Navidad in Valledupar: or, Colombian Christmas number one

During the two weeks of holiday break from training, my host family decided to take a family trip to Valledupar, the World Capital of Vallenato, a typical Colombian dance and music that includes an accordian as its signature instrument (Merengue is a type of Vallenato, so maybe that helps with the mental picture). To get there, we trooped onto a 4 hour bus and headed first north along the coast towards Santa Marta before veering to the right into the country, further into the Sierra Nevadas.

To be forewarned, this post got mega long, so here are some highlights:

-it was a definite vacation: the family with which I stayed (my abuelos' daughter and her husband, both doctors) is quite well off. We ate fancy food and traveled everywhere in a car. crazy!
-Navidad included eating a ridiculous amount of food and being mandated to drink inordinate amounts of whiskey
-They abducted me one night and we went to a vallenato concert in a little mountain town that included small children playing the accordion insanely well
-after a long contemplation, during which lasagna made with cream cheese and pickles took second place, I've decided the strangest food I was fed this week included a sandwich on a hoagie bun slathered in mayo, piled with different types of fried sausages, and then topped off with quail eggs and parmesan cheese. (I've almost forgotten what vegetables and/or fruit are. I don't think they showed up on the table once this week! Not counting the pickles)
-I met my first explicitly anti-American here, who happened to be the revered grandfather on the other side of the family with whom we stayed...which made a few family events a little bit interesting

-pictures of things coming soon, when I can load them onto a computer!

And now, my week:

Valledupar is a city that I haven't been able to get a number of inhabitants on, but from what I saw felt like a smaller, but more modern Colombian city than Barranquilla. Some of the biggest differences were more space in the streets, traffic that actually followed rules, a river bordering the city where townspeople and tourists hang out alike, a large population of indigenous people, and oh yeah, an incredible vista of mountains from every point in the city.

(Sad thing about these mountains was that no one goes walking or hiking in them at all. They're apparently not as safe, between rebel groups and unfriendly indigenous folk, so you only get to look at them and, if you're a nature-deprived city dwelling pc volunteer like me, with lots of rules you have to follow and such, you just sigh wistfully an inordinate amount)

The other thing Valledupar is known for is the statue of the mermaid down on the riverside. Rumor has it that there was some girl who liked some guy so much she wanted to stay in the river forever so she became a mermaid. not too original..and of course there's the rumor that if you bathe in the river you'll always return. So I was encouraged strongly to bathe in the river but I abstained...if only because I like the power of choice?!

During the week I stayed in my abuelos' daughters' house in their daughter's room, which entailed sleeping on pink sheets opposite an army of blond haired, blue-eyed baby dolls. If I'd ever watched Chuckie I would be very afraid. I substituted mental images of Rugrats instead.

It was an interesting week for many reasons, highly augmented by the fact that I wasn't kept totally informed (read: at all informed) about minute to minute events. I basically was given a basic overview of the week: on the 24th, we will eat a lot--and then things just sort of happened according to an external plan. In order to not be left in the lurch, I practiced what must be a slogan for some military or police type group, aka "Ready at a minute's notice." Sometimes this accomplished the desired readiness...other times it left me sitting for hours with the abuelos in the ever present rocking porches on the patio. But I suppose that either way the practice will probably serve me will in case of some national disaster.

Christmas gifts and celebrations here happen on the 24th. So, on the 23rd, I accompanied the mother of the little children (7 and 9) on a city-wide gift shopping tour. This turned into an epic quest through multiple "Exitos" and "Carrefours"--the international equivalents of Targets and Walmarts and the like (although these are considered very upscale here, and their prices reflect it although their quality is equivalent). The particular target of our search, in this case, was for "Bey Bladze," which is apparently an international phenomenon. They are plastic tops that are launchable by a little plastic launcher-thing, and kids can have top-battles with them. Here they pronounce them "Blay Blays," which is fairly amusing until you spend an entire day searching for them; unable to find the desired set, we got five of the identical-looking but differently-numbered "bey bladze", and we were finally set, if you will.

(On a side note, brand name toys here are ridiculously expensive...we're talking 40 American dollars for a Barbie, 100 dollars for a bigger doll, 40 dollars for an action figure, and prices just go up from there..)

