The local grocery store in my town got in a whole shipment of fresh fruit this week. Including….are you ready for it….PEARS!! I just about had a heart attack. Having limited funds with me, I bought two and an orange and smiled nearly all the way home. When I went home, I tried to ration myself with my newfound fruity wealth: one pear today, the other for breakfast tomorrow. I succeeded, but only in that I allowed myself to eat the orange that evening as well. On the way to class the next morning I ate the other pear with relish.

I was on my own this weekend, as Leland was in Praia for some conference. I have never been in this town in my house alone since I arrived. I was lonely and a little bored the first night, but I found it miraculous that 24 hours later I had completely readjusted. I told myself that Saturday I would treat myself to lunch in the praça (main square) where I could read and relax outside. I took the money I was going to use for lunch and went back to grocery store and bought myself an entire kilo of pears instead. I was pleased at the price. It cost about $3.00 for a kilo of pears (about 9-10 pears). As I sat in my kitchen eating a pear for dessert that night, I thought about my zealous pear devouring. I ate the pears down to the nub. If I could have eaten the seeds and the stem, I would have. This made me reflect on all my eating lately. When I first arrived in this country, I remember being amazed at the way Cape Verdeans ate their food. They find every morsel and eat it. A small chicken leg will go in to their mouths and a few seconds later, out will come a spotlessly clean bone. It’s not that their that hungry, it’s that why waste it when it was so hard to get in the first place?

As I have said before, fruit is quite the luxury. In general, it is expensive and hard to get. For what it is and the kind of sustenance it provides, it generally isn’t worth purchasing for most Cape Verdeans or for us. For just under twice the price of my kilo of pears, I can purchase a couple of boneless chicken breasts that I can then shred to make BBQ chicken. This lasts Leland and I for about a week’s worth of lunches.

But it wasn’t just the pear I have been eating with such care. It has now become just about everything. Wasting food, or anything for that matter, is something we avoid very carefully. We only make what we can eat, or what we can store and eat later. Cape Verdeans have very little waste. I remember living in my homestay family’s house and they barely had a trashcan. It was a small bucket that served for small things like napkins. Cape Verde just is simply not a disposable society. Any food waste they had went either to the dog and cat or in another bucket later given to the pig. I had to keep a plastic carrier bag in my room to throw my trash away, because a trashcan just isn’t a staple part of a person’s individual needs. I, on the other hand being the wasteful American that I was, had q-tips, wrappers, and other random pieces of paper that I threw away on a daily basis. When I moved out of their house, I went to throw the trash away. My little homestay sister was there and offered to take it out for me. By this time I had a few bags worth of things I didn’t want anymore (such as magazines my family had sent and had since been shared and discarded by my homestay family) as well as actual trash such as used q-tips, my nail clippings, and other private trash. My little homestay sister took it with her and when I came out into the common area after packing I saw the magazines out once again and my trash scattered around the room. I was completely mortified. A person’s trash is just so personal. But I guess one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and these people were even playing with the case my Intuition razor replacement came in. Disposable items just aren’t as prevalent here, so even my trash was something interesting to them.

Food, however, still remains the area we are most careful with. We are not of the mind, mind you, that you have to finish everything on your plate just because it’s there. Occasionally, of course, one simply is just too full to finish. But we don’t make a lot to begin with. We go through a painstaking effort at the grocery store to plan out exactly what we’ll cook and just how many ingredients we need to make the desired dish. It’s not that we can’t afford to buy more, it’s just that there’s absolutely no need to. Which is almost exactly the attitude felt by the rest of the people of this country. There is no need to have more, when having less works just as well, if not better. It’s like that line from Sabrina (I know I’m a romantic comedy movie weirdo): “More isn’t always better Lionus, sometimes it’s just more.” Anyway, the pear extravaganza has made my weekend and in a week we go to Praia for our big conference, which marks the end of the second trimester. Two down, one to go! So at the moment, things are looking up ☺

So I just thought I would inform everyone about what my students had to say about this World Wise exchanging of letters thing:

