A Day of Instruction...

  While posting another thrilling History of Paraguay post (some university will publish it... you watch), I realized that much to my chagrin, there is nothing on here about what we do here or how it's going.  I'll give you a quick run-down.

   It's Tuesday morning, and the cheap cell phone Krista and I bought starts an obnoxious beeping to inform us that it's 6:30.  After counting my new mosquito bites, I shower quickly and sit down to eat breakfast quickly with Krista and Berta before I have to be out the door by 7:00 or 7:15.

  It really doesn't matter exactly what time I leave.  This is because it will always be 30 seconds too late and the Line 18 bus will pass by while I'm waiting to cross the road.  Then I wait 15-30 minutes for the next bus 18 to come and whisk me away to the Mennonite World Conference headquarters about 30-45 minutes away.

  Krista and I have started volunteering there lately with our free time in the mornings entering registrations into the database.  It's a decent excuse to sit somewhere for three or four hours and listen to NPR on the internet.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I make sure that some combination of buses and walking gets me to Emanuel Mennonite Church by 3:00pm.  The conference offices of CONEMPAR (the Spanish-speaking Mennonite conference) are behind the church and that's where class #1 takes place with Dario.  He's the conference treasurer, and requested an individual conversation class to keep up his nearly fluent English skills.

  At 4:00 my first class of beginning English students arrive.  Lisa, Antonio, Jemima, Dámaris, Joanna, Graciela, and Yolanda come through the door with a "Hello teacher!", which is something that I've gathered everyone in Paraguay learned in high school English.

  I generally run class like this:  We spend 5 to 10 minutes talking about what day it is, what day yesterday was, next month, last month, etc., and about the weather.  Then, 15 minutes is devoted to grammar exercises.  After the grammar, I try and wake them up by having a 15 minute section of responding to commands.  The guys in the picture below (from the class at my other church) are going up the stairs and down the stairs.  We spend the remainder of the one hour class working at vocabulary through a Bible reading or sometimes songs. 

  This process gets repeated at Emanuel at 6:30, and at Amistad Mennonite Church on Mondays and Fridays at 6:30 pm.  Generally, the students who are taking time to study and practice outside of class are improving very quickly.  

  After class, I typically take two buses home because of the dark, and end up back at home for supper at 9:00.  All the time spent on buses (at least 2 hours a day) has been a good opportunity to keep up with reading.  I just finished John Grisham's "Runaway Jury" in spanish, with bus tickets as my bookmarks.  

  Curious about something else that we do?  Shoot me an e-mail and I'll tell you about it.