Monday-Friday, April 12-16

The days have been going alright this week. The amount of emotions I go through in a day is crazy; sometimes I feel so frustrated with the administration or my kids I could cry and then the next hour my kids do something that makes me smile or laugh. All these little frustrations keep building up throughout the day, whether because of the administration, my kids, not being able to teach well or handle my kids problems well, people being disrespectful and inconsiderate, etc, etc . All these little things add up everyday and have really dragging me down. I consider myself a flexible person most of the time and I can usually roll with the punches alright and let things go after they happen, but lately that hasn’t been the case and I don’t know why, which is aggravating. I think God uses my kids sometimes to show me how he feels when he’s trying to talk to me and I won’t listen or he’s trying to get my attention and I’m ignoring him. Maybe he feels exactly the same way I do when I’m disrespected or people won’t listen or don’t care or give me attitude. God uses whatever and whoever he wants to get our attention sometimes.

Tad said something a few weeks ago when I was really struggling coming back from Spring break, too. He said you just have to remember that you’re not here for you, you’re here for the kids. And maybe I’ve forgotten that; maybe I’m so focused on myself and how I feel that I’ve forgotten why I feel like God called me here in the first place. Maybe it’s time to reevaluate and give myself a reminder of what I’m doing here because I can’t continue my next two months here like this. I don’t want to; I want to enjoy my time as much as possible and while I know that frustrations will still come up, I just feel like right now I’m not enjoying my job. I’m just going through the motions of it, doing it, getting through the day. I never want that to be my attitude towards my job for a long time. If it is, something’s wrong with my attitude and spirit or what I’m doing I’m not meant to do for a long time, I guess. And I think that’s one of the things I’ve realized being here as a teacher (maybe just a teacher for Abundant Life): I can teach and I’m alright at it and I care about my kids and try to do my best, but I don’t think I’m meant to be a teacher.

Anyways, this week is SAG so most of the middle school kids are gone. We split up the hours between the middle school teachers, so I get a few extra free periods by not having Bible class from that. Other free periods were taken away by classes like PE (which I have to cover) and math, which I’m not technically supposed to cover; Mr. Calderon is, but apparently he has more important things to do since he’s the only principal at school since Mr. Lara is in Teguz with the kids. I really enjoyed being able to develop some more relationships with the middle school kids that were still here and hadn’t gone to SAG, whether that was just playing games with them or chatting. It’s just hard to then go back to teacher mode after that with them and find that fine line between teacher and ‘friend.’

One thing there’s been some confusion on when the teachers are actually going to be done at the end of the year; it may not be June 11, but a few days after like June 15…we’ll see. We had rain on Tuesday night with thunder and lightning. It was much needed and peaceful to listen to. I ran up Celaque the other day and it went pretty well; some days are good, some days not. I started the Joke of the Day this week with my kids and I didn’t realize sometimes how much jokes depend on knowledge of the language. The kids don’t get the jokes sometimes unless I explain them so I let them do a few in Spanish. I usually understand their jokes in Spanish, but even then I may not fully get it. That’s the thing I hate about not completely understanding Spanish, I could have more deep and relevant conversations or be able to joke around more if I knew more. It’s also the same with our kids and people here; they don’t seem to get sarcasm for example sometimes because they can’t pick up the nuances and tone besides just the words.