I Love My Country

Its the best holiday ever today, the Fourth of July. Thought I would write about how much I love my country. Since I have been in Mexico I have come to love the United States so much more than I did before. It is truly a great nation! Today in Mexico I am all decked out in red white and blue I have flags painted on my toes and every Mexican in town knows how much I love the USA. I have even been humming the national anthem all day. Only 40 more days until I step foot on US soil, I'm not counting down or anything.

¿For Why Teacher?

The other day while I was teaching my students I told them we were going to make something really cool. It was a sling shot made out of popsicle sticks and I thought it was pretty sweet. I was interupted by one of my students Juan Pablo. The name says it all. He is the wildest child in Mexico. He said "all the days you bring one things and you say that it is very cool for us to make. But nooo you take one thing out of your bag and say can we use this, no, it breaks. And you take one other thing out of your bag and say can we use this to make, you say no no no no all the times. It is the same all the days. It is boring for me. For we are not babies." I was trying so hard not to laugh the whole time because Juan Pablo is totally right. Every day I do the same thing and I really wonder how these kids are supposed to be learning English with this curriculum. Juan Pablo continued to complain so I just ignored him when finally said "Teacher, for why you listen more bad than my grandma?" Enough said I laughed so hard I cried right in the middle of class. After class one of my girls said "Teacher Megan for I am sorry Juan Pablo was mean for you today."
Thats really how my students talk all the time but worse. Most days I love my students.

Growing Fonder

I'm growing fonder of Mexico. Tehuacan is very hot and very dry. There is a thin layer of dirt over almost every surface. No matter how much you sweep and mop it doesn't go away. Now it makes sense why everyone wears house shoes here because the floors are so dirty. I miss carpet. Everyone has tile floors, cement or hard wood flooring here. When I get home I'm taking a nice long nap on the carpet. There are side walks everywhere here. You would think that walking everywhere would be really nice but its not. They plant trees on the side walks. You think it would provide nice shade for walking in if in fact there was room to walk on the side walk. The dumb trees take up all of the walking room. Then when the trees get bigger the roots tear up the side walk. So the Mexicans cut down the trees fix up the side walk and then plant an other tree in the same spot. Its a vicious cycle.
Teaching makes the days go by fast. My kids call me Megan Fox which I really hate and find very offensive. I have natural beauty not fake beauty. When they ask questions they always say "for why teacher" its really annoying but super funny. The other day one of my classes busted out in random song. They sing this song about chocolate, maybe they will teach it to me. Then they sang hot and cold by Katy Perry. It was just so weird I didn't tell them to stop singing until they wanted to. So at the Discovery school I teach 3rd graders. At ILP I teach like 2nd and 3rd graders too but I teach one kinder class. There is a little girl who is pure evil. She looks just like Dora the Explorer. She is so evil she scares me. She is wild and won't listen to any of the teachers. She constantly speaks Spanish in class which is totally against the rules. If you had to interact with this beast of a child you would feel my pain. Her looks may be decieving but she is evil. I feel like one day she might bite me. Other than that I pretty much like the kids I teach. My host family has these stupid excuses for dogs that my host family has. They have 2 little poodles and one like half chiwawa or how ever you spell half somethingelse. I'm pretty sure that its part satanic. The satanic one for the first week I was here would nonstop bark at me every time it saw me. I really want to kick one of these dogs just because they are freaks of nature. I think one of them peed on one of my pillows. I miss Boomer, now he is a real dog.
Every day I help one of the teachers eat the food that her host family sends with her. They give her so much food. She gets like 3 sandwhiches and other stuff for lunch and then after we teach her host mom brings her more food. The other day she had these potatoes with pork and it smelled so good. I ended up eating it all because it was extremely spicy and no one else wanted it. I thought my tongue was going to fall off and my lips dissinegrate. The more I ate the hotter it got. But I can proudly say I finished it and didn't have bowell problems later.
The other night I made french toast for my host family. After we were done eating we were all sitting around visiting. Then this huge grasshopper flew into the kitchen. My host sister wanted to catch it. It was me and a bunch of Mexican women. So I was trying to help her. It was flying around and was hiding on this window ledge that was way up high. I ended up standing on the counter top and my host mom gave me this huge stick to get it. Everyone was screaming and running and it was crazy but I eventually caught it in a shoe box and saved the day. I got video of it too. We had a huge rainstorm on Thursday night. The streets were flooded with like a foot or so of water. They don't have storm drains here in Tehuacan. I really wanted to play in the rain and in the streets but I wasn't sure how sanitary that would have been.
Today I went to my host sisters swimming lesson. They tried to make me do it too but these 10 year olds were kicking my butt so I quit. They just couldn't handle my olympic doggy paddle skills. I used sunscreen but I think I got a little burnt again. My host family said that every Sunday after church they are going to take me to a sight seeing place and show me around. I'm pretty excited about that. Tomorrow they are going to take me to a soda making factory that is famous here. Its gonna be weird going on Sundays but its really the only day that they can take me places. I'm pretty excited to go. Well thats my update from Mexico!

