Bad Day

This is probably not a good day to leave a post as I´m rather angry and very frustrated today, which means if anything else comes at me today I´m going to start crying. All I asked for before and since I´ve been here is for something written that explains everything I need to do. This is a school, I am a teacher, usually these institutions have pretty clear guidelines on what is expected from their employees. Not so much here. Well, that´s not accurate. There are guidelines, there are requirements, there are deadlines - but none of them are written down. Oftentimes, they are not even spoken of, until the day or the hour before they are needed. Apparently, everyone who lives in El Salvador just knows them. I am liking El Salvador less and less - and I´ve only been here a month. Not that I´m counting. (1 month, 5 days)

sigh. Solidea leaves on Monday to return to Italy for 3 weeks. I think she´ll come back. I´m not so sure she´ll come back to this school. She´ll do what she needs to do for herself. That´s one thing I´ve learned about her, not afraid to voice her opinions and express her concerns. This has been good for me in that she gets the information we need to teach. It has been bad since we often butt heads as to how to teach the classes. That´s a bit frustrating since I want to implement the teaching techniques I´ve learned but often have to convince her it´s the best thing to do. This gets tiring when we´re not speaking the same language and go through the same arguments every planning session.

Right, so she´ll be gone for 3 weeks and part of me is really scared and part of me is really excited. The scared part is for the classes, because I´m going to have to work a lot harder making sure I know as much as possible about the grammar and how to translate examples and what not. The excited part is that now my Spanish should really improve. Not to always look at the negative, but working with Solidea has hampered my Spanish. We plan in English (she wants to practice) and since most of each day is spent together, my Spanish is not being used all that much, other than in the classes and at meals . We spent one day with local VIDES volunteers and they insisted I don´t speak English to any of the other English speakers (there were 3 others), so I didn´t, and I was surprised when the next day I started speaking Spanish in the morning with a familiarity I hadn´t experienced before. It wasn´t that I knew everything I wanted to say, but using the language and having to search for words to explain things makes a huge difference in the learning curve.

Solidea has become something of crutch for both myself and everyone else. When they want to communicate with me, they turn to Solidea. This is also becoming rather frustrating. I´ve started talking mostly in Spanish to Solidea, but it´s too easy to use English when I don´t know a word. It´s better for me to talk to the Sister´s or the Interna´s who don´t know any English.

Oh yeah, the major frustration of today is learning about something we are supposed to turn in to the Ministry tomorrow (Ministry is the government education department) and something else we need to prepare for all the classes by the end of March. Swell timing. Solidea has a bunch of stuff to prepare for her trip home in 3 days and I´ll be adjusting to a heavier work load as it is, so why not add a few more items now, since I´m collecting work? Yeah, a bit irritated.