Rats, English, and Luz

Rats: I think there may be one living in my box spring. My bed has a box spring, a mattress, and then a mattress pad on top. A few nights ago I started feeling like something was running through my mattress. I turned on the light and it stopped. Then I felt something tugging on my mosquito net. I realize, it's probably a rat. So I open my mattress and realize, thank God, it can't be living in there, but there is a hole in my box spring and it's probably living there. Since my mosquito net was tucked between the mattress and the box spring, it was probably trying to chew some of it off for bedding