even though I had to leave the room several times to throw up. Like I said, stubborn and stupid! Thankfully my host father is a doctor, so he took me to a nearby hospital for treatment. In my fevered state I don’t remember all that happened, only that I was injected with something, that something else was squirted in my mouth, and that they took my temperature where the sun doesn’t shine. I was diagnosed with an allergic reaction to nobody-knows-what. All in all it was an unpleasant experience. My souvenir from this week is a blooming bruise at the sight where they drew my blood. It looks like my left arm, and only my left arm, has been in a fight club. The bruises don’t hurt and I was told by my doctor/father that they will fade away on their own. For now I am suffering through the weather in long sleeves. There’s no sense in getting questioned by people about my purple arm!

That’s enough story and adventure for one blog entry. I’ll be back after Easter Break to tell you more! Until then, dear reader, saludos.

~Kirsten