Male student: "Teacher, I want a girl, a (said in English) love"
Female student: "Teacher, the boys in America are very good looking, I want a boy"
Female student: "Teacher, I'm going to ask them to send me a passport so I can go to America"
Male student: "I will write (said in English) 'I am hungry.' Cabo Verdianos are hungry"
Male student: "Can we exchange phone numbers too with our (said in English) love"
Male student, said in English to mimic what he would write: "I live in house that is barraca" (The slum-ish section of town, apparently this is a joke)
Male student, also in English: "I like cook catchupa"
Me to male student: "American children don't know what barraca or catchupa means. You have to explain it"
Male student: "I'll ask for money then they can know what a baracca is"
Me: "You have to write in English, and no asking for money!"
Whole class: Uproarious protestations

Yup. I can't wait.

Yes, it's been a while. I've been neglecting my blogging duties. Well, to be honest my life is currently not that interesting. I absolutely love my children's classes and although they leave me exhausted at the end of the day, I really enjoy teaching the kids. My high school students are obviously another matter. They of course leave me exhausted as well, but for very different reasons. It is a mental struggle to be in the high school environment. I find the little children are harder physically to keep up with, but my high schoolers keep me mentally and emotionally drained. So, needless to say, at the end of the day, I all but collapse.

Peace Corps has a program that's called the World Wise School program. It is where each volunteer who chooses to participate is matched up with a teacher from a school in the United States. The teacher uses the volunteer as a tool in her classroom. They exchange letters, photos, and any other relevant information. It is a way for American students to become familiar with other countries and cultures, and helps the volunteer gain perhaps a slightly unique view on their own situation. Well, after 6 months of being at site, I was finally paired up with a class from Las Vegas, Nevada. The teacher teaches 6th grade English and we have decided to set up a little pen pal sort of thing with my eighth graders. It is fairly bad timing, as we are well into the latter end of the school year, and most of you understand how efficient the mail system is here :). I received my first email from the teacher about a week ago, and we have been exchanging emails since about what it is exactly we should incorporate into our classes. Well, for me, th pairing came as quite a surprise, I was given no warning as to when I might receive a match, so I have nearly every class period planned out for the next two weeks (after which the trimester ends, and we go on a two week break before the final one begins). Again, bad timing. But the teacher's emails intrigued me. I didn't get the feeling she had researched Cape Verde all that well. Of course I will be the first to admit that Cape Verde is a slightly out of the way country and not many people have heard of it. But she expected individual photos of all my students and weekly correspondence. It was odd. I was slightly taken aback. Then she thought the students could exchange letters about entertainment in each country. As one of my friends put it: "what, like sitting on the stoop and drinking grogue?" Because that's about it as far as entertainment goes. I know my students will be thrilled to hear about the latest goings on with the likes of 50 Cent and Jean-Claude VanDamme; but somehow, I don't think going on a passeio (leisurely stroll) around your 2,000 person town will thrill the masses of 6th graders at a Las Vegas high school. I just hope they don't write to us about tassels and Chippendale's.

In other news, Leland is going out of town for the weekend to some conference thingie in Praia, so I have the house all to myself. Although that also means I will absolutely bored out of my mind since there is a complete lack of entertainment here in this country. And it's the end of the month so funds are a little tighter of course, which makes culinary endeavors slightly more difficult as well. Oh well, good thing I like to read.

Oh family. What a complicated structure sometimes. Cape Verdean families are something of a marvel. The sanctity of marriage is almost non-existent. This trimester, instead of a final exam for my eighth graders, I decided to have my students do a family project that would incorporate a family tree and a composition about one side of their family. It's very interesting to see their family trees. Some students have 45 cousins, while others are fairly compact only because the father has had to move to Portugal or the United States to find work. But I find the family unit here fascinating. I will keep you updated as to the progress of these projects when the time comes nearer for them to hand in.

