It’s been quite an adventure learning to sit back and let learning take place in a more casual fashion. It turns out that by letting go of the idea of perfection, and instead embracing good enough, we’ve ended up in the most ideal of schooling situations.
Before moving here I contemplated which of the two closest schools Eliana would attend: the poor, local public school just down the road, or the small private school taught in English. Eliana would become fluent in Spanish quicker at the public school and fully immersing her in the culture excited me. I genuinely wanted things to be low key, low expense, and local, but I worried that all Eliana would learn in the very humble and poor school was Spanish. We believed the small private school, comprised of 6 children spanning grades K-6, and located in the expat community 25 minutes away, offered a better academic opportunity. Fred gave me full decision making powers on this topic (bless his heart, but this time I actually wanted his input), and I vacillated between the two schools for quite some time. In the end we went with the private school because it just felt more familiar, and with everyone speaking English, we thought we’d all make friends quicker.
Our arrival in Nicaragua coincided with the school’s month long summer camp in August followed by two months of rainy season break. It worked out perfectly. The timing enabled Eliana to familiarize herself with the school and its students before spending all her brain power learning a new language and exploring our unfamiliar surroundings during the school’s break.
When school started in November just days after the presidential re-election of Daniel Ortega, I wasn’t yet interested in what Eliana was learning in school. Just living here still provided daily learning experiences and academics were not yet on my mind. But I was watching the routines to figure out what type of academic year it would be and assessing how much teaching I would want to do at home as the year progressed.
I could see early on that the school wasn’t going to provide the type of education I had in mind. The teacher didn’t quite know how to teach to the needs of the now 7 kids spanning six grade levels and the materials were sparse at best.
We had to back up and reevaluate our idea of education. We knew that our time here was valuable in and of itself. So after a bit of tweaking, we devised a reverse education type plan, in which I kept Eliana home one day a week for home schooling and sent her to school the remaining days to develop her social network and provide cultural and physical enrichment. We also studied together for an hour or so every Sunday.
While the tuition was reasonable, we doubled the amount spent on tuition in gas and car repairs each month (the unyielding bumpy dirt roads wreak havoc on even the toughest of cars). Eliana enjoyed the school and was able to further her love for horses and make some friends. Unfortunately, however, the friendships didn’t spill over into our private life so we found ourselves at home with no playmates. And I was spending upwards of 1.5 hours a day driving.
For 15 years I taught elementary grades in an affluent, high achieving school district. Thirteen of those years were in first grade alone. I knew that I could provide a higher quality education than any of the surrounding schools, but Fred and I kept coming back to our desire for Eliana to have friends, to not live here in isolation, and to know how to learn and work with her peers.
We stepped back and compared our life experiences here with our anticipated adventure, and we realized that we weren’t quite on our imagined path. We had hoped we would all be more connected to the local culture and that Eliana would be speaking more Spanish. The teacher in me could not completely let go of the content I knew Eliana should be learning, yet we both believed that there was much to be gained by connecting with the local culture in the public school.
So this year we decided to “enroll” Eliana in the very poor, humble, local school just down the road from our house. She will attend school for three days a week and formally home school for only two hours each day on the remaining two days. We’ll spend the rest of the time exploring interests and being together as a family.
Ya’ll may be thinking I’m crazy. So I’ll explain a little more…
Eliana did not like studying the extra day a week with me last year, even though it only lasted 1.5 hours. She was unconcerned with how much she had or had not learned during the previous week, she only knew that she had already endured 5 days of school and she wanted two days off. Because I want to make sure I adequately support both her academic development and personal interests, I want two days with her a week.
The focus of Eliana’s learning this year, however, will be to learn about a third-world culture nestled against the edge of the rain forest so in depth that it could only be learned by first hand experience. Our goals are that she will experience learning in a poverty stricken school, learn the customs and celebrations of a people different from her, experience immersion and become fluent in a second language, experience how if feels to be both different and the same, learn how to live off of the land and be one with her surroundings, and create friendships that will hopefully help form her global perspective and keep her both humble and grateful.
The local school is attended by poor Nicaraguan children, most of whom come from families that live below the poverty line of $2/per person per day, while a few children who come from smaller families with two working parents live off of $3-4/person. Most do not have electricity or running water, but if they do, they only have it in one or two rooms. Laundry and bathing often takes place in the nearby river or by using buckets of well water. Bathrooms are outhouses. Most floors are simply tightly packed, firm dirt while a few have bare concrete in select rooms. Travel is done by bike, foot, horse, ox cart, thumb, bus, and occasionally by moto.