Here, Christmas celebrations take place mostly on the 24th, with a lot of eating, reunion-izing, sitting, drinking, eating, and a little bit of gift giving. I'd heard church happened, but somehow I never saw or heard of that happening with my family, which still leaves me a little bit confused, in this highly religious country (my family is highly Catholic, so I don't know what happened there)

As for the food, we were a cater-in sort of a family this year, which included ordering a lot of food from Olympica, the local Colombian super market. We're talking, a giant turkey, another spread of turkey-like meat stuffed with spam-and-other-spam-type-meat, desserts, bread, more bread, and well, I don't even remember.

Either way, here's how Christmas goes, (rich)-Colombians-in-Valledupar-style: On the 24th you spend a normal day eating and sleeping. And then, around eight, you gather to wait around. And then one or two hours later you troop 5 feet to the neighbor's house, who happens to be the father in law of the wife/father of the husband of the house. And then you drink an excessive amount of Old Grand Parr Whisky, forcibly given to you in high ball and shot glasses, sometimes simultaneously, and finally eat turkey close to midnight, and keep eating and drinking until who knows. I say who knows because around one, falling asleep in my rocking chair, I was escorted back to the house where I could sleep in peace. Thank goodness.

Christmas morning dawned in relative peace, and I was able to use Internet and relax in my room for a few hours before the small children began running into my room with their newly discovered gifts from Papa Noel. The rest of the extended family stumbled into the house by around noon, at which point it was "espaganza" making time--aka lasagna made with spaghetti because we had spaghetti noodles and not lasagna noodles in the house. Fulfilling the rare role of sous chef, I had a front seat view of this concoction, which included making a sauce from tomatoes as well as onions, red peppers, carrots, celery, and pickles--yes, pickles--and mixing this with the most random assortment of meat loaves ever. I say meat loaves because I don't know how better else to describe these tubes of meat that had things like olives and unidentifed colorful objects there. Sort of like lots of gourmet bologna. The dish also included the colombian version of mozerella cheese, milk, and cream cheese. If anyone is interested, I can write you up the recipe... (it actually tasted much better than it should have?!)

While cooking time was happening, I was asked if I wanted more whiskey. This, I took to be a joke. In fact, I only realized the earnestness of the question when an opened beer was pressed into my hand, and from that moment on, I was never without an alcoholic drink. As I sipped slowly, the men kept remonstrating me, and then taking my half drunk beers and replacing them with full ones because they said the other ones had gotten cold, and I needed to drink more rapidly!

After being yelled at for not finishing my espaganza (was it because I was drinking too much beer? I was asked by the womenfolk rather snarkily, in my opinion, all things considered!) I escaped to my room for a brief respite. But soon thereafter I was told in no uncertain terms that we were going to "the river." As Valledupar has the river and mermaid thing going on, I naturally assumed this is where we were headed. We piled into a car--my abuela, her children, her daughter's husband, and two or three small children on our laps, and off we went. Whiskey was immediately pulled out, and so all the adults, Abuela included, recommenced taking the tiny sips of whiskey that (fortunately) pass as shots around here.

Then we passed the river. "Where are we going?" asked naive Emily. "Oh, a little further away." Hmm, thought Emily, this is an interesting answer, as we headed into the mountains. "We're going to a party," says Manuel. "Oh, with family?" "No, with friends." "Ahh. Close by?" "Not too far--in a different department." (departments here are like states in the US, on a smaller scale). "Oh," says Emily. "Ok."

And off rolls the car for another hour. At which point we pulled up at a giant vallenato music festival. Aka a party...With friends...

So, there we stayed for the next six hours, whiskey on the plastic table we rented, watching amazing little kids compete in a Vallenato competition, and then listening to groups play. Fairly wonderful music, all in all. A car of us left with the children a little before midnight, but apparently it went until 6am. If I hadn't been regulated to sitting with the womenfolk I would have loved to stay...but here, if you're not a man/are a girl but don't have a boyfriend, you either have fun and get thought of as a "loose" woman, or you sit with the women who play games on their cell phones and take care of their children. In this case, my family left me no choice and when I once tried to wander off to explore a little, I was remonstrated heavily!

The other days were reserved for recovery, sitting around the house, and eating said quail egg and fried meat sandwiches, and then driving to different places to chat with family friends. And finally, a bus back to Barranquilla, a home with no internet or frills, but one that serves fruit every day and is not filled with small children! (all of the kids have now met all friends who skyped me this week, whether invited to join in the conversation or not...yay for cultural exchange!)

