More training

1/19/07
I take a second training in Brain Gym materials here in Antigua on this beautiful January day – a repeat of the one in San Pedro last week. There are about 35 young teachers from the Antigua area here for this training, which is given in a beautifully-designed, well lit and well ventilated building at the Familias de Esperanza project,. The first thing I notice is that most of the participants wear jeans and sports jackets, not typical (traditional) dress as they all did in San Pedro.
The training is scheduled for 8 am. Most of the participants and the trainers are there at 8, but there is a problem; the written materials, which the trainers have to use during the training, are not ready (even though I offered to help and was told they would have all been completed last week.) I am blown away by both the unpreparedness (I think what my boss at Head Start would have done if I started a training without any materials and made the participants wait) and secondly by the patience of the waiting participants. I can just imagine the HS community workers walking out in a huff if I had made them wait half-an-hour. But these folks sit quietly and chat with each other.
The trainers wait, and wait, and finally decide to go ahead and show the video first. And they can’t get the bloody power point laptop to work! They have 3 competent-looking people up in front working on it – sending the girl member of the team out to hunt for other cables, finally producing another laptop. At about 9 am, the trainer decides to go ahead and just start the training – sans video, sans written material – and actually it turns out well; a rather personal warm up for the more scientific material in the video. But I’m still blown away that these quite professional trainers didn’t get someone to check out the materials and equipment BEFORE the training. Or that the young man I thought so much of muffed this so badly.
They teach the various Brain Gym exercises and then get the various participants – mostly young teachers, all of them with little more than a high school education – the only requirement for a primary and secondary teacher in Guatemala, tho many go on to take more classes – to get up and demonstrate how they would teach the children what they had just been taught. I am SO impressed with these young folks! Confidence, a good memory for the details of what has been demonstrated to them, and already some internalization of the philosophy behind the material.
This day really speaks well for the Guatemalan people and the school system! I am really impressed.
I am also a little surprised by two things – probably because of the little that we know in California about Guatemalan culture. One is that some of the activities require the teachers to physically prompt the “children” (adult volunteers) to do the exercises, and that the male teachers seem to think nothing of lifting the women’s arms, or putting their hands on their shoulders or backs to assist them, though noone does more than gesture at the legs (and this is part of the instructions.)
The other is that references are made to the similarities in these exercises, especially the ones involving pressure points and breathing, to tai chi and yoga, and the word “chakra” is used. Although it seems to be assumed that not many have taken classes in these topics, it seems assumed that all have heard of them. And these are teachers from the small pueblos between Antigua and Panajachel, hardly a modern area.
And of course the basic wonder is that the school systems here have embraced the Brain Gym materials for their pre-kinder, kinder, and primary classrooms – taking seriously the need these children (with poor early stimulation) have for left-right hemispheric coordination and requiring these exercises for 20 mins. each morning.
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I will be going into the local primary schools in the small pueblos around Antigua with the two young women teachers whom I stayed with in the hotel in San Pedro la Laguna. Last week, they, and the woman trainer we had in San Pedro la Laguna, and I spent two days going from pueblo to pueblo, on chicken buses and walking. The local San Pedro, which I'd seen once before, now seemed sprawling and a little dirty; a little edgy. I felt better that I was there with 3 Guatemaltecan women. I remembered thinking on my first trip that I would like to live there, but can’t imagine that on this visit. A nearby school on a coffee finca was the opposite. Up a dirt lane and through a grand gate into the finca, then up two more paths to the tiny two-room schoolhouse. The smiling teacher was very welcoming. The children peeked at us from the doorway. That school should be fun. It seems that the owner of the finca started (subsidizes?) this school, primarily for her workers’ children.
Then I convinced the others that Santa Ana would be easy to reach, so we went there and found the school very close to the house I once wanted to live in when I first looked for a rented home in the Antigua area. In each case, we just located the school and got our bearings, because we have yet to get authorization to enter.
Then we walked down the road I would take for the bus, if I lived at that house, but turned left and took a back road to the next Pueblo - Santa Catarina. The trainer kept emphasizing that we should never walk this road alone. We took a look at the school in that pueblo, and then walked back to the road and took a short chickenbus ride to the project for lunch.
Then into Antigua and walking all over Antigua to see the 6-7 schools there. Throughout this time the three of them are chattering in Spanish. It seems many times that the trainer is repeating the same materials which we already learned in the training, and discussed at the meeting. Maybe these youngsters didn’t catch on as quickly as I thought, though mostly their questions are about how to deliver the materials in the classroom. The answers seem obvious to me, so it is evident that various experiences I’ve had with teaching and going into schools to observe are serving me here.

Cultural differences
There is a knock on my gate at 8:30 am on a Saturday. I’m tempted not to answer – anyone I know would have called, first. But I answer to find an old indigenous man in a plaid sweater and beaten-down hat. He asks for “Christina.” “No soy,” I tell him. He gestures toward a small bookcase nearby, with a carrying strap around it. Ohmigosh, he is one of those bent-over men I see in the street, carrying large or small pieces of furniture on their backs. I ask him, “Have you been carrying this piece?” “Oh si,” he nods, smiling, “de Solola.”
So he has been carrying this piece of furniture (since what hour of the morning?) all the way from Solola…..several hours on the bus and a half-hour walk through town….and his target customer is not to be found. Yet his dark eyes are shining with warmth and his smile carves deep creases in his face. How does he do it? My parting comment to him is not perfunctory: “Que le vaya bien.” (May you go well.)