Teaching

Today was the first day of our last full week here. It's crazy to think of how soon we're going to be finishing up and going home. For the past 2 weeks, we have all been working in our service learning jobs. We haven't been seeing each other every day, and we have all been super busy. It's been weird, but good.

I have been working at a Christian school here in Leon with the English teacher. I have sat in on classes and observed, worked with students individually and in small groups, and wrote a curriculum and lesson plans. It has been a lot of fun. I have learned a lot from the experience. One of the ones that I have told the others many times is that writing curriculum is awful. It isn't fun, and it's very frustrating. Writing lesson plans is a lot harder than it seems. It's not easy to engage middle and high schoolers in a class that most of them don't really want to take!

Today, I started teaching the curriculum and lesson plans that I wrote. The classes that I am teaching are basically just review for the student because they didn't do well in the class during the year. We are just going over basic vocabulary and conjugating verbs. I was a little overwhelmed this morning. It is hard enough to explain why some things (like irregular verb conjugations) are the way they are in English, in Spanish, it was way hard for me. I was really tired by the time the morning ended! I'm teaching these students for the rest of the week and I really hope it goes well. Despite how exhausting it was, I did enjoy it!

For now, besides going to the school every morning, I'm just working on final papers and projects for my other classes (they are all due or being presented next week), relaxing, and spending time with my family. I am loving spending time with them and am sad that I'm going to have to leave. They're wonderful. However, I'm also really excited to get back home to my family and friends. There are also various other things that I'm homesick for... my bed, some certain foods, hot showers...). I'm also sure that there will things that I'll be 'homesick' for in Nicaragua too.
These next 2 weeks should be wonderful. I am hoping that I really enjoy them. I have made amazing memories and some pretty awesome friends over this past semester. I am looking forward to continuing with those friendships and having more adventures throughout my life.

Costa Rica

This semester has been flying by. We have all finished our elective classes. All we have left is 3 weeks of service learning (which starts on Monday) and a week of finals, a goodbye party, debriefing, and home. So Crazy!

This week we are in Costa Rica. Part of the reason we are here is because our visa's only last 90 days, so we needed to leave Nicaragua for 3 days in order to update them and finish out our semester. The other reason is because we are studying the immigration of Nicaraguans to Costa Rica. It resembles (but is not the same as) the immigration of people from Mexico to the US.

We visited the neighborhood of La Carpio in San Jose, which is sometimes referred to as 'Little Managua'. Costa Ricans don't like going near there and all claim that it is dangerous, the Nicaraguans are violent, and that they steal all their jobs away from them. Nicaraguans are going to Costa Rica because they think they can make a better life for themselves there. It's an interesting situation.

While we were in La Carpio, we walked around with our guide and interviewed some of the immigrants there. Many of them have been in Costa Rica for years. Their children are Costa Rican, not Nicaraguan. It was really interesting to hear about their lives and get their perspectives. Most of them said that now that they have their lives in Costa Rica, they don't want to return to Nicaragua. It's really interesting.

I'm excited to return to Leon tomorrow and to see my host family. Leon has truly become a home and my host family is easy to consider actual family. It's been awesome. I'll miss it when I leave, but I'm excited to be back home as well. It's bittersweet.