Wale 2 and English class

Yesterday was a good day.  I had a meeting to introduce myself to the community of Wale 2, since there's technically 3 parts of Wale.  I took a bus up the hill about 10 minutes with Don Pedro to meet with a group that I figured would be maybe 5 or 6 people who remembered to show up. Turns out 26 people showed up!  They don't have a communal meeting place, so they all gather around the bus stop.  Which means there was no place to tape up my posters of information about Peace Corps and what I'm doing here.  So two guys held my posters for me, blowing in the wind, while I gave a quick presentation about Peace Corps in Nicaragua.  Then afterwards we had an open discussion about the needs they had in their part of the community.  Potable water is always top on the list.  Then latrines, a 'casa comunal' where they can have meetings, and other things like accessibility to credit and loans.  So I set up a meeting to discuss starting a community bank and plan to attend the next FUMDEC women's group meeting for that sector.  Overall the meeting went really well,  I had a great turnout, people listened, and seemed really interested in what I was doing there.  But that's just the first step.  Meetings can be easy if people seem interested; the real deal is when people actually show up to work on something or work on a project.  We'll see. 

Then in the afternoon was my first English class.  I wasn't sure how many people would show up and what ages they would be.  I've had interest from all ages (not from people older than 40 or so since they don't really expect to get a job using English), but didn't know if the adults would show up considering they knew how many kids were interested.  The turnout was about 20 or so young adults and kids, including one of the school teachers.  I started out with some basic classroom rules in English and Spanish, like raise your hand to speak, no cell phones, and show up on time to class.  Believe it or not most of them showed up within 15 minutes of the start of class. I started out with the alphabet and we ended up playing hangman for an hour and a half, them spelling out the words in English and me giving them new vocab words.  It was loads of fun for me and for them, and overall went really well. 

I'll keep you posted on how the rest of the classes go!  Plus the garden, this Tuesday we're planning on actually planting the seeds!  Yay! 

More later. . .

~Sarah~