But all in all, it was the strangest and most random Christmas I've ever had. It was also definitely a window into how "the other half" in Colombia live, since this family is clearly well off and for the first time while being here, neither I nor the people around me were counting pesos--rather, pesos were thrown about freely and for luxery items. I sort of forgot what it was like, to not live on five dollars a day, and to see excess food in the fridge, and go out to eat! It all definitely made me feel quite spoiled, that's for sure. But the family was just wonderful, so welcoming, and I even felt fleeting fondness for the small children, who generally drive me to distraction...but no, in all seriousness, the family was pretty incredible, and made sure I felt at home the entire time (Gradually I am learning what that means, in colombian terms)...Anyway, for not speaking the language (well), not knowing any customs or the people I was with, my first foreign Christmas was certainly a happy affair overall, thanks to the family and despite its idiosyncracies (and fondness for alcohol!) Although what stories they'll be telling about the gringa they had for Christmas, I hope I never know...

Juramento

In a burst of semi-anticlimactic ceremony, On Wednesday, 1/14/11, we 22 trainees swore our oaths to become a part of the first official group of two year volunteers to serve in Colombia in thirty years.

Because Colombia was part of the first group of original Peace Corps countries, way back in 1961, our swearing in ceremony was also the last “official” 50-years-of-Peace-Corps celebration in the world. (Who knew that DC has been celebrating it in different ways the entire year…but it has, and we were the last of these celebrations)

In real-life terms, this all meant that we imported Stacey Rhodes, the Chief-of-Staff of all of Peace Corps, from Washington to speak, played some wonderful Peace Corps movies created about Peace Corps and Colombia that had been shown at the Folk Life Festival in DC this past summer, and got a few fun doohickeys of 50 year celebration memorabilia (A pen! A patch! A sticker!)

Highlights from the ceremony included: a traditional band playing the Colombian national anthem while we sang along, a man who warbled the United States national anthem on A LEAF (yes, that’s right, a small leaf became an instrument with which the man produced a pitch perfect rendition of the anthem, vibrato, high notes and all), speeches from the mayor of Barranquilla, Stacey Rhodes, the US ambassador Paul McKinley, a wonderful speech by two volunteers, Jessica and Kasper, and last but not least, the Peace Corps cake.

The best parts were probably seeing the pictures and watching the movie of the original Colombian volunteers, including Maureen Orth, high up in the beautiful mountains of Colombia working with the people here half a century ago. The movie also included snippets of an interview with the current president, President Santos, who talked about having a Peace Corps volunteer stay in his house when he was a child. As far as ceremonies go, it was a success.

And then, of course, later that night there was the wonderful moment of listening to my abuela here describe the history of Peace Corps to her relatives—about how we were called “hijos of Kennedy,” (children of Kennedy) and we promote peace and such . Such a great cultural exchange!

Historical side note: the idea for Peace Corps started when Kennedy arrived for a stump speech at the University of Michigan. He’d arrived at 2am and hoped to go to bed, but upon seeing thousands of students waiting for him, he gave an impromptu speech where he asked if the students would be willing to serve 2 years in another country to share our culture, bring about peaceful relationships, and learn about other cultures in return. The students answered yes, and literally, that’s when the Peace Corps was born. Kennedy signed an executive order creating the Peace Corp two months after he got into office, and that very year the first volunteers left for their countries. We have a volunteer here now who was part of the original crop of volunteers in Colombia and is serving a second time, who describes how his mother heard this speech on the radio and told her sons that they would go into the Peace Corps…and as Bob says, after those years of service, he never left.

Anyway! The whole thing, despite being lovely and such, was anticlimactic because unlike most Peace Corps ceremonies, which mark the graduation of trainees into the real world of volunteers and everyone heads out to their sites immediately thereafter, we returned for class on Thursday and Friday, and after Christmas will have two more weeks of training. Apparently Washington wasn’t able to get us out here originally soon enough to have timing work out, so now we hover in the ether land of volunteer-but-not. So for now, all we can do is enjoy Christmas break, endure 80 more hours of classes, and then finally, mid-January, move on to actually beginning the next two years of the rest of our lives!

 Peace Corps  Cake!

Traditional Band that played the national anthem 

Paul McKinley, US ambassador

Paparazzi

The Barranquillan mayor aka part of one of the richest families here, but is apparently one of the best mayors in the country and thought to be in the running for  president in then next decade

Volunteers!

Andddd...Carnival Festivities Have Begun!

