its almost here...

in exactly 23 days julia raymond will be taking her first steps on colombian soil, officially starting our reunion after a year and a half apart and our 2 week adventure which will include pueblitos of antioquia, and an amazing semana santa trip to capurganá, one of the few untouched, virgin, wild beaches on the border of panama and colombia.

pumped am i? hell yea.

and so it goes (again)...

my brother just went to his first gpm (gmm, asamblea general, whatever you call it). 

and it all starts...

so i guess i seem to have a tendency to put myself in some of the most difficult and challenging situations i can possibly think of. most of us in aiesec and on nomadlife are like that...masochists. this past week has been no exception. finally i started in the schools in marinilla, waking up at 430AM to catch the hour bus ride at 6AM to get us there by our 7AM class. i never really realized how hard the reality would be up there, seeing as i had never worked with kids before and never NOT worked with privileged teens and adults that have the resources to take english classes. 

the reality hit at once, when i was put in a room with 48 1st graders alone because the teachers thought that because i was there they could just leave and go tend to the other 2 classes that were under their watch at that time, seeing as 2 teachers were absent and substitute teachers seem to not exist in this school (they usually just replace the teachers with an 11th grader). cry number 1 of the week. eventually we got our groups split into 15 students each, and one would think things would get easier, but no siree. 

i would just like to say i give all the credit in the world to teachers. they are the ones who deal with the lives and futures of kids and are responsible for the well being of 20-30 some odd kids at a time, needing to balance the needs and challenges of each child simultaneously. this week in my 5 classes i have seen just how difficult that can be. in my 6th grade i have a blind girl named carolina. i never realized until the moment i met her in my class just how visual a teacher i was, and how everything i had ever done involving teaching now had no significance to this child. cry number 2 and a start from square one. in my kindergarden class i have a student name maria fernanda. maria fernanda is 5 years old, and she has been suffering from a brain tumor for 3 out of those 5 years. because she developed a tumor so young, cognitively she is no where near everyone else. she cant produce, can only mimic, and cant seem to control her urges to burst out when she gets excited about something. thus brought about cry number 3 right after a session of duck duck goose.

so that was week one. week 2 has started out a lot better, now that im in the rhythm of things and am able to handle the 430 wake up call. 

last week also started my grad program. no cries thus far, but lets just say my head starts hurting about 15 minutes into each class. my mind is just not used to concentrating on such technical and academic spanish for 4 hours at a time that it literally wants to explode by the end of the night. also i feel completely lost with the architecture vocab in spanish, though slowly but surely im starting to get it. 

on top of all this i have 2 private students. mas-o-chist. 

though this past week has been one of the most challenging of my life, i must say i wouldnt change anything about it. i should take that as a good sign, right?