Along those lines, I received the photos I ordered off of Snapfish from the family cruise. My students were pretty insistent on seeing photos of my family. So you will all be happy to know that I showed them all your smiling faces and they loved every minute of it. They said I had a very beautiful family, and especially like the photo of Heather, Kim, Azmina, and Natasha. I have very beautiful girls in my family, they said. Some of the girls also developed a small crush on Aaron and Shaheen, and they were delighted to hear that my family would be visiting this summer and could I please ask the rest of them to come too? I said of course, I will do my best. So everyone, just know that you were all invited by the students of my 8A class to come out this summer to visit me :) But they really did enjoy the photos and so did I.

So this is always the way things happen: the minute one thing in your life is going well, the other just completely blows up in your face. I began my children's class yesterday. I have one hour of class in the morning and another in the afternoon three times a week for the next 8 weeks. I very much forgot how much I LOVE little kids. I had only three little girls show up for each one of the classes, but we had such a blast. The girls in the morning were a little older and came with notebooks and pens in hand ready to absorb and write down anything I had to say. But they were so eager, and wanted to know everything. My afternoon girls were a lot younger, 6 years old as oppose to the girls in the morning who were around 9 and 10. My afternoon girls just wanted to play and sing Head Shoulders Knees and Toes the whole time. Which was fine with me, so we played and sang and basically had a grand old time. They're just so FUN!

Well on the other hand, today I gave out three faltas da disciplina, (basically a disciplinary write up) all to my one class, also known as the Spawn of Satan class, 8C. When I first let all the students in the classroom, two of the boys had begun to fight. They each had the other in a choke hold and were punching back and forth. So before all the students had even come into the room, I had kicked out two. Then as the students were coming in, a girl closed the door all the way, maliciously not allowing the other students to enter (this particular door locks from both the outside and inside if closed all the way. The only way to get out or in is to pass the key through the window to someone standing out there so they can unlock it from the outside). So there's a third student who I kicked out before class even started! I didn't give her a disciplina, however; she was just being annoying. Then, about halfway through class, while they were doing exercises, I was leaning over helping a student, when a particularly irritating student caressed my rear end to get my attention. I use the word caress, because I really can't think of another word for it. He snickered as I turned around with astonishment on my face. Well I let it slide because I thought maybe, just MAYBE, I had miss-interpreted it. Well five minutes later when I was standing in front of the class explaining the lesson he asked loudly and repeatedly if he could kiss me, In English, mind you. "Teacher can I kiss you, can I kiss you?" Yeah that was the end of that. Out he went and another falta da disciplina went with him. Well a few minutes after that I kicked the rest of the class out about 15 minutes early because I basically couldn't take it anymore. They weren't listening, no one was doing the exercises, they had no respect for me or anything I was trying to do in class.

After class I went to the director of the school, who is also my Peace Corps counterpart (basically my counterpart/helper person) and told her that it had to stop. She promised to speak to the class tomorrow. I felt sorry for her, she was clearly coming down with the flu or something. She's got a tough job and I feel sorry for her a lot, but she handles herself well, and I think from what I have heard, our school is one of the more disciplined in Cape Verde, if you can believe that. But just from hearing other volunteers' stories, I think this island has one of the better run schools. It's small and there aren't that many students. It's slightly easier to look after everyone if there aren't that many to begin with. So now I sit here trying to fill out a disciplinary report in Portuguese about my miscreant students. I'm tired.

Ok the first two photos and the fourth are of the parade again, the third photo is of me and my friend Stephanie who lives on Maio. The last photo is of a group of volunteers all in Mindelo for the festivities.

Ok so here are some pictures, but blogger has changed its format and I can't see the photos; they don't actually show up in the edit page anymore. So I will try and describe them the best I can. The top two are some floats that were in the parade. If you look closely at the first one, the float is actually made of garbage. I think this was a Clean Trash group of some kind. The third picture is the sunset over Mindelo, so pretty. The last two photos are pictures of the parade. There were a lot of groups of people dancing with elaborate costumes. It was very neat.