This weekend my abuela took me to our local Casa de Carnival because the queen of this year’s Carnival was passing by with a troop of traditional Congo dancers. And no, these dancers aren’t from the Congo, as for some reason I assumed…instead, they actually dance the Congo line…you know, “duh duh duh duh duh DUH!”

Anyway, as gorgeous as this year’s queen is, I was slightly disappointed to hear that the selection process isn’t even close to democratic. As my abuela explained, the queen is picked by the committee who runs the carnival. So she’s always rich, from one of the high stratas, often the daughter of political figures, etc. Partially this is for connections, and then the practical reason is that she buys all her outfits for the year, apparently…dresses, masks, etc. And of course, she has to have time to attend the numerous festival functions all year round.

May I remind you, Carnival starts in FEBRUARY, but they weren’t kidding when they said festivities began with the Immaculate Conception; here are some pictures of the 2012 queen!

For some reason, the men put soft-porn pinup girl pictures on the back of their traditional hats. Really couldn’t tell you why, nor did my abuela have any sort of explanation for me!

One of the more tame images:

Tuna Rice: A Recipe

On Sunday I stayed in the house for lunch (the largest meal of the day), something I often try and avoid because being fed three meals a day in the house means engaging in obligatory consumption of large helpings of food spaced quite widely throughout the day, something with which I still struggle since I love snacking!

After eating a sweet corn arepa, scrambled eggs, papaya and corozo juice (which tastes something like a grape-cherry cocktail, like an Ocean-Spray-esque flavor but better) at 8:00 am, at 2:00 pm I gave in and made myself some popcorn (Popcorn here is always old-fashioned style, in a pot with hot oil on the stove, woot). At the sound of all the popping, my abuela walked into the kitchen and accepted a little popcorn…and then told me it was now time for lunch! Figures.

Lunch turned out to be tuna rice with boiled plantains, which I helped cook. Soooo, here for any of those interested, here is the recipe for Barranquillan-style Tuna Rice:

Ingredients:

·         Two cans of dark tuna, stored in oil

·         Half a small tomato, not too ripe

·         A very small onion

·         Two scallion stalks

·         One cup of scrambled eggs (if you have them, leftover from breakfast, etc)

·         A third cup of oil

·         Half a cup of ketchup

·         Five cups of cooked rice

Directions:

Chop onion, tomato, and scallions and sauté in the oil, and if you happen to have butter left over in the arepa pan from breakfast, that can be used as well! Drain oil from tuna cans into the pan, and mix that in, too. When vegetables start to soften, add the tuna and ketchup. Combine and cook over medium heat for a few minutes, until tuna is broken into small pieces and everything has started to sizzle. Add scrambled eggs and rice. Mix well.

At this point, sit in the rocking chair, make some phone calls, and have a little chit chat while tuna rice finishes warming. Then serve with a hunk of boiled ripe plantain*

*This is one of my new favorite ways to eat savory rice dishes. Whether or not I ate large amounts savory rice dishes prior to arrival is a different story, but anyway. When eating something like rice with chicken, or rice with tuna, the custom here is often to take a very ripe plantain, cut it into halves the hotdog or hamburger way, boil it, and serve it with the rice. It’s a little sweet and is a delicious counterpart to the salty, oily, savory rice. The closest I can come to an American equivalent is peanut butter on crackers with chicken soup, always a childhood favorite. Mmm. 

Tuna rice and plantains:

Junior!

The eighth was a holiday—no school even for the Americans(!). The day is hypothetically spent catching up on sleep (See: Immaculate Conception) but the continuation of loud music far into the daytime hours made that impossible for me. Instead, I went to a soccer game. Each department has a team, and ours is called “Junior.” Given the name, the fact that the sponsor right now is a pasta brand whose emblem is a doll (and here, the sponsor’s emblem is ALL over jerseys, the field, etc) and their mascot is an adorable bouncy little shark, at first glance it does not seem the most ferocious. Except don’t be deceived: Barranquilians LOVE their team, and their ferocious loyalty by far makes up for the cute nature of the team emblems. 

A few of us and host family members headed over to the stadium, which is on the edge of Soledad, a district here of a similar notoriety as Harlem, or Roxbury. After receiving TWO full patdowns, we climbed into the “Oriental” section, which is the cheapest section. The seats were great in that everyone got full views, but they are not so great in that they face the setting sun. However, due to unexpected providence, a patch of clouds conveniently blocked out the worst of the rays for the majority of the game!