Brats

Yes I came to Mexico to teach a bunch of rude, disrespectful children. I teach at 2 schools. The first school is Discovery. It is known as the rich school where all the children in weathly families go to school. They are so mean and they sit there saying that they just want to play games and that our lessons are stupid. The age group I teach are all pretty fluent in English. So Im not too sure why Im teaching them how to speak a langauge they already know how to speak. I guess we will see how things go for the next 3 months and if they learn anything new. I would rather just duct tape them to a wall and spit spit balls at them. Right now Im just getting used to the teaching method and how things are working. The second school is called ILP and its more relaxed and the kids are nice and fun but they dont speak very good English. On Fridays pretty much nobody comes to class. Apparently Mexicans take the day off on Friday. So its sort of like a party day.
I like my host family. They are pretty laid back and relaxed. They are ok with me doing my own thing. They let me eat normal United States food which I miss soooooo much! They did try to feed me this soup with whole shrimps in it. Like the head and everything. I screemed when I saw what was in it. I dont really like my food to stare back at me and my host mom was gracious enough to make me chicken instead. I took pictures but yesterday I accidentally deleted all the pictures I had from half of vaccation to now. Its a good thing Im in a big group of girls who all take pictures of everything so I can copy all of their pictures onto a CD.
Im not too happy with the ILP program and I will most likely never do this again but since I am here I am going to make the most of it and have a great time.

Hustled in Mexico...Go Figure

So like I said in my last post Agua Azul was wonderful. We had to drive up this twisting winding mountain road. Ruben our driver drove like a mad man but I felt right at home. His driving reminded me of my dads driving. There were a couple close calls where I thought we were going to all die but we made it safely to the top. We were stopped right before we got to the top though by a road block. It was 10 pesos to get through and it was a bunch of poor Mexican women and their children. They were sticking their hands inside the window trying to sell of platanos and other stuff. So we thought that it was just 10 pesos to get into Agua Azul. WRONG! We were stopped by an illegal road block and we had to pay more to really get into agua Azul. I had a wonderful time once we finally made it to the water falls. We would swim to the falls and climb up them and then jump right off.
After Agua Azul we drove to San Cristobal which is a very beautiful city. It is also pretty cool in tempature there, which was a really nice break from being sweaty all the time. We spent 2 nights there. We just did a lot of shopping and exploring the city. That night some of us in our group went to this show about Palanque and Mayan history. The show was like interpretive dancers and it was kind of funny and really weird but the music was amazing. It was like 3 or 4 guys on drums! If only they had a sound track for sale.
The next day we drove to Tuxtla and went on this canyon boat ride with lots of history. The tour was in Spanish so we really had no clue what was going on but the river was so beautiful. Finally our vacation was coming to an end. We drove for the rest of the day to Tehuacan,the city I am teaching in. We got to our school at 4:30 am and now we are here getting ready for teaching. It starts tomorrow!!! I have some fun stories about my host family.

