Weighing ´em like potatahs...

What do you get when you mix 60 Ecuadorian girls, stickers and a white girl? MADNESS!

Yesterday I gave my first charlas on nutrition to the all-girls school up the street. Paulina Solis, the school, has grades kindergarten through our equivalent of seventh grade. I got my hair cut about a month ago and the woman cutting my hair, Christina, told me she is a teacher at Paulina Solis and I should give charlas there. I said sure, not thinking much of it, but last week she called down to me from her window, telling me that the director wanted to see me about giving charlas. So I marched up to the school and turns out I´ll be giving charlas about twice a month to the girls. Yesterday, it was on nutrition and it went really well! I was super nervous at first, but Chris was around to help me with the first one. We played games and talked about the food pyramid, it was great.

My mom has been AMAZING with her care packages and includes tons of stickers in each one, so I used them as prizes for my games. I feel that estickers are a better prize than lollipops or candy during a NUTRITION charla. Anyway, these girls were going NUTS over these stickers! The last class I taught, they were literally fighting over these little koala bear and alphabet stickers. The teacher had to pull them apart! I felt bad, but hey...I was just doing my job, man. The girls loved me though, made little cards for me and cut out foam hearts. Looks like my calling is Paulina Solis...

The education system is very different here and that was an interesting thing to observe. The girls basically wander and talk and do whatever they want while the teacher was ¨teaching.¨ There is very little discipline and the learning style is incredibly different. All they are taught to do is memorize, so very little absorption of the material is taken place. I had a conversation with the English teacher, and I was honestly having trouble understanding her during our conversation in English. I was like...and you´re the English teacher?! (No wonder people don´t really know English here).

Needless to say, I was absolutely exhausted after teaching the girls. The screaming and fighting over the stickers like they were Willy Wonka´s Golden Tickets was more than enough for me. Thank god classes end at 1 pm so I had a free afternoon.

Then today I went with the FODI girls to the campo to evaluate the centers in each barrio. The first one we went to, San Isidro, was really far away. I had to get up at 6 am to be there on time, because many times there isn´t a way for us to get through due to the road. So we get to this community and I had to interview the teachers about the children, evaluating each one to see if they have any disabilities. Then came time for us to weigh and measure the kids. The president of the barrio, Manuel, was there in his campo boots and ripped pants, answering questions. He came back with a scale for us to use. I was looking and didn´t see a normal scale, instead I saw a market basket and a potato bag....

So Manuel calls the first kid over and puts her in the basket; she starts screaming and he has this small scale that you use to hang vegetables or dead meat from to weigh. Instead, he clips it to the handles of the basket and hangs the child in the air in order to measure her. I thought he was joking....and then he started laughing. Nope, this was for real. The next kid was too big for the basket so they ordered him to stand in the potato bag and they literally lifted the kid up in the potato bag, like he was a sack of potatoes! It was so funny...I wish I had brought my camera.

I´m absolutely exhausted, though. It´s been a whirlwind of a week. But it´s sure making the time fly...I can´t believe Thanksgiving is in two weeks!