I am currently reading Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. I have hardly read anything by him, possibly a short story when I was in high school, but none of his novels. I must say that I really do enjoy this book. I was never interested I guess because I always assumed I wouldn’t like him. But honestly, this guy’s not bad. Don’t worry this is not a book review, nor do I pretend to posses an expertise on most things literary. But there is one thing in this novel that sticks out to me: the language. Hemingway’s dialogue is that of transliterated Spanish. Meaning, if you were watching this novel as a movie, the characters would be speaking Spanish. But what Hemingway does is not translate the novel into understandable and everyday speaking English, but transliterates it from the Spanish dialogue as if you were the interpreter of the Spanish-language movie translating the dialogue word for word in your head. One of my favorite and more often used phrases is: “I obscenity in the milk of thy …” Now I was never 100% fluent in Spanish, nor did I learn nor speak it in the 1930s or 40s. But I assume that this is a slang phrase for something that could have been understandably translated into English. Something along the lines of “screw you” (wouldn’t that be an interesting phrase transliterated into another language). We instead are left here with an amusing transliteration that pretty much gets its intended meaning across.

Now, it is the use of the word ‘thy’ that truly interests me. His dialogue in transliterated English uses the subject pronouns ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ for the familiar tu form in Spanish. I remember back to my high school Spanish days when were taught all the verb conjugations, including of course the tu form. I don’t recall, however, it ever being translated as ‘thee.’ This form of communication in English is all but dead, but is it possible that transliterated, it still exists in other languages (I really wouldn’t know for sure I am also no linguist)? But it made me think about the languages here. When the TEFL volunteers were going through our language training back in July and August, we were told that the tu form in Portuguese is nearly irrelevant for us to learn. No one here uses it and in Brazil it is practically obsolete. The reason for its lack of use here in this country, I was told at the time, is familiar speaking is dominated by the language of the people, so-to-speak: Kriolu. Whenever one speaks Portuguese, it is automatically assumed you are in a formal setting and therefore there is no need to learn the informal form, you use the formal ‘you’ form of você. ‘Well, good,’ everyone thought, ‘one less conjugation for me to learn.’ Imagine my surprise, then, when I entered the classroom and the students are speaking to me in informal Portuguese. Hm. Not dead.

But it becomes a hazy line when you are trying to teach your students the translations for even simple phrases like, “Do you like to dance?” You ask them to translate and you will get two different responses: “Tu gostas dançar” or “Você gosta dançar” which isn’t really a problem until you see the confused look on some students faces, they can’t understand how two of their conjugations mean the same thing in English. It then is out of my area of TEFL expertise. Although I don’t think it would go over well if I told them that “Tu gostas dançar” literally means ‘thou likest the dance?’ But I smiled inside a little when the thought occurred to me that other languages are still using this type of communication. Because it sounds so funny to me. Maybe that’s why the Cape Verdeans were smart and just threw out this manner of speaking for a much simpler less grammatically structured blend of Portuguese and Creole. I’m sure this translation is not what they are hearing themselves when they speak in the informal form, but it just amused me that English has done away with this segregation of address, while most other languages still continue to safeguard the line that separates formality from familiarity.

