Mudslides and Dentures

So, if you have a minute, send some good vibes to Guatemala. Things have been pretty rough for the people here since the sinkhole, volcanic eruption, and tropical storm that happened in the spring and the economy just never really recovered. This weekend, we had a crap ton of rain that created mudslides throughout the lower half of the country. One slide went right over a bus near the Pacific coast and killed everyone on board. Today, we found out that one of the major highways the buses take to get to school was blocked from a mudslide and the buses had to take an obnoxious detour. Some of the kiddos were on the bus for FOUR hours! A few of my students just didn’t come today because they could not get out of traffic for several hours. There’s talk that school may be canceled tomorrow since 5 of the buses will not be taking kids to school tomorrow because they physically can’t get through the route. I won’t lie, it would probably be better if school were canceled because if half of my kids are gone tomorrow I’ll have to reteach everything when they come back to school anyway. But I guess whatever happens, happens.

Today, I was trying to explain something to my students when my retainers gave me the most intense lisp. I had so much trouble saying the word and my kids started cracking up. I told them that I wear these things called retainers on my teeth that make it hard for me to talk sometimes. They had blank looks on their faces with that explanation so I took them out to show them. Before I could get them all the way out they all screamed! They legit thought I was pulling my teeth out of my head. It was SO funny I about died. I made sure they knew that it didn’t hurt me at all it was just a way of keeping my teeth straight. They still looked panicked and shocked so I told them it was like putting a sock on your foot; it fits tightly and you can’t even feel it. I took them on and off a few more times to show them it was all good but they still looked really uneasy. Some of them were laughing pretty hard but no one was laughing as hard as I was. Its weird to think that they can’t even conceptualize retainers. There’s a cultural difference to the extreme.

I talked to Walter, my Spanish teacher, today at recess about running because he is running the Chicago Marathon in October. I told him that I only run at the gym because I haven’t really found a safe route in my zone just yet. He said that where he lives in Zona 10, the streets are safe and beautiful and he runs every morning at 4:30. Then he offered to pick me up on Friday morning so we could go running together! I am super pumped to get out on the streets and have someone to run with. Plus, Walter only speaks Spanish so it will be awesome to try to carry on a conversation with him while we run a 12K.

Anyway, that’s about all that happened today. Oh, we also don’t have internet in our apartment because we never received our bill and thus never paid it, haha! Natalio, this guy that kind of guards our building, thinks that since our apartment is new that it hasn’t made it on the mail route yet. So we have no idea when they will turn it back on, or when or how we pay for it so in the meantime I only have email access at school. Hopefully we don’t get covered with mud in the next few days and that everything is well for you all in the USA :)