Most parents have an education not exceeding 3rd grade, at which point they stopped school and started working, or they continued through 6th grade but did not have enough money to travel to town to the nearest high school. Some can read and spell, a few fluently, while many create their own phonetic spellings (which in Spanish isn’t as noticeable as it is in English). Many of the parents are employed in the community in which we live.
The local children have limited interactions with white children and in most cases the parents’ interactions with Gringos is restricted to cleaning, guarding, gardening, or fixing the houses in which the Americans live or rent. To the best of my knowledge, there are no “equal” relationships between the local Nicaraguans and the whites, Gringos, North Americans, Europeans (whatever you want to call us) who live here, although a few relationships come very, very close.
So on Friday morning, September 7th, when Eliana and I walked onto the school grounds for the first time to inform the teacher that Eliana would be attending her class the following Monday, the teacher stopped talking, the children froze with their eyes wide open, and the world almost stopped rotating. We may as well have had 3 heads each. Eliana is the first white child to attend the school. And she’s fair skinned, blue eyed, and blond. She couldn’t stick out more if she tried.
Leaving the school Eliana started to have a melt down, suddenly whining about something I can’t remember. I started to tell her to “redo that,” (fix her intonation and say it again) but I realized her heightened sensitivity had nothing to do with the words coming out of her mouth and had everything to do with where we were. So I turned to her, took her hands, knelt down to look her in the eyes, and instead said, “This is hard, isn’t it,” to which she responded without hesitation, “Yes, I don’t want to go to this school.”
Over the weekend Eliana expressed an interest in dyeing her hair black.
The following Monday morning at 7:00 a.m., Eliana arrived at her new school. While holding hands, we walked up the dirt path through the white fence to greet Junior, the boy we have employed to attend school with her to make sure she is safe. Junior greeted us with his best, “Good morning,” and then explained that no one had yet arrived.
Public schools officially begin class at 7:00 a.m., however they are notorious for having loose schedules. Arriving late, dismissing early, and canceling class for unknown reasons. It’s been known to drive a punctual Gringo mad. The school, having begun in February, was clearly in full swing of their late starting program.
The teacher arrived at 7:15 on an oxen cart loaded with other school kids. The passengers jumped off the back of the cart. Some students stayed on the yard and played while others ran inside the classroom to eat at their desks. A few students transported their brightly colored juice (or sugar water) in plastic baggies tightly twisted to prevent leaks and drank from them by sucking through a small hole in a bottom corner. Eliana found a small wooden chair with desk attached in the front row and asked me to sit next to her until class started.
We noticed some of the students pulling out notebooks so we asked the teacher if Eliana needed a notebook. Rather than give me a simple answer I could understand, such as, “Sí,” or “No,” she explained the answer in two sentences that I didn’t understand. We decided to play it safe and returned to the car to grab a notebook. Eliana, keen to her uncomfortable feelings, grabbed her favorite stuffed dog, Sally. Smart move on her part, I should have thought of that.
We waited and waited. Forty-five minutes later, at 8:00, still only half the children had arrived and the teacher informed me that with so few kids, she would dismiss the students at 10:00 today.
Fred picked Eliana up from school and when she got home she was eager to tell me about her day. I was nearby in a meeting and Eliana hopped on her bike to spy on me to see if I could talk. Her timing was impeccable and she filled me in on the wonders of her day. She was smiling from ear to ear and her eyes exploded with expression. She was full of excitement as she detailed for me her day in this new world.
The room was hot and she kept swatting bugs away from her eyes. She sat still in her desk for most of the day and she didn’t understand everything the teacher said, so she copied the other students. If they said something, she said the same thing. She transcribed a lot of writing from the white board and practiced reading in Spanish. There was no recess today because they got out early, but she saw chickens on the yard and she hoped she’d get to play with them another day.
As excited as she was, her first week was also an exhausting and stressful experience. Overwhelmed by continual Spanish, only having one friend, and sitting in a stuffy room with gnats hovering in front of her eyes, she managed to talk Junior into bringing her home 2 hours early on her second day. But she remained in school all day on Wednesday her third and final school day of the week.
Overcoming her fear and attending her new school has brought us immeasurable joy. There have been many times in her seven years that I have been proud of her, but this time takes the cake. Living here has afforded all of us numerous opportunities to grow and become more resilient, and and I am beyond thrilled at how strong Eliana is to not just embark on this new adventure, but to own it.