¡Totuma!

Totuma is a Spanish word for "all-purpose water pouring device," something I have gotten to know very well from bucket baths. It´s essentially a halved, hollowed-out fruit that is extremely useful for transferring water. Since I´m moving into a house on my own soon, I decided it would be great to have some totumas of my own, preferibly ones that I myself had made.

So now, to show you the process, I thought I´d break it down, step by step.

Step 1: Choose your fruit.

Totumas are made from a fruit called calabazo. They can get pretty huge. The one here in the picture is about the size of a small child´s head. I spent months staring at these things growing right outside my window. Sadly, I had to wait a good long while before I pick one to use, because they are best when they´ve gotten nice and hard.

Step 2: Carefully cut in half with a machete.

Here, you can see my host dad cutting the fruit. This was after he had drawn a line across the middle of the fruit with the machete. I didn´t realize it until he had me try it myself, but some machetes have a serrated portion toward the middle of the blade. Perfect for cutting the calabazo!

Step 3: Remove guts Part 1.

My host dad used the machete to quarter the innards and remove them.

Step 4: Soften remaining guts by placing calabazo in a pot of boiling water.

If you cannot tell, that is a wood-burning stove fashioned from blocks of cement, an old grate, and dirt and stuff. Oh, we go hard out here. We go real hard.

Step 5: Remove guts Part 2.

After letting the calabazo cool for a while, my host dad gave me a piece of an old SPAM can and I went at those bad-boys for about 15 minutes until the innards were all scooped out and the inside of the bowl was basically smooth and clean. There were some stubborn pimple-like bumps, but for the most part, that bowl was clean.

Step 6: Let your almost-finished product dry in the sun.
To be safe, I put the totumas out in the sun every second it wasn´t raining.

Step 7: Personalize!

My host mom put my name on one of my totumas. It kind of looks like she wrote Micolas, but who would complain about something so nice?

Step 8: Behold!

Finished product. And of course, that´s only one of them. I got two bowls from my one calabazo. How awesome is that??

English Week(s)

I mentioned in the last post that my students and I went to someone else´s English Week celebration. Well, a week or two later, it was our turn. The last week of June was English Week for the elementary school, and the first week of July was English Week for the middle/high school. And it turned out to be a lot of frustrating work, but some fun as well.

Elementary School English Week: June 25-29
Throughout the week(s), they had various English language contests. For example:

Dictation Contests. The "best" English students get a list of 10-20 words and study the spelling. On the day of the contest, the teacher (or me, in this case) reads, dictates, the words and the students spell them. The student with the best score wins. It´s an easy way to choose a winner and give out a certificate, so I understand its appeal. But I always felt we should be teaching these kids to "espeak" before we teach them to "espell." And the elementary school did this for kids as young as 1st grade! Imagine that! But hey, a 1st grade kid beat out 2nd and 3rd graders, so there is some potential with some of these kids.

Spelling Bee. This pretty much turned out exactly how I thought it would. The percentage of overall words spelled correctly was pretty low, but we found our winners. Now I am training them for the Regional competition in early August.

Mural Contests. The classrooms are asked to decorate a board with English, things that the students have been learning in class. One other teacher and I judged the murals and the winning class got a prize: a ream of paper! WOO!

(The winning mural! How priti! Panamanians use the word "pretty" as a synonym for cool. It´s so odd to hear a teenage boy refer to himself as pretty...)

(A random picture in one of the murals I judged. I was speechless. The questions I have are: 1) What in the heck is that kid wearing? and 2)How on Earth did this photo end up in a Panamanian elementary school?)

(Panamanians freaking LOVE to give out certificates, and take pictures just like this to comemmorate the giving of said certificate. This is the principal presenting a 6th grade girl with a certificate for getting a 5.0, probably the equivalent of an A+, to a student. Hopefully, it will encourage other kids to do well in English so they can get their fancy piece of paper too!)

At the elementary school, I brought activities and games I learned during Peace Corps training and they were, for the most part, a huge hit. The kids aren´t really used to having fun during class, so they were all over it during English Week.

(A group of girls playing a hand-slapping game called "Double Double," where they learned a sequence and then added some English to it. A BIG success!)

There are a handful of performances that I recorded. However, like I said in the last post, since I can´t upload them right now, you´ll have to settle for photos.

For one of the performances, a teacher and I taught a song with accompanying choreography to a group of 4th grade students. The song was called "Hello" and the lyrics were as follows:

Hello, what´s your name?
And what´s your address?
Hello, how old are you?
And what´s your telephone number?

Sit down, don´t walk away.
Close your book and look at me.
Sit down, don´t walk away.
Talk to me!
(Repeat)
And darn it if that song didn´t get stuck in my head for a week.

(The kids got into it when I was teaching it. NO problem. When the day rolled around that they had to perform it in front of their peers, they got shy and did the bare minimum. Sadness...)

I.P.T. English Week: July 2-5
The second English Week was at the combo middle/high school, and the activities were almost identical. However, this school had a dancing competition one day that happened to fall on the 4th of July. So I decided to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" to wow them with my singing skillls. They loved it. So that was fun, although it was the only thing remotely related to celebrating that I did for Independence Day.

To close out the English Week celebration, they had the Miss English beauty pageant I mentioned briefly in a previous post. It was quite a big deal, a huge event with sponsors and prizes for the girls. All 8 of the contestants got a cell phone from Digicel, one of the companies down here. And of course, there were pretty dresses and a crown and sash and girls crying. So this was a legit event comparable to any other pageant.

(The Miss English contestants doing their little dance entrance)

(The winning group of the Dance Contest performing a routine to a mix of American music)

(Me singing "Sir Duke" by Stevie Wonder. Everyone loved the performance, and I learned a great new phrase from singing the song. "La botaste, Nicolás," which roughly translates to, "You killed it," meaning the performance. And I was like, "Was there any doubt in your mind?")

(The winner, Miss English, seen here getting her sash put on by the Regional Supervisor of English from the Ministry of Education. There was a bit of "scandal" involved. Obviously, people speculated all week about which girl would win. Of course, as people can be superficial, they all thought the prettiest girls were gonna win. However, the contest was called Miss English, and the winner was supposed to be the one who worked the hardest during the English portion of the contest. When it came right down to it, the answer to a question in English had the most weight. So this girl, who is a good student, gave the best answer, and won the contest.)

All in all, it was pretty fun, although sometimes it felt like a logistical disaster. So next year we will regroup and do much better.

My Kids Make Me Proud (Written June 14, 2012)

Yesterday I went with a group of students to an English Week celebration in a neighboring community. The Ministry of Education´s English department has mandated a nationwide English Week to take place at some point during the month of June. And festivities were this week at this particular school. Their opening ceremony was a sort of invitational where kids from their own and different schools performed to American songs or did some sort of performance with English included. Our group recited a poem about soccer (appropriately entitled "Soccer" and written by yours truly). Below I have the text of the poem.

Keep several things in mind:
1) I´m not a poet.
2) These kids are in 5th grade.
3) English is not their native language.

Enjoy!

Soccer
Soccer in the morning,
soccer in the evening,
soccer all night and day.

A very simple game--
just don´t use your hands--
that anyone can play.

Kick it, bounce it off your head.
Bong! You hit the pole.
Get it back, take good aim
and hey! You scored a goal!

I will still try and post the video, but for now I suppose you will have to settle for a picture.

(Most pictures don´t do the kids justice. They´re absolutely adorable, but for some reason they don´t like to smile in most photos. And my buddy Melvin, the teacher... Well, he´s not a hard-ass like the photo depicts.)