I had a visitor!

Mom and I being ridiculous, but reunited at last!

Hello, dear reader. Today's post will consider a very happy topic, that of my mother's visit last week :)   After having survived since mid-March on a "diet" of supplementary hugs and advice from my Dominican host parents, it was wonderful to have my flesh-and-blood mother spend time with me. I need to give her kudos first of all for putting up with the crazy amount of travel required to come and see me in a far-flung Dominican pueblo. Unfortunately we were unable to "play tourist" because the two vacation days my class was scheduled to have after completing the latest textbook were cancelled (see previous post on the strike in Neyba). Instead my mother was unlucky enough to have to trot off to class with me for five days and observe quietly for four hours as I bumbled my way through as a first-year teacher. I am not-so-secretly grateful for her presence in my classroom: as someone with over thirty years' experience in education, she provided me with some invaluable advice and creative ideas for how to get my students up and moving more. They (the students) even took to calling her "Teacher 2"--a term of endearment, to be sure--as she patiently helped me guide them through their workbook exercises. Mom also lent her hawk-eyes and reproachful stares to the task of keeping vigil over my students as they took their exams. I was especially grateful for this as I had suspected some of my students of cheating on a previous exam (five of them had the same wrong answer for a written question and the class average was too high to be believed). This time around the students' scores were much more commensurate with their potential...thanks in large part to my mother's presence!


But enough about classrooms and exams. The highlight of my mother's visit (and I think she would agree) was the opportunity we had to spend a day at the beach with some friends of mine. Although it is true that I am living and working on a tropical island, I have rarely had the chance to see the ocean. This was only my third time in six months! Absolutely pathetic. Good thing we were able to rectify that situation with a weekend trip to Barahona, a coastal town about an hour south of Neyba. Mom has all the pictures of that particular visit; I will post them when I get a chance.

Until next time, dear reader, saludos.

~Kirsten