Left Behind

Vacation was amazing. For the rest of vacation we went to Palanque in the state Chiapas. They have Mayans ruins there, so awesome!!! I have pictures but you have to stalk my facebook until I post them. So at Palanque we had to pay 25 pesos to get into the park which is just this area full of vendors. The plan was to do some shopping and then go see the ruins. When we all got off the bus this man tells us in decent english that we can buy a tour for our whole group and that getting into see the ruins costs 51 pesos and that the tour would cost even more. We thought he was pulling our leg, but he was for serious. There was an other fee to see the ruins. We all did our shopping which was so much fun. I walked from vendor to vendor asking quanto questo? When they would say the price I'm pretty sure my face just went blank and thats when they would just write it down for me. I loved bargaining and talking with the people even though I don't know how to make a full sentence in Spanish. Me and one of the other girls Jessica were doing our shopping together. After a while we realized that we were the only ones from our group still shopping and that we were left behind. We weren't really sure what to do so we bought tickets to get in to see the ruins. While we were getting our tickets these men who run the tour guide thingy were bugging us to buy a tour guide. They wanted 85 bucks for an English guide. We were trying to make them understand that we only have pesos and then they wanted 800 pesos for it. We weren't going to buy a tour for that much and we didn't even have that much money on us after all of our shopping. We decided to just ask them for a map and try to figure everything out ourselves and then they said "we give you English tour guide 600 pesos he be here in 20 minutos." We decided to take the tour so that we could enjoy Palanque as much as we could. It was the best decsision ever. If we didn't have our tour guide Victor we wouldn't have enjoyed the ruins as much as we did. We learned so many cool things most of what we learned is really crazy. But thats the Mayan history for you. After our tour the plan was to meet the group at this museum at the end of the ruins. We were a little worried because we hadn't seen any of our group in the ruins. Then when we got to the museum our bus was not there and neither was our group. Instead of standing around looking like a couple of lost white girls we decided to go into the museum and figure out what to do. The whole time I was praying in my heart like crazy. Every car who passed us would honk at us like kreepers. As soon as we walked into the museum our bus pulled up! There has never been such happy reunion. After that adventure we went to Agua Azul. So beautiful and the water felt so refreshing. It was like heaven on earth. Well time for me to go! I'll fill you in on the rest of my vacation and how things are going at the school later!

OH THE PAIN

I made it afaely to Mexico. I am so lucky to be here I cant believe it. Before I get any farther in this post, if my puntuation or anything is way off its because the key boards here are a little different from the ones in the US. Ill also blame all my spelling mistakes on that too.
So when we got to Mexico we had to wait around for 4 hours in the air port for the rest of our group to get there. After what felt like eternity in the area to wait we finally got a move on. We took a bus to an other part of the airport to meet up with the other part of our group. The streets in Mexico are INSANE. Never ever drive on them. Most of them dont have lines or street signs. I have no clue how these drivers know who has the right of way or anything. Im surprized I havent seen an accident yet. We made it to the other terminal with our never ending luggage. The men just started taking it off the bus for us. I was a bit nervous about that. I mean I know they were being nice but they were strange men and I wasnt too comfortable with them taking hold of my precious belongings. I was pretty sure one of them would just dip out with my suit case. Then they all start rolling our luggage through the airport for us. Man I was tailgating the guy with my suitcase like no other just in case I had to chase after him if he wanted to take my luggage with him. Well come to find out these wonderful gentlemen carrying our luggage through the airport for us actually work for the program Im with. Big sigh of relief. We put our luggage on a van to go to the school and we all kept back packs for our vacation. We hopped on this 16 passenger van and have been on it ever since Monday. The first night we just slept on it. Our driver Rubin had to stop at some random gas station to get some sleep. It was so hot and muggy on the bus. After a few hours we drove on. We got to the state Tabasco. We were in a really poor area. We had pineapple for breakfast from a street vendor. We went to La Venta which is like this museum thing with old sculptures and stuff from the Olmec culture. After that we went to this amazing beach. We were the only ones there and the water was amazing. It was the Atlantic ocean we were swimming in. I forgot sunscreen and now I got this killer sunburn. I really feel like this might be the death of me it hurts so much. We got to stay in a pretty nice hotel on Tuesday night. It felt amazing to shower and get clean. Its so hot here I just dont use hot water anymore. Despite being sweaty and sticky all the time and being on and off a small cramped bus I am having the best time ever! There is so much more to write about but I only have 4 more minutes. Yesterday in the late afternoon we went to this pool by a river in the middle of the jungle. AMAZING! ill write more soon!