Things you can do, and things you can't do

I haven't seen the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie yet, but lately I keep thinking about a quote from the first installment. Johnny Depp says to Orlando Bloom, while the latter is hanging precariously off the side of the ship: "There's two kinds of things in life: things you can do, and things you can't do. Either you can accept that your father was a pirate, and a good man--or you can't. Now, I can let you drown, but I can't bring this ship back into port all by me onesy, savvy?" As far as I know, my father was never a pirate, so that part of the speech has little bearing on my life. The last sentence, though, is how I've been feeling lately about several of my projects here, particularly Communication, and I'm discovering that a big part of the international volunteer experience is figuring out the difference between the things you can do and the things you can't do, and then learning to live with that.

For those who don't speak Captain Jack Sparrow, "all by me onesy, savvy" means "all by myself, got it?". The more I come to understand how Fe y Alegría works and what it needs, the more I realize that the things I would really like to do for these students are impossible for me all by me onesy to accomplish. What the students need is an English class that teaches them to really use the language instead of just memorizing phrases. What they need is a Communication class with a planned syllabus, where they are informed well ahead of time of all their assignments, where they are taught first to write paragraphs taking evidence from the text to answer a question and then to put those paragraphs together into essays, where they have homework that asks them to think instead of just to fill up their notebooks with summaries of each chapter they read. What they need is a real music teacher who would know how to coordinate the various vocal and instrumental talents of the students into a well-organized group or two. In other words, to truly fix the things I'm working on would take no less than three full-time teachers doing their jobs impeccably. Essentially, what the students really need is... not to need us.

But they do need us. However frustrating it is for me to look at this school, analyze where it is now, come up with some changes that would be essential to giving these students an excellent education, and realize that those changes are impossible, the immediate reality is that this year I can help a few students move a little closer towards that excellent education they aren't getting. Instead of patching up the leaks in the boat, we're bailing. Not a permanent fix, and by itself it won't bring the ship back into port, but it helps a little in the meantime. It's hard for me to work this way because I've always been a big-picture person. When I do things, I really do them, and I'd rather do one thing well than many things poorly. I get stressed out when (for example) I realize that the kids aren't going to have their reading questions for Monday because both they and I have just been given Monday's reading on Friday, and I can't demand that they take a quiz on the reading because I wasn't given the opportunity to tell them that there would be a quiz, so Monday will be yet another day of nobody having read and me not knowing what to do with them--in short, when I can't make the class "work." And I think, I can stop doing this if I want; I can walk away, dedicate myself to English classes instead, and let these students "drown" without something solid to hold onto in this class; but I can't fix it alone because I'm not the teacher. But then the next week I do manage to give them questions, and we talk about the setting and plot and start analyzing the characters, and they have fun re-telling Treasure Island from John Silver's point of view, and it's so clear that they need what I'm doing that I really want to continue.

So it turns out that much more difficult than either letting them drown or bringing the ship back into port all by your onesy is doing neither: staying with it even though it cannot ever really "work," learning to live with doing something halfway because halfway is better than nothing. A very difficult lesson for me. But this whole world of Peru is full of things that are different than I'm used to. Less academia, more cooking and cleaning; less news from the US, more freedom to be Catholic without the difficult politics of Christianity right now in America; less structure, more flexibility. Peruvians in general are not as stressed as Americans, and I'm trying to learn from them to just live with a little failure.

Meanwhile, my English groups are more or less under control, and by the end of the year if nothing else I will have taught "to be," the question words, and adjectives for describing people to every student in 9th and 10th grades in this school. It makes me laugh that I usually have class in an auditorium with holes in the roof where birds fly through, and my dry-erase board has stains on it from bird poop (so far I myself have been lucky). My fourth grade chorus is absolutely darling and often the highlight of my week. They are learning to sing in tune and working on doing rounds, and I hope to take them to a city-wide arts festival in November where they can perform and listen to other student groups! Some of them are so unbelievably excited about singing, they always yell "La señorita de canto!" ("the singing teacher!") whenever I appear, and they give you kisses on the cheek to say hello and goodbye. The secondary chorus has issues with showing up when they're supposed to, so I may be cutting out the Thursday rehearsal in order to accompany some of the parish women in taking communion to the elderly--something I have done once and am interested in doing more. The only other news lately is that Peruvians are constantly having parties. Last week was our friend Sara's birthday, Sister Denise's goodbye dinner, and Sister Magda's birthday all in one week. All the ice cream and cake is probably not good for me, but the celebrating sure is fun.