El Salvador Vacation...

We had an amazing 41/2 days in El Salvador. We rented a house with a view, as you can see from the picture. Time was spent swimming, reading, eating amazing El Salvadorian pupusas and seafood.

We also cooked for ourselves a couple nights. While I can't take props for too much of the actual making of the food, I'm thankful to be friends with great chefs!! :) We made carne asada, chismol, platanos, and a fried potato medly. Que rico!!!

One of the mornings, we pried ourselves away from the pool and our books to venture into the capital city San Salvador about 40 minutes away from out beach house. We visited the museum of Oscar Romero, a Catholic priest who was martyred 31 years ago for preaching social justice. I've heard him referred to as an El Salvadorian Martin Luther King. After the museum we ate the BEST hotdogs ever! Now I would normally not rave about hotdogs but these were phenom. They had caramelized onions and were fried in grease that was probably 5 days old but was exploding with flavor. Ya they were that good. During our day trip we made a special stop at STARBUCKS! This was my 1st Starbucks experience in Central America. I felt like we were back in the States. I had an iced caramel macchiato!

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Great friends, great food, great country, great times :)

This last week at school has been a refreshed week! So thankful for the break.

PTM: I was walking my kiddos back from PE and before we entered the classroom I stopped them and told them that everything needed to cleared off their desk, nothing could be on top of the desk. We were working with small math pieces. So they all clear off their desks and I pass out the base 10 block packets and we start working with them. I look over at a boy name Angel and he is crouched underneath his desk. I give him the "what do you think you are doing look" and he looks back at me and says all sincerity, "Meese you say nothing on top of the desk...I am below the desk!"

Sicky, sick, sick....

I'm sure by the title of this post you can gather that I have been sick. The last seven days have been less than enjoyable for me. Two Thursdays ago there was a huge semi-truck accident including an electrical pole, rendering half of Tegucigalpa powerless ALL DAY. I would have thought that there would be no school...no power=no school....right???? Wrong, we had school. Well school went on just fine, it was hot and I had to use a chalk board instead of a smart board but I survived....or so I thought.

At IST no power means no functioning bathrooms, so these kids were bring into my classroom all of this bacteria...and as a result, this past Thursday I ended up in hospital with a Dr. telling me I have an intestinal infection. SUPER! They gave me an IV of drugs with instructions of lots of water, rest and more drugs. I'm thankfully feeling a lot better and hoping for more enjoyable, productive weeks to come.

*On a positive note, Honduras is celebrating its independence we get a 5 day weekend because of it!! We (Danielle, Eric, Ben, Diana, Abby and myself) are going to El Salvador, we rented a house next to the beach. I am SO excited!

Quirks...

So my kids are pretty cute!! We were lining up go to the flag day assembly. September is the month were Honduras celebrates its independence/children's day/and teacher appreciation!

I am getting to know my new students and learning their strengths, weaknesses and quirks. I have learned that one of the quirks about my class is that they need to microwave their food or it is simply not edible. Last Thursday the power was out ALL day and so the classroom microwave was obviously not working. I told them that it's OK to eat cold food, they looked at me with a bewildered/are you kidding look.

In an effort to not stick out too much I dyed my hair dark!

PTM (precious teaching moment) I was teaching ordinal numbers and to demonstrate when you would use ordinal numbers I told them to imagine that the class was running a race. Then I asked, "who is the fastest kid?" One boy was very set on making sure that I knew that he thought he was the fastest. (He name is Werner and he is a hilarious/confident young boy) So then I said imagine that all 20 of us ran a race and Werner was last, what place did he get? After the laughter died down they replied "Werner got 20th place." Lesson learned.