Happy Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day everyone! Two posts in two weeks!! Woo hoo!

Today, to celebrate earth day, the kids got out of school early (what else is new?) so they could go around town picking up all the trash that wouldn´t have been there if they hadn´t thrown it on the ground in the first place. And I was greeted by a pile of burning trash (the more plastic bags, the merrier!) when I got to the elementary school this afternoon for my 6th grade class. Ha.

I only went to school in the mornings once this whole week because my counterpart´s daughter is sick. The only reason I went the one time is because I didn´t know she wasn´t going to be there and was guilt-tripped into teaching alone. I explained to the principal that if I teach alone (which is against the Peace Corps and Ministry of Education rules) I´m not capacitating my counterpart which is the goal of the project. She said she didn´t see a problem with it, but if I was uncapable of handling the kids alone (not the issue) then I could leave and she´d have them copy random sentences on the board that they wouldn´t understand. So I stayed and taught alone, but after that day I was sure to call my counterpart before going to school to see if she was going or not.

I´m not entirely clear what´s going on with Danny Ortega and the Sandinista government here, but I´m pretty sure he did something unconstitutional again, which provoked a bunch of riots in Managua in the past few days. Everything here in my town is fine and I have no reason to go to Managua, don´t worry! My host sister´s boyfriend was over last night after we got back from my community English class and was saying apparently some pro-Sandinista things. My sister just sat there nodding her head and playing along (My family is very, very anti-Sandinista). When the boyfriend left, my mom let my sister have it. She said (with a wide array of Spanish curse words) that the boyfriend can´t ever talk about politics again in her house, that he should have known better and that my sister´s an idiot for not putting him in his place. The yelling went on for a good 10-20 minutes. I knew my mom was super anti-FSLN but I´d never seen her so outwardly-passionate and intolerant about it before! Today she explained to me that the Sandinistas kick people out of their houses so they can give (for free) those same houses to Sandinista supporters who then turn around and sell them for profit, or stay there to live. One way in which they literally ¨buy¨ the people and the elections. I´m not sure how accurate that is, but based on the politics I´ve seen, it wouldn´t surprise me too much if it were true.

I think that´s it for now! Off to my community class...