Week 4

Monday 25

Today, instead of football, Fernanda and Mattia start a basketball game and it's another great afternoon, with no rain: it's a good bonding experience to play a few of your own students, it creates unity between students of our school and other local guys, it helps Michele and Sam to integrate with people outside school hours and some sport is always good. 

Elena has her first very busy day, working a lot to organise activities, preparing meetings and training and translating material into Spanish.

Tuesday 26

Elena leads a few other volunteers in their first yoga morning session, at 6.15am, before school duties and it seemed as a good start, so most likely it will become a regular things, once or twice a week.

In the evening, it's our turn to cook community dinner and they'd like Mattia to be in charge; not only his cooking repertoire is quite limited and he doesn't like cooking, but he gets quite disheartened at the thought of having to cater for the vegetarian-vegan requirements of some of the roof gang: its take on this would be: "if you want me to cook, either you accept steak with cheese omelette on the side, or I don't do it", but Elena comes to the rescue and suggests bruschetta (ch pronounced as K, please), so that's our Italian success for the night!

Wednesday 27

He's usually the one with he toughest stomach, but this time Mattia is the first to go down with a pretty bad case of intestinal infection (followed by colic pains due to extreme dehydration) which knocks him out for a night and the next day. However, a visit to the UPAVIM clinic and a trip to the pharmacy by his caring wife saves him and on Thursday he's still weak but back to teaching. He misses football, but Elena takes the boys down, so they don't.

Thursday 28

Great Spanish and training success for Physio Elena, who delivers her first session on normal children development!

Friday 29

Maddie has proposed holding Poetry Day in our English programme and Mattia supported the idea, so today 4th, 5th and 6th grades gather for teacher's and classes presentations. Mattia stuns the audience with Hamlet's "To be or not to be" and the Jabberwocky, not for them to understand but just to acquaint them with the greats and let them experience the power of words and recitation, an aim which seems to have been achieved. 6th grade performs very well, given the low standards, by delivering with confidence and decent pronunciation the few rhyming verses they had composed and learnt with so much effort in class in the past two weeks.

Saturday 30

These days are not only Shakespeare's, as "great minds die alike", i.e. William died approximately the same date as Miguel de Cervantes, so the Centro Cultural de España en Guatemala has arranged some events on Don Quijote and after missing the best one (activities for kids, on the street) two weeks ago, as we didn't find out about the programme in time, we venture out by big bus to La Sexta again, for a screening of a 2007 animated version which seemed quite fun and interesting. Our first visit to the Centro Cultural let us appreciate the new big mural on Cervantes (with a great quote: To change the world, Sancho, that's not madness or utopia, it's justice!) and some items and boards in a small exhibition, but the movie is quite disappointing: there was an issue with the DVD they received, so they showed us and the few others (nice but very small space) a less-than-interesting adaptation from the 70s, mostly out of focus and badly digitalised. A movie is still a movie (it wasn't horrible) and an excuse for a trip out of here is always good, but the journey by two buses and the missed attraction makes the trip only half enjoyable. Luckily, an helado / ice-cream (or choco-fruta, iced-fruit covered in chocolate) at our favourite shop, just outside our gate, makes up for it and most of all the afternoon football game is a good way of finishing the day actively and positively. At night, the old ones find out that we didn't miss much, as the modern movie was definitely bad.

Sunday 1st of May

Nothing special, as given yesterday's morning outing, the usual Saturday's tasks of laundry (we are trying to do it only twice a week) and homework have been moved to today, adding some good playing time, with Lego and several card games.