Oh Carnaval. Well, in a nutshell, we had a blast. Leland and I got to Mindelo Saturday evening along with two other volunteers from Sal and a good friend of mine, Stephanie who lives on Maio. We all stayed in Casey and Elizabeth’s house in Mindelo. The people here go crazy for Carnaval. The day after Valentine’s day, students began dressing up and putting copious amounts of makeup on their faces. At first, I didn’t understand. Girls had red tights on and sparkles on their faces. I thought to myself, Valentine’s day is over, what are they all dressing like this for? Well, naturally, I asked. CARNAVAL TEACHER!! was the response I got, like “duh, what planet did you come from that you didn’t even know it was Carnaval time. Silly me thought it was in 5 days. They start things early around here. In Mindelo it was much the same. Crazy people in crazy costumes. On Sunday, there was a buzz in the air, we walked around the very cute town and just felt what it was like to be in a larger city. Sunday evening the parades began. Small, and with a few interesting floats. One was made entirely with garbage. On Monday was the big party day. Everyone in town (including ourselves) was scrambling to gather the pieces for their costumes. The children looked as they do in the US on Halloween. Everyone dresses up. The children were in Spiderman costumes, and the favorite costume of a male Cape Verdean between the ages of 16 and 40 is women’s clothing. The cross dressing was incredible. I mean these people go all out. I will post pictures later. But if you click on the link to Courtney’s blog you will see more pictures of the floats and such. Monday evening was another parade, and Elizabeth, a fellow volunteer, participated in the dancing. Afterwords, her group hosted the largest party in town, where everyone danced, drank, and partied well into the morning (although I was a little party pooper and getting sick, so I went home a little early). Tuesday was the day for the big parade. Huge floats made their way around the town along with dancers and musicians. It was truly a sight to see. I have never been to Mardi Gras in the US, but from what I hear, I think the Cape Verdean Carnaval is not nearly so scandalous. There was no bargaining for beads, if you know what I mean, and actually very little obscenity at all. It seemed to be good clean fun, although the amount of alcohol consumed by the general population (not me daddy!!) was quite astounding. Women set up little stands on the sides of the main thoroughfare roads selling drinks like water and soda but also homemade ponche de mel: basically the Cape Verean national beverage grogue (made from sugar can grown here) mixed with honey and lemons to make it sweet and thick. They handmake pastels: little fried pastries with fish inside. Some even set up a grill and sell chicken or pork skewers. It’s quite the event. Definitely very worth going to. I didn’t get a chance to go the Santo Antao, which is the island that is about an hours boat ride from Mindelo. It’s a shame really, I have heard may great things about it. I believe it is one of the more beautiful islands with ribeiras and great green mountains. Leland was there and he said it was very nice. On the way back to my island, I stopped in Sal (Leland and I have to fly through there anyway every time we want to travel from or to our island, so I figured I would just stop and rest there for a few days). I stayed with Caryn (look further down, you’ll see pictures of her. We hung out around her town, I went and sat in on one of her classes, and we went down to Santa Maria, tourist haven of Cape Verde. It really does feel like you’re in Mexico when you go down there. I could have been in any beachy tourist town on the planet. Grand hotels, overpriced drinks, more white people than natives. It was slightly surreal. There was even a sushi restaurant there for a while before it closed (I assume it went out of business, though I don’t think anyone’s too sure). But it was so nice to relax before coming back to my life again here. But all in all a great vacation.

On a separate note, I have been asked to teach a children’s English class at the Youth Center. The children will be aged 6-11, which slightly hinders things since the 6 year olds can’t read, I’ve been told. Anyway, my class begins Monday, and I will be teaching two classes three times a week for the next two months. This is, of course, on top of the teaching I already do at the high school. But we will be doing basic things like ABCs and colors, animals, etc. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. Reminder: I am attempting to teach English to 6 year olds who don’t even speak a structured language themselves. Oh wait, I barely speak this unstructured language myself. It’s really a good thing I love children. Leland and I were surprised actually; we didn’t think anyone would be interested. I mean the children who are 11 years old, are getting ready to move into the high school where English instruction is part of the curriculum anyway. So what silly parent would want to pay 4000$00 about the equivalent of $50 to have their child learn English they’re just going to forget in three months anyway? Well, apparently a lot. Which is why we now have two classes a day instead of one. Peachy.

Emotions are tight at this point in my life. I have come halfway to the halfway point and am starting to question myself again. It’s not so much that I don’t want to be here, it’s that I really just want to be home. Everyday I think of something else I miss, something small and stupid, but it has an effect. I really do appreciate the packages, though. Aunt Lisa, Heather and Kim, the last package was perfect, so thoughtful, and of course, delicious. Thank you so much, it really does brighten my day, possibly even the week. I know this is just a rough time again, but I’m getting sick of the rough times. I just have to pull through I guess