Profesora, por favor como se pronuncia esta palabra? No entiendo!
I look around at the room at my small collection of ESL Beginner students and feel a sense of panic. I don’t know the phonetics of English words! I don’t know how to explain to a person how to pronounce “thirty” in the Spanish language. And so…I take my dry erase marker and calmly write “serti” on the board, while frantically searching in my mind to figure out how to pronounce the rest of the words in the lesson. But then after everyone saw the word “serti” written on the board, suddenly they understood how to say thirty in English. It was like a light dawned on all of them. And I felt a little bit better about being an English teacher.
The Christmas season has come and gone, and the schedule for the next couple months is starting to work itself out. I am the point person for ESL and each week Garrett and I will have to come up with the lesson plans for Beginner ESL. Im excited about teaching English and also learning Spanish from the Nicaraguans here too. Every night it seems like most of us on the Nica team end up in the kitchen talking in spanish to some of our new Nica friends here- Oscar, Kennedy, Ezekiel and others. We talk about everything under the sun. We taught our friend Oscar the word “awkward” in english (and also the awkward turtle!) and they teach us words for everything. We talk about life, culture, the worm in my stomach (yes i have whipworm- and they call it a gusano en mi estomago), and things that they like to do. Its such a great experience to be able to learn spanish from people instead of having to take classes.
This week we officially started all the new programs- womans ministry, prostitute ministry, organic community garden planning (im excited about that one), ESL, Vida Joven (Young life), Homeless ministry. We have so many great ideas from everyone to start working in the community with the people and this new year will have so many new changes. Im excited to see what happens in the next couple months!
Acts 17:28
‘In him we live and move and have our being’