Here, there is an interesting scoring system that if the game is a home game, you receive one less point no matter what. Or something like that. This happens cumulatively, so, due to a long string of scoring events in past games, the logic of which still eludes me, Junior needed only to tie to make the playoffs…but if they lost they were out completely. Needless to say, tensions were high. And when the other team, Chiquo, scored two goals in quick succession during the first half, the mood got ugly. At one point a fight broke out in the adjacent section, and the ongoing bass drums from the two separate field-side bands certainly gave an ominous backbeat to the game. During half time, Junior’s goalie got into a fight in the locker room and was red carded…but fortunately the other team lost a player to a field fight as well, so we played with equal teams for the rest of the game!

Other fun, only-in-Colombia-sorts of things—

The crowd cam! Crowd cams are, of course, popular crowd entertainment devices. I once attended a baseball game where crowd members were implored to pant and bark like dogs. For some reason, those crowd members complied. Here, the crowd cam’s main purpose was legitimately to find the hottest girls it could…and then focus on their most attractive features. Sometimes the women got up and did some sexy dancing for the camera, causing happy excitement in the crowd. Needless to say, most of the breasts were not real. Conversely, the camera also occasionally paused on a less-attractive woman…at which collective groans went up from the male members of the audience. And then there were the few spotted kisses. When the women tried to hide their faces, Tyler’s host dad said to me, “Those are probably not their wives.” 

At one point, a rather full beer came sailing down from the top of the section. Now, I’d already been hit with a cup, and there had been some others thrown. But this drink showered enough people that a few guys got up, which turned into half the section standing, pissed at the guy who threw the cup. Here in Barranquilla, the symbol for “cut it out,” is to put two fingers to your throat, as though you’re sticking or shooting yourself in the neck. So combine that with a murderous glare, and multiple that by about fifty people doing this, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be the culpable person.

Fortunately, something exciting happened in the game and attention was distracted, and no fight broke out in our section.

And equally fortunately, Junior tied! Meaning that we didn’t experience ridiculous fights or scenes. Merely someone taking out the firecracker launcher they’d brought in with them and shooting off a series of something that looked like bottle rockets. This was, mind you, only a week after a referee was hit by a firecracker in the face at the beginning of the previous game, where the entire game had to be canceled because of it. But no one seemed to mind…so hey, free fireworks show!

After the game was done we hustled out. Since Junior’s colors are red and white and are striped, and approximately 98 percent of people at the game were dressed in Junior jerseys, we kept hands on each other so as not to be forced into the most difficult game of “Where’s Waldo” ever.

And somehow, we found a bus within 10 minutes, and headed home! All in all, it was a successful sports venture, to be sure.

Where's Waldo?

 Stadium at sunset, post-game

On Speaking Spanish as a Professional

In my few interactions with professionals with whom I will be working side by side come January, it’s come glaringly to my attention how deficient I am in professional tools—most of all, in language.

In terms of the European framework of judging language level, I’m swimming somewhere in B1. Basically, this means that I have survival-level Spanish. I can also converse to some degree of theory on topics I am somewhat familiar with. With my teachers here, who are accustomed to my “special brand” of Spanish, I can usually get along decently well, as long as they’re willing to talk fairly slowly and/or repeat themselves, occasionally pause to explain new vocab, and sometimes explain in different ways. However, talking Spanish on my own in a school setting is a whole new ballpark.

Well, duh. None of this is surprising. That Spanish is more difficult out of the classroom is a given. It doesn’t help that there are those whose costeño accent is so thick that Colombians from other parts of the country have difficulty understanding (my principal happens to be endowed with this sort of accent…although everyone from the coast speaks in an altered accent to some degree).

 And yet, I didn’t take into account how much more difficult it is to speak Spanish in a formal setting when nervous. At my school, we held our first meeting in Spanish since la rectora was there and she doesn’t speak English. At the end, I spoke a little. I’d prepared some in my head, but the words, sentence structure, and what felt like rational thought absconded from my mind as soon as I opened my mouth. I stuttered over words I knew, through in some fake words, blushed away, and apologized profusely as I muttered my way to a close. 

