Dog fights and Classroom keys

Today we had meetings at the school from about 8am until 3pm so it was a bit of a draining day. We learned a lot about the curriculum mapping that is required of all teachers (if you’re a school of ed person reading this you can imagine just how exciting these presentations were!) and how much planning and collaborating the school had in mind for the teachers. It was good information to go over but it wasn’t anything we hadn’t been instructed on throughout our entire education program. We also had a chance to meet with Colin, our primary school principal, to ask a bunch of questions about the upcoming year. He’s a great leader and has really high expectations of us while still remaining flexible and understanding. I am so looking forward to working with this elementary team!

It seems that no country has really escaped the economic crisis of this decade and the school is really being hit hard with budget cuts. Katie (a super cool grade 1 teacher from Minnesota), Makenzie (a super cool grade 4 teacher from Canada), Aubrey and I are considering pooling our money to get a car, preferably a VW van so we can be the coolest gringas in Guatemala. We still have a lot of time to consider it and plan on talking to the returning teachers about the necessity of having a vehicle but we are keeping an open mind in light of the inability for the bus to pick us up every morning.

We also got the keys to our very first classrooms today! Aubrey was sweet enough to take some cheesy pics of our excitement at getting one step closer to being real live teachers. My room is pretty tiny so I’ll have to get creative with 23 little guys in there. I also only have a chalkboard, which if you know me well you know that those things give me the creeps! I’m trying to be positive about it but am considering dressing like a ninja and hopping the barbed-wire fence in the middle of the night to steal a white board out of one of the high school classrooms. I’ll keep you posted.



It’s a little after 10pm while I’m writing this and, like clockwork, a pile of dogs are going nuts outside our apartment. It’s so bizarre! There are probably about 15 dogs that just sound like they are being murdered at 10pm every night. Last night Aubrey yelled from her room, “Is someone killing all the dogs in our neighborhood?!” I really don’t understand it and hope to get to the bottom of it sometime soon so I can steal one of the dogs and give it a nice, non-death-like home.

Tomorrow we are headed to Zona Viva (the nickname for Zone 10) for Laura’s birthday. I think all the new teachers are really looking forward to a night out and away from thoughts of curriculum maps, dying dogs, exploding washing machines (I’ll tell that story later), and the general overwhelming-ness of moving to a foreign country. I hope this note finds you well!

-Hannah