more in love than ever

My kids and I are going to get married, I swear. They are the cuttest, best thing in my life here in Nicaragua. So one day after class when I finally managed to get away from the screaming kids yelling, "teacher please don't go," and me having to tell them, "Don't worry its only until tomorrow," I went to grab something from my house and then headed back towards the church. When I got closer I noticed that about half or more of my kids were still there all in a group with what looked liked like a piece of paper. As i got closer they noticed I was coming and all ran up to me for another round of hugs. After, they all started asking me all kinds of questions like what's your favorite food, what is your shirt and shoe size, what's your favorite fruit, and about every other question you can imagine. It was soooo cute because they were planning a little going away party for me. I don't know how they would ever do that but just the fact of the matter was so cute I almost cried. The next day in class a few of them put together some money and bought some crackers and bananas to put in a bag for a little present for me. It was the best present I have ever gotten in my life. Right now I'm working on thinking of ideas of how I can leave my kids with things to do with English once I leave. I don't just want to leave them with nothing. If anyone has any ideas please let me know!

awww.

today I was on the bus like normal heading to class and then something soooo cute happened! My kids were at the bus stop all waiting for me to come in and when they saw the bus they all started running with it to meet me. It was the cuttest thing ever! I love them sooooo much.

little visitor

so there was a monkey on the roof last night. . . having a party or something and i swear it was coming straight for my bed since the roof in my room has the biggest gap in it. great!

Friends Forever

So my best friend michele was here for a week and it was soooooooo fun! When she first came we stayed in the Pastor Bayardo's house for a night then had our own little room in Cataraina. First we went to the lagoon all day!!! It was so fun. Michele and I swam out really far, taught the guys how to swim, and took TONS of pictures with the underwater camera! Which, might I add, broke half way through the trip, so we only have less than half of our trip on camera :( And i didn't have my camera, because I left it in my house in Nandasmo. After that we went to a 5 star Resort on the beach. . . it was so nice. It was unlimited everything, food, drinks, facilities and anything else you could want. We just chilled in the pool and on the beach all day and ate all the food we wanted! The beach lifeguard definitely had to come out into the water to tell us that we had gone way too far out. OK I'm sorry, but the waves were so big and sooo fun! Oh and we also went to the spa and got pampered! After that we came back and did some tourist shopping and just hung out with some of my friends! It was perfect, and I'm so glad she got to come. I have about two months left. Teaching is going good. I don't understand how I keep getting more and more students everyday! I've finally figured out a way to teach verbs and sentences rather than just vocabulary, and it's going really well! I can actually see that the kids are learning, and it makes me really happy! I also have a 5 year old girl and another boy that I give separate private classes to. In about a week I'm going to be teaching another group of teenagers (I think) 3 times a week. Soon I'm going to start working on a scrapbook for the church; that should be fun to make.! Well, i gotta go teach right now!

more and more love.

Fist, the other day I was walking with Mira in Nandasmo and found this school with a big school yard. . . a perfect place for Mira to run without me worrying about her being smashed by one of the crazy buses here. We were playing for about 3 hours just running, and finally I was like ok we gotta go. Then I noticed that all the lights in the school had been turned off and I was the only one with Mira! So we walked to the exit and everything was all locked up everywhere! I thought ohhh gosh now what. . . . so eventually I found a spot where there wasn't a huge amount of barbed wire where I would hop the fence WITH Mira in my arms. I must say it was very interesting, but I'm alive! I went to the lagoon again. We left early in the morning and climbed back up when it was dark! I'm actually starting to get in shape again. This time I climbed the whole thing without stopping once in just over 30 minutes! I'm pretty sure I still had some left at the end! Soon I'm going to run it! maybe. . . . And I'm going again tomorrow! My class is going amazing. We have so much fun. I really am completely in love with my kids. I don't know how I'm going to leave them. Everyday when I'm walking to class, they meet me in the middle of the street running as fast as they can, so they can hopefully be the first one to reach me. I really wish I had about 30 more arms to have one for each of them. The other day there was so much emotion, we actually fell over on the ground! In my morning class today it was me and five other girls. We did some English, and then realized my camera was in my back pack, so we had a girls day taking pictures, laughing, and we walked all over Catarina taking pictures having so much fun. I also have a special project planned for my class with English and the Bible that I will tell how it goes after! One thing that is very hard is to see my students come in the exact same clothes everyday to class! I really with I could just fill their drawers with clothes, but right now I can't but I also have an idea for this too that I will say later!

Class

I just got done teaching my first class, and right now I am in the "garden house" where I go to eat lunch everyday in between my classes. They are so nice, because they take really good care of me and don't ask that I pay anything. In my first class, we made menus for the kids' restaurants, and then we played a game where there is a song playing and the kids are passing around a ball. Before they can pass it they have to say the name of a food or drink in English. If they have the ball when the music stops they are out, and the last person in the game wins a prize. They loved it and got so serious. It was so funny. Yesterday I learned the Lords prayer in Spanish . . go me. Right now I'm really really hungry! Saturday I'm going to the lagoon with a bunch of people!

faster than I thought!!!!!!

