A teacher's pride

Four times a week, Sam and I teach a beginner's English class - Mondays and Wednesdays to about 15 students at El Salero, and Tuesdays and Thursdays to about 20-25 students at El Farito.  There used to be only one beginner's English class, but Sam and I started the new one at El Salero about 7 months ago because some of our teen English students were clearly interested in and capable of an adult English class.  Beginner's English has been one of my favorite programs this year, and we have a lot of fun teaching the class.  Our students are fantastic (most of the time...:-)) and it's a fun level of English to teach.

Last week, since we had finished our six-ish month curriculum, we gave a placement test to our students.  The test was to determine if they had learned enough in beginner's English to move on to our second English level.  Out of the 33 students who took the exam, 20 of them received a high enough score to pass!  I am so, so proud of our students and how much they have learned - the reality is that when we only have 2 hours of class a week, there's only so much we can do as teachers, and the students have to motivate themselves to study more and learn English.  I am particularly excited for our teen English students, because I have no doubt that they will quickly advance through our English levels if they stay motivated and will be able to speak very good English before they graduate from high school.  Knowing English is a huge help in getting jobs here in Nicaragua, so it will be a very useful skill for them to have at such a young age.

Every rose has its thorns, though, and this is no exception.  The 20 students who passed the exam will be moving up to elementary, and Sam and I are very sad to see them go.  It'll be strange not to go to our English classes next week and be greeted by the familiar faces of our students, but we're hoping to have a new batch of students interested and excited about learning English!

Farito beginner's English

Salero beginner's English - the silly version.

Community

Something I have struggled with all year has been finding a sense of community here in Nicaragua.  Maybe this struggle has to do with the fact that I have an unbelievably loving, supportive, and generous community in Houston which it took me the better part of 18 months to truly become a part of, and so my standards for community are pretty high.  Or maybe it's because, regardless of how much time I spend in Cedro Galan, Chiquilistagua, and La Chureca, my life will inevitably remain different from most community members - I'll go back and sleep in my comfortable house in a gated neighborhood down the road, and eventually I'll go back to my even more comfortable living situation in the United States.  No matter what I do, I will always be an outsider, I will always be different, I will always be a visitor - or so I thought.

On the Saturday of Easter weekend, I was putzing around my house when I received a phone call from my friend Martha.  Martha is a community member who I have gotten to know well and who is very involved at the church I frequent in Cedro Galan.  Martha called that morning to ask me if I would be willing to do one of the readings at Easter Vigil that night.  I enthusiastically agreed, we discussed the details of when to arrive and what to wear, and then we hung up. 

Since high school, church has been an incredibly important community for me.  From high school youth group to the Catholic Student Center at WashU to the young adult group and youth ministry leadership team at St. Clare of Assisi Catholic Church in Houston, much of my experience of community has stemmed from my involvement in a church.  And while I go to churches here on a pretty regular basis, I wasn't involved in ministry and didn't truly feel like a part of the church community - just a visitor on Sundays.  Being asking to do a reading changed that for me, though.  I was extremely flattered that I was asked, for two reasons:  first of all, it made me feel like the community viewed me as a part of the community, and I can't even explain how much I appreciated that and how rewarding that feeling was.  Secondly, I was frankly slightly surprised that they trusted my ability to read in Spanish enough to ask me.

I did the reading that night, only stumbled over two words (which, let's be honest, I likely would have done in English too), and appreciated the community and the Mass even more than normal.  Throughout the next week, lots of people commented on the fact that I read and complimented me on my Spanish.  More so than any other time during my year here, I truly felt like part of the community; I truly felt like I belonged.

At the end of the day, the truth is that my life is different than most of the people I serve.  It has been a struggle for me not to feel guilty for this, or not to feel angry about the inequality.  Ultimately, I will never 100% be a part of the community - but as I stood at Easter Vigil and proclaimed the reading from Genesis, I looked out at the congregation and felt like they were my community, that I was at my church, and that, just maybe, the differences didn't matter as much as I thought they did.