Teacher Tirtza

My newest project is a book club. I have had three meeting and each time it has become more popular. The first Saturday I had eight kids between the ages of 4 and 13, the next Saturday there were 9 and this past Saturday 18 kids came. We do activities like make puppets of the monsters from the book "Where the Wild Things Are" or make Curious George masks and then we read the book. Although the library isn't open on the weekends, the mayor gave me permission to use it and now I even have my own key. I am hoping that I can get some members of the youth group to help me because there will probably be some Saturdays when I won't be able to make it and also with 18 or more kids it would be nice to have some help. At first the parents, and some of the kids, thought I was going to grade their work. Now I think that they realize it is just for fun, but many of the kids at still call me "profesora".

Last week I taught my first classes in the school. The school is putting in a school garden and I said I would help with it. My first class was about the ecosystem of a garden. When I first talked to the school they said 4th, 5th and 6th graders would be the ones working the most with the garden. The three grades were small enough that we decided we could combine them. When I showed up last Wednesday things were a little different. In Paraguay the kids only go to school for half the day. Either in the morning from 7-11 or in the afternoon from 1-5 with a half hour break in the middle. There was some rearranging in the school and many of the kids who were in the afternoon changed to the morning so the classes were a lot bigger. I ended up doing the activity three times in the morning and twice in the afternoon. Also, they told me that 1st, 2nd and 3rd grader will be working in the garden too and the preschool and kindergarten kids will probably want to be involved as well. I don't want to spend all day every day in the school so I'm not sure how I will work things out. I'm wishing now that the teachers and other people involved with the school worked at the small school. On Thursday I taught my first recycled art class with my host mom's 9th grace class. The plan right now is to teach recycled art once a month. For my first class we made wallets out of milk cartons. All the school kids here get free milk and cookies everyday so there are a lot of one liter milk cartons.

Here in Paraguay pretty much everyone is Catholic so Holy Week is a national holiday. They only had classes Monday and Tuesday and any official offices closed on Wednesday as well. A big tradition for Holy Week is to make chipa. The closest thing to chipa I think is a large soft pretzel, but chipa is made from corn and cassava flour. The dough is dry and crumbly at first so you have to knead it a lot until it becomes soft and you are able to shape it. They spend Wednesday making tons of chipa and eat it for the next few days. I helped my neighbor make some. She had prepared 10kilos (22lbs) of dough. We literally made hundreds of chipa. They cook the chipa in a brick oven called a tatakua. They build a fire inside and when it gets hot they sweep out all the ashes and it stays hot enough to cook the chipa. Some people cook chipa on banana leaves which gives them a different flavor than if they are just cooked in a pan. Over the next few days everyone I visited gave me chipa. There was no way I could eat it all so I used it as a snack at my book club the Saturday of Holy Week. In stead of having Easter mass on Sunday morning they have it on Saturday night. They also have a service on Sunday morning, but my neighbor said it is mostly for people who didn't go to the service the night before.

I forgot to mention in my last post, but the same day I moved into my new house I also got a bike. It belonged to my host mom's father. It hadn't been used in a long time and she said if I wanted to fix it up I could use it for the next two years. The first question a few people asked me was weather or not it had breaks. I thought it was kind of a funny question until I started looking at many of the bikes around town and most of them don't have breaks. Fortunately my bike has breaks. Some of the stone roads are a little bumpy, but after a few times I have learned where the smooth parts of the roads are. I took it out for its first long trip a few weeks ago. I headed to Brook's house for her birthday. Brook is the volunteer who lives about 10 kilometer away. When I arrived they were just bringing home the pig she bought for the birthday BBQ which wouldn't be until the fallowing evening. I ate some of the freshest pork I have ever had. Within a few hours of slaughtering it we were eating a stew like meal made from the liver, the heart, and maybe the lungs. I didn't ask too many questions I just ate it.

I recently made a book shelf for my house. It is made from 100% recycled materials. I used wooden crates used to ship fruit and I made string out of plastic bags which I used to lash together to boxes.

Photos: 1) My first book club with Where the Wild Things Are puppets 2) Me reading Where the Wild Things Are 3) Me kneading chips dough 4) My neighbor and the 10 kilos of chipa dough 5) My neighbors putting the chipa in the tatakua 6) Chipa cooking on banana leaves 7) My bike 8) My shelf