January 24, 2010. . . .. . . 97 days left!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Where is the time going????? Seriously the time has gone by sooo fast and I still feel like I have so much to do! I still want to go to Casa Materna, visit Danilo’s mom, visit an orphanage, and I still have sooo much to teach my kids! Not only kids. I also just started teaching adult classes, and I feel like I have no time! But its okay. We are going to cram like crazy. I really really like the adult classes; they really want to learn, make a lot of funny jokes, and we always laugh a lot. It's good, because I have adult class on Monday after a day of 3 other classes, and it’s a good relief! I also had my first experience of being really sick in Nicaragua. Don’t worry I’m perfectly fine. I woke up one night with a horrible stomach pain and a few hours later I was throwing up everywhere. The whole next day I had the worst stomach pain ever, and I ended up going to the doctor. I had about 7 shots and some tubes in me to give me water or something, because I didn’t eat all day. . . .I'm not really sure but now the doctor says that I have to be really careful what I eat and I can't eat things with acids and some other foods that I really like. Ohh well whatever! I'm still having a great time and I'm fine so all is good! In about 25 days my best friend Michele is coming to see me. yayyyy!!!! It is going to be soo much fun! I'm really excited for that! Also Cheryl and another women are coming to do some things here really soon and I'm really excited to see them! I have my Spanish Bible and I like it. . . Joel and I have been staying up long nights comparing the English and Spanish just to be sure they are the same. lol. We're finding out that yes, its true, they say the same thing. Nelson, one of my best friends here (who speaks English) just recently found out that he is going to live in New York as soon as possible to work and help an aunt who lives there. I'm sad, because he is one of my best friends here, but I know that it is really good for him because he is going to be able to send money back to his family to help out with things here in Nicaragua. Right now I'm helping him get his passport and visa, even though I told him I don’t really want to because I don't want him to leave! For about a week and a half it was really cold here and I don’t know why! I had a sweater on everyday and two at night! But now. . . . we're back to tank tops. Mira (my puppy) is doing really well. She hates dog food. She cries when I'm not with her, and when I leave she looks at me like she is going to die. Soooo I just bring her to English class. . . in the church! The kids love her and she helps me teach! She is much bigger now too, but she is still my little puppy. When we go on walks she stays right with me and loves to run with me! I still haven’t tried to see if she can swim, but we are going to go to the lagoon soon! Well church is about to start so I gotta go! Hope everything is going amazing for everyone! Love to all!

Family and more!

OK so it has been a little while and I'm so sorry! I promise this year I'm going to try harder to write more! About three weeks before my amazing family came to see me, English class got really intense! We started learning a lot of new things but the best was when we learned classroom objects. We would play a game where I would put a table at the front of the class with various objects from the classroom like books, pencils, staplers, paper, markers, crayons, and just about anything else you can find in a classroom. There are two teams and it’s a relay race. I say an object and one person from each team runs, grabs the object, runs back to their team and has another person run back to me with the object, and the first team to get me the object gets a point. The kids go completely crazy. It’s so fun! I like to play to 15 points but they like to play until their team wins . . . .so the game goes on for pretty long ☺ We also learned commands like sit down, stand up, back, forward, jump, and spin. I have a song that says all these things and makes it into a dance. They love doing it and love to have competitions to see who could dance the moves the best and who could sing the words (in English) the loudest. I have some amazing videos of the dance and all the games that we play in class. Since Christmas was coming fast, we learned some Christmas words and phrases, and I thought I would teach them a simple Christmas song. So we started learning Silent Night. I mentioned it to the Pastor, and he said he wanted the kids to sing it for the Christmas service in church. I said ok but it’s going to take a lot more work! So we worked extra hard on the song and eventually it was really good and we were ready! Also, one day in class I said we were going to make Christmas cards for family, friends or whoever you want (in English) It was so cute, because almost every kid made a card for either my family or for me.

The past ten days of my life were amazing, because my family and my amazing boyfriend came to see me! When I was waiting in the airport for them to come in I really almost peed my pants! So they got here and we came back to the house and had a really good lunch that Francie, my host mom, cooked, and then we went to church. My family started to meet everyone and my class, too. The kids love my family! There is one girl named Anna, and I really think she was in love with Zach. Not just her but everyone was amazed with how tall he was, and Anna loved to have him pick her up over his head.
We saw the Mirador of Catarina, went to Derick’s and Julisa’s wedding (which was amazing), saw my kids sing Silent Night in church, gave gift bags to all my students, went to San Juan del Sur, and Zach and I with other teenagers from Catarina, climbed up AND down a mountain that I swear was at least 10 miles. Ok it was probably more like 1 but it was sooo hard I almost died! We also saw the project site for the Nicaragua Project and other towns and cities in Nicaragua. ANDDDDDD I had to translate the whole time for everyone and I could actually do it! So I am learning my Spanish. The house was FULL with people while my family was here. My mom, dad, sister, boyfriend and me, Bayardo, Francie, Derick, Joel, Joshua, and Heyler, and all the other people that would come by everyday to meet my family or do other things in the house. So after my family left and I came back, the house felt really empty and I was soo sad because my family left. But its ok, because I am almost half way there and I still have a lot of things to do here!

Now that the holidays are over I’m going to start teaching again next week. Yesterday I climbed the horrible mountain again. The only good part to the mountain is at the bottom is the Lagoon of Catarina and it is sooo fun to swim in! It's just hard, because we leave early in the morning and spend all day there in the sun with not a lot of food, so by the end of the day when its time to climb back up, I am almost dead. I am even closer to dead when Nestor, a boy from the church who is in really good shape, grabs my arm and practically drags me up the mountain running. It was really horrible, but I am actually getting in shape now, which is good!

So everything is going good. I had a great time with my family, I now have a new sister in the house, Derick's new wife Julisa, and I am beyond ready with school supplies to start teaching again soon! Thank you so much to everyone who sent school supplies, presents for the kids, presents for me, and prayers. It really all helps so much and makes such a difference in my teaching and the kids lives. Thank you so much for all the support!