Of course, being language teachers, the English teachers were awesome about understanding my predicament. And yet, they already see me as a “joven”—a youth—since I’m the same age or younger (23) as many of their children. The fact that I’m short and appear young otherwise doesn’t help my cause, either. Of course, I’ve been through this transition of others’ perceptions from youth to professional at my job at Epic, when I worked with CEOs and surgeons alike in an “advisor” capacity. However, getting to wear professional clothing and speak academic English helped my case quite a bit. Here, where skin-tight jeans and blouses are the norm (my skirts and shirts in their varied degrees of formality, in contrast, appear somewhat outlandish)…and I speak a broken, child-like version of the language…well, this transition of perception may take a while. 

Ultimately, until losing it, I hadn’t realized how tightly I clung to my language usage and abilities as a tool to shape others’ perceptions. I can’t even begin to explain how much more empathetic I feel towards non-native speaking professionals I’ve met in the US, whose communication ability so often shapes others’ perceptions of not only their competency but their intelligence. And in some ways, the perceptions reflect a degree of truth—without the ability to effectively communicate, some aspects of competency are certainly lowered. Yet intelligence isn’t! And too often we let those assumptions go hand in hand. Not that it’s a new goal, but I need to settle, take a deep breath, think, study, and hopefully use this next month prior to my official start of work to gain a little more solidity in the language, thus hopefully gaining in tandem the ability to establish myself as a professional and forge needed connections within my school. Just one more Peace Corps challenge…good thing I have two years to overcome it!

That Flexibility Thing

So, remember that whole post about… “Site Visit for Realsies,” is how I believe I put it…? Well, scratch that! The Monday after that visit, I told Olga, our wonderful amazing project manager, about my experience in order to talk through next best steps. Olga, however, took immediate action. Turns out the school was indeed on probation due to the former volunteers’ experiences. The fact that they never contacted me and didn’t have the wherewithal to even notify the English teachers I would be at the school seemed to be enough to convince Olga to take away its Peace Corps volunteer.

Having come to this conclusion, Olga notified the Secretary of Education in Bogota as well as the school and within the day she’d gotten a new school to commit to having me(!) I’m pretty sure she’s magic. After two months of coastal living, I had assumed this would take months rather than hours…but costeño time is a different topic entirely!

So, anyway, a brief rundown of my school is that it is…none other than the school I went to for my Field Practicum! So you can reference that post if you want to details. Highlights include that it is an all-girls school, the English coordinator is wonderful, there are seven English teachers to work with in addition to primary school teachers trying to start an English curriculum, and although the coordinator is wonderful there are many areas that can use improvement.

I never thought I’d ever say this, but I’m so excited to work in an all-girls’ school! Here, in a machismo culture where woman are almost uniformly expected to perform traditional gender roles, womanizing by single as well as married men is an open and accepted practice, small boy children are taught by their older relatives to yell disgusting things to women on the street, random men on sidewalks  mutter things into your ear like “Que linda, oh que bonita” and much worse, and even nice, perfectly respectable host fathers say things like, “I know you’re thinking this, but I’m just going to say it: Colombian men are hot…and there’s a rumor that we all have big penises. This isn’t necessarily true. But there is a reason for this rumor.” (word for word, I swear)…well, needless to say, mixed-gender classrooms of hormone-filled 15-18 year olds was going to be a tough one. I feel like this simplifies classroom management a huge amount!

In keeping with the model of efficiency that Olga is, she arranged for me to meet with the teachers and La Rectora—the principal—on Friday. We met for an hour to discuss arrangements like host families, a little bit about the coming year, and a few other sundries. It was easy to see that the teachers were united if not in teaching methodology, then in their care and concern for the welfare of the students. Although I came out of the meeting excited, as the teachers were wonderfully nice, I also left a little daunted as well. Why?

 I will be the first volunteer at this school. The teachers are all made up of the “old-guard” teachers—not new ones recently hired. There is no intrinsic push to develop a more holistic English program; instead, I will be interrupting momentum long-established. In the grammar v. conversational style of teaching, lines have already been drawn, and most ebb towards the grammatical teaching method, with no huge impetus to change.  Oh, and did I mention I have only a little formal teaching experience?

Obviously, I will have to emulate the change in the schools, as well as be extra clever in my work with the teachers to make the change an intrinsically driven one. It will have to be gradual. Fortunately, we have weeks of observing at the schools built in so that we can plan strategies. I will have to get to know these teachers before I know more about how I will approach this. Either way, I think that, especially for the first year, I will be doing more in-class teaching than I’d originally planned. However, having an amazing coordinator as well as a strongly united school should be amazing!