Week 14

Last week I was tutoring the little boy on the left. He was drawing a picture of his Easter vacation with some crayons I had taken out of the free box at the Peace Corps office. As he was getting ready to leave he asked me in a tiny voice, reminiscent of Oliver Twist, "Miss, can I have three crayons?" My heart broke.

What Dominicans have, cabbage, plaintains, mangoes, papaya, peppers, soursop, grapefruits, they are incredibly generous with. I’ve had fresh produce brought to me every day since I moved in on my own. (quick side note: Black and yellow bugs the size of my pinkie have moved into my apartment. I’ve already killed two of them and I saw a third tonight. I knocked it off my curtain and hit it about a dozen times with my shoe and left it on the floor to go finish cooking. I came back to write some more and saw another one on my wall. I looked down and realized that it was the same one I just killed. It survived my brutal force and climbed back up the wall. I got up to kill it again and hit it another dozen or so times and now I am watching it slowly come back to life. I think I’m just going to let it live and tell all the children there is a demon bug living in my apartment.) But they are caught in rift between having access to American technology and therefore being subject to American commercials while imports from America are prohibitively costly to most Dominicans. Many of the things they want I think they are better off without, although I haven’t figured out a way to explain this to kids; its like telling 13-year-olds that they will appreciate their time spent in Israeli Dance class when they are older. Kids should have an inalienable right to things like crayons, books, paper, pencils, and glitter glue though. When kids ask for these things it breaks my heart that I can’t shower them in art supplies and stories. (There is one bookstore on the island and it doesn’t sell children’s books at all. There are no craft stores.) I realize that what I actually want is for them to know that they can make beautiful things, that they are important and deserve everything they want and hopefully I can do that without importing an arts and crafts store.

Tonight was my first English Language class for adult Haitian immigrants (the tutoring program for the children I started during training is going very well). I was terrified to begin. When my mom reminded me that in the US you need a Master’s Degree to teach ELL with text books and classes capped at 20 students my chalkboard in front of 50 students who range from entirely illiterate to fluent in Spanish and Creole, and training as a Sunday School teacher in 1999 seemed menacing. (There is another bug now on what appears to be on a very loud kamikaze mission targeted at my light.) The class turned out to be fantastic. The pastor who asked me to start the class and my host mom helped and together we taught introductions (“My name is ___”, “It’s nice to meet you”, etc) and the alphabet. I had the students do some role playing and I couldn’t get them to leave after class ended because they all wanted to continue the practicing their introductions. I felt like an ugly American though because not 5 weeks ago I was complaining about having to perform role plays in Creole class which was taught by the premier Creole teacher in Dominica to 10 of us with text books and an Ipod app. Their energy inspired me so much that I agreed to teach a second night a week (I have no idea how to fit this in with my actual Peace Corps assignment but I assume the government can’t get mad at me for teaching a group of people who are discriminated against in a developing nation to speak English). On Wednesday we are going to begin learning questions which should be entertaining as a lot of the Dominicans don’t raise their voice at the end of questions, I wonder if Haitians do?

(This post took me almost 30 minutes to write and the bug is still moving. He seems to be gaining strength.)

The students lined up for Big Sports Day outside the school in their sports uniforms.