I’m still American.

February 1 – February 7

     Happy February! Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad! Happy Groundhog Day! Happy Everything! Yup, I’m definitely still American, even after these months in Colombia. On Sunday, I went with a group of volunteers to see the Superbowl at La Brisa Loca. The commercials were local ones, so they weren’t quite as good as normal Superbowl advertisements, but the game was the same. Then, with between 2 and 1.5 minutes to go, ¡se fue la luz (the power went out)! There was nothing to do but laugh, so I did – ¡que viva Colombia!

     At school this week, I observed classes, as usual, and also helped a 1^st grader with his classwork. I think he just didn’t understand the directions, which were to write the numbers 1 through 10 three times. He needed me to check his work every time he wrote a number and he paused for long periods between numbers, so it was slow going, but eventually, he got it done. I appreciate how welcoming the teachers are at this school – I knew from training that lots of teachers here (and in the US, for that matter) don’t really like your observing their classes, but the teachers at this school don’t seem to mind too much. I learned a lot from observing one of the 2^nd grade substitute teachers, too – she kept the class more or less quiet using a normal voice volume and had teams of students compete to see which group could copy the board fastest, so that was interesting and I’ll try to use her ideas in the future.

- Punxsatawney Phil saw his shadow, so we’ll have 6 more weeks of winter…well, the US will anyway…pretty sure it will stay quite warm in Santa Marta…

- Eating raw vegetables is not normal here, which makes sense considering how recently it was even possible to clean vegetables well enough to eat them raw without getting sick. However, encouraging healthy eating is always good, so I took a red pepper to school one day for a snack. I sat in a chair eating my red pepper and quickly had a group of 1^st graders staring at me, confirming with one another that I was, indeed, eating a pepper. I let one of them try a piece and she liked it, so hopefully, more of them will try raw vegetables in the future.