Too Much Caffeine and Too Many Kids

5-26-09

Yesterday was a very long day. I woke up a little before 6 and was out of the house at 7am. I´m really not into being awake super early, though Paraguayans seem to love the wee morning hours for whatever reason. I am, no matter how early I wake up, always the last up in my house. My host family--parents and 2 teenagers--are all out of the house before 6am. My host dad sometimes leaves at 4:30 for work. This is baffling to me. I sometimes run into them en route to the bathroom in my middle of the night/their morning. (It is obnoxious, by the way, to have to wake up enough to heave a bucket of water into the toilet.) Anyway, yesterday I went into Limpio itself to do surveys at the big high school there. I don´t believe I´ve explained Limpio thus far. (Excuse me if I have.) It is, at a glance, a mix between a town on the Pennsylvania turnpike (think Breezewood, PA) and a small Jersey town outside of NYC. Again, not a place where many people stop to look around. That being said, I like Limpio a lot. If ou get off the main drag there are nice little places to eat empanadas. The center is the church but since it is surrounded by a fence, it is nearly always completely dead. The church doors are locked and there is only the occasional person napping or playing with children in the far corner of the yard. I´ve also found that it is an excellent place to read since the polka VS reggaetone fight to be heard can be avoided and I don´t have to spend any money to sit.) There is also a good sized market area where I often buy pears and successfully bartered for a comforter last week. (It got so cold one night last week and I only had a sheet, so I wore thick socks, spandex, sweat pants, a t-shirt, long sleeve shirt, fleece, and winter hat to sleep!!)

The high school I went to is a national school on the same street as the municipality, police station, and the church. They have morning, afternoon, and night classes. I did a survey with 183 high school juniors asking the basic information (sex, age, neighborhood), if they worked, how much they study, drug use, alcohol, sex, condoms and HIV/AIDS knowledge. I still have to finish tallying the results, then I´ll figure out where to go from there. Some of the kids were rude and rowdy. The smallest class was 39 and the largest was 57. In between giving the surveys I basically drank too much caffeine (I recently found a place that went ot to buy Nescafe after I ordered a coffee), looked over some of the surveys, and finished Crime and Punishment. I´ll definitely have a great deal of down time in the next two years and just started, nerdily enough, my own personal book review. It is excellent.

Anyway, I´m hoping the surveys are at least mostly true, though who really knows? I guess I´ll never know. The night class was the most tranquilo and the nicest overall so I´m going back to observe them tonight. Though, very unfortunately, I´m sure it will be boring. Most of the teachers either have the students copy from the board or from their dictations. There is no way I would have survived in a classroom like this. It is excruciating to watch and I really don´t know how the kids swallow any information. I´ll keep my fingers crossed to be pleasantly surprised...