I am not sure where to start so I'll start with what I am up to right now.
I live with a nice host family in a Barrio (neighborhood) in Cartagena called Blas de Lezo. My host mother's name is Nydia, she is a school counselor, and my host father's name is Ciro, and he works in the jewelry business (Ciro's Spanish is more difficult for me to understand so that is all I know about him right now). I also have a host sister with beautiful eyes named Angelica. Angelica is super wonderful because she owns here own store in the Centro, which is the historic walled city on the north side of Cartagena where most of the tourists go.
My school is called Bertha Gedeon, and I will be co-teaching English mostly 9th and 10th graders. I met my main co-teacher and mentor, Rosalia, on my first day in Cartagena and she is wonderful. Rosalia speaks very good English and sings, "Hellllloooo!!!" every time I call her on the phone. Her son, Michael, spent a year in Boston and also speaks very good English, so it has been really nice getting some info without having to decode it from Spanish.
The costenos (people who live on the coast) here have very difficult accents to understand because they basically only say half of each word. So something like, Vas para la playa? Becomes, Vapalaplaya? The silver lining here is that I figured if I can master costeno Spanish, I will be set for any Spanish speaking country in the world!! Aside from Spain ... And Argentina. haha.
Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the first day I will actually be in my school, but I will just be introducing myself and observing for the week, and then digging in to planning and giving real lessons in the next week.
It is actually a very exciting time to be an English teacher in Colombia because this is the first year that the country's Ministry of Education is implementing a giant plan to make the country bilingual in English and Spanish. The movement is called Colombia Bilingue. The government has recruited 600 English speakers from all over the world to teach throughout Colombian classrooms this year. During my orientation, we spent one week in a hotel in Bogota with 400 other people from around the world. Tooo many gringos haha.
In the sense of being a part of something that is sustainable and not so in-your-business-American, I love how this program works because the country wants us to be here. We have had a number of press events (I was in the Colombian news, nbd!) and promotional items in the past few weeks, and many Colombians I talk to (taxi drivers, neighbors, waiters) are very happy to hear that I am here to teach English.
Still, being an effective teacher is probably my greatest worry here. I have had a lot of crash courses and a small practicum with real Colombian students, but at the end of the day I am not an experienced teacher, and I don't want that to be a disadvantage for my students.(They already have quite a few here. The average class size is about 50 students, and high school classes go on in the afternoons, which are the hottest time of day. Air conditioning is a luxury here, so that means students have to sit at their desks in 95-degree heat and 90 percent humidity. There isn't usually an overhead or TV; just a white board. And, schools don't have anything like copiers or laminators -- students must reimburse the teacher for the copies they make, meaning copies aren't as common as classrooms in the states, either). Not to make everything sound dire -- I have heard a lot of great things about Colombian students. One that I love is that bullying is much less common in Colombia because the culture here focuses so much on togetherness. Most students get along with all other students and don't form the cliques that are so well-known in the U.S.
I live about a 20 minute cab ride, depending on traffic, from the Centro, which really is beautiful. I haven't yet taken photos, but it is all colonial architecture (thanks, Spaniards) literally within stone walls. There are balconies covered with flowers, ladies in colorful dresses selling fruit, and tons of places to eat, dance, drink and be merry. One of my favorite things is that there are no rules on open containers, so people just bring their parties wherever they want. In the Centro the restaurants put tables outside on the cobblestones, and it is a custom here to just go to a plaza, pay for a beer out of a cooler on the street and enjoy sitting outside.
I don't think I could count the number of things that caught me a little off guard here or that reminded me of the time I spent abroad in Costa Rica, but they all add up to remind me why I love Latin America! Here are some fun ones:
1. Street performers on a whole new level. People juggle with bowling pins in the middle of crosswalks here to entertain drivers while they wait for the stoplight, then run really quick to get tips before they are off. It was so bizarre at first to see someone juggling in the middle of the road!
2. Moto taxis and driving. There are literally crowds of men on motorcycles on every corner in Cartagena. They are taxi drivers for one. They have an extra helmet and you get on the back and go, for a much cheaper rate than regular taxis. But, they are very dangerous. In some parts of Colombia, they have actually been outlawed on main highways. As for the driving ... I'll just say that I would have had fifteen heart attacks at this point if I had been driving the streets of Cartagena -- and I have been here for three days.
3. Juice. The juice here is amazing! It is all fresh, all the time, and of every variety -- mango, papaya, passionfruit, blackberry, strawberry, watermelon. We shouldn't even call it "juice" in English because putting it in the same category as Sunny D is just nuts.
4. Tinto: So tinto is a very small cup of coffee here and it is very common. Tinteros sell the little cups (they are like 3 ounces) on the street everywhere. But the hilarious thing is the confusion surrounding the word. Depending on the Colombian I talk to, tinto is either already sweetened or not sweet. Depending on the person, too, you either can or cannot ask for cafe if you do not want a full cup of coffee with milk or sugar. Lots of options here for the coffee, but it's definitely all delicious!
OK, so I know that was a long post but it needed to be done. I'll try to fill in the details of orientation later, but the adventure is really beginning now!
