Carnival!

Carnival was... words just can't describe it! lol

I started off on Thursday at the beach after a big meeting at my site. And then on Friday we drove down to the Azuero Peninsula to celebrate in Las Tablas. One of my friends rented out the house of someone from his site (who then decided that she was going to stay too... leaving us with one bedroom and 15 people!). I'm glad I left early Monday morning, cause my liver sure wouldn't have been able to handle two more days. As it was, I think I was the only one in my group of friends not drinking at the discotecas. It's a marathon, and if I was going to make it as long as I did, I knew I would only be able to handle some drinks from noon to 4pm, nada mas. Well okay, one of the days I played flip cup after we got back to the house, but then called it quits. Oh... lol and I had a rum and ginger ale the very first night, but that was only because the Vice President of Panama had his secret service bring it over to me and my two friends. That was a crazy day! We shook hands with him at the parade, and he asked if he could take a picture of us. Then he sent it to the US Embassador of Panama, with a text message saying, "Your Peace Corps Volunteers are celebrating Carnival in Las Tablas. I'm taking good care of them." Then of course we got a picture with him and that's when he invited us to join him in his VIP area of the club he owns. (He owns half of Las Tablas too, plus the main alcohol company of Panama (Abuelo and Seco rums, and Balboa and Atlas beers), plus Pub Herrana (Herrera?) which is a club in every major city of Panama for all celebrations, fitting at least a couple thousand people in each one. When he introduced himself to us, he told us that he was the VP and all that he owned... as if we didn't know who he was already. hehe) But needless to say, we were taken good care of!

Then in the culecos (the water craziness during the day), we got on top of one of the water tanker trucks and danced and squirted people with the fire hoses. And then we got into one of the VIP areas that are elevated as well above the wall of people in the streets. (I dont' like being squished with a bunch of people, so it suited me well!) And that had an open bar. You can see then why I called it quits at 4pm when that part of the day ends!!!

All in all, it was a great last Carnival in Panama! I'll send pictures as I get them from people, as I wasn't going to chance bringing my own camera. Ahhhh, now back up to site and back to work!!!

I went to the last day of the teacher seminar today. Boy, the agenda wasn't followed at all... Instead of analyzing the environmental education guides (or touching them at all), evaluating the workshop, anything helpful... we listened to a powerpoint on the types of puppets and spent the rest of the day making our own puppets and creating a puppet show in groups. Wow. And they werent' even the puppet shows out of the guides (since the written objective of the workshop was to orient the teachers in the use of the guides). Soooo, that was pretty much a wasted day. I'm out of site again, which means I have internet. Life could be worse. :) And I'm earning major brownie points from ANAM, MEDUCA, and my Peace Corps bosses. Gotta rack those up while I can! I'll definitely have a thing or two to say to the National Director of Environmental Education when I meet with him on Monday. Like... hey, if you want educators to teach EE in the classroom and want them to use the guides you just spent a ton of money printing... maybe in the workshop you should do more than just pass out the guides after five days and 40 hours of sitting through irrelevent lectures and doing random dinamicas (minus the itsy-bit of time you gave the Peace Corps Volunteer, aka me, to explain everything about the guides). Of course, I'll have to be more politically correct when I offer that suggestion.

Teaching

My teacher training went well. I presented a lot of info they had never heard before (always good in keeping attention), and the index that I made addressed all their concerns from the previous person's lecture on how they are supposed to carry EE through all their subjects. Unfortunately, there was some major confusion on the part of the planners, so I had to drop my activities on how to use the indexes. But the teachers were all flipping through them through other people's presentations, so hah! I won and had the more interesting and useful info. :) I go next week to present it in the city with my boss to the national directors. And I'm picking teachers' brains this week in the seminar for more info for our CEC guide.

Lol, you'd appreciate this... Yesterday the teachers were divided into groups and assigned an EE activity to present to the whole group. I was sent to help one group who had what would seem to be a pretty easy activity on vertebrates. They had to draw five verts on different pieces of paper, write what group of vertebrates it belongs to on the back, and string it all together to make a mobile. So they draw a snake and label it a reptile. Good job. Then they draw a dog and label it a mammal. Nice. Then they draw a loro (parrot), pollito (chick), and a pescado (which means cooked fish that you would eat instead of "pes," the animal, but I wasn't even going to go there). They labeled all three "egglayers." Hmmm, okay, so that is a characteristic of them, but that's not their group. It took me 20 minutes of trying to be pc with them and explaining the heirarchy of animals (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, etc), rereading the example in the book "mamífero, ave, etc". They kept arguing back. And finally saying, "What I'm trying to say is, you're wrong." Then one person in my group got it and took an extra 10 minutes arguing with the others to change it to "birds" and "fish." Oye! But then again, it reminded me of EE seminars in the states that some teachers who had NO science background attended.

And I really am leaning more toward middle school science. While I like that high schoolers have more freedom with classes (like opportunities to get into teaching AP Bio and AP Environmental Science), clubs (like a science one ro Wilderness Club, etc), and push them toward internships (like Mrs. Santiago did with me to get me the cancer research one at Stanford)... I could get stuck teaching Chem or Physics or something, which isn't what I'd like. The middle school curriculum is what I'm more interested, and any of them (6, 7, or 8) would be okay. The lower pay of middle school would also come with less work and pressure I think too. So I'll change that sentence in the personal statement. :) Thanks again!