¨Teacher¨

The worst moment and the best moment! Ha ha- let´s start with the worst because it is pretty darn funny when I think back on it. Not in the moment though. It was a cold and rainy day here in Cuzco, which really doesn´t affect me in any way now that I´m inside the entire day. One of the mysteries of Cuzco has been how the women walk around SO much wearing high heels. Now that I´m officially a teacher I have to dress up like one and I wanted to feel local so today I set out to do the impossible.... I took my walk to school in my heels. Shouldn´t be too hard... except those few places where I go through the dirt and the places where the roads aren´t even, or the hills I´m going up, or the cobbled stone that I walk on (that stuff is slippery!!!)..... I can do it!!!! And I DID! But... as I got to one of the corners just out side of the school a taxi goes flying by. Less then a foot away from me was the biggest puddle I´ve ever seen & I see it coming but can´t do anything about it. It splashed ALL over me... all the way up to my face. I look down at myself covered in wet mud from head to toe... and thought to myself-¨damn I looked good in these high heels¨.

The good... after drying off a bit later in the day we had a five minute break and I ran up the street to buy some water. There was this kid across the street yelling that caught my attention... ¨teacher! teacher!¨. I felt kind of bad because at first I didn´t acknowledge him until I finally realized.. HE IS TALKING TO ME. I almost broke down in tears in that moment it was sooooo sweet. I think that moment will pull me through the rest of this class this week just hearing him call me- ¨teacher¨. They are so sweet in class when I ask them to read or describe a word and they can´t and they look at me with these huge brown eyes and tell me ¨no teacher¨and I can´t get frustrated with them. They have a LOT of respect for the teachers here... they are held very highly. My class is about 8 students the youngest being 18 and the oldest I would guess is 50. Good mix.

Today class was great... we had to talk about how the Minoan civilization was destroyed. Not the most exciting topic... but tomorrow should be fun. I´m going to have them create their own civilizations in groups and then each group will have to present their civilization and convince me that their civilization is the GREATEST civilization in the world. So they will have to do some persuasive writing. Should be fun. They will get into it quite a bit I think. Thursday will be hard to spice up as I´m teaching grammar.. the Future Perfect tense. Blah! I´ll have to figure out a way to make it fun for them.

Well it is 8:00 and I just took my daily break of writing.. and now I have to get to my lesson plan and homework for class tomorrow so I can make it home by midnight and be up and at em tomorrow morning for another day. There are 8 people in my host family right now and I´m always the VERY last one home and in bed and the VERY first one up in the morning... The only time I see my host mom Marina now is at breakfast (which I wish I could skip so I could set my alarm 20 mins later.. but missing breakfast is the highest sin here so no-can-do). She thinks I´m crazy. Haven´t seen the boys since the weekend and I don´t know if/when I´ll see them again??? It is going to be hard that this is all going to end so abruptly. I´m teaching until 7:30 on Friday and leave at 7:00 am on Saturday. I´m planning on taking my host mom and whoever is around out to dinner on Friday after teaching to tell her thanks for all she has done for me. She is cooking 24/7 it seems like & sometimes I feel so bad that she never takes a break from it, so I´m going to try and treat her to a night off. Should be a good last night.

Planning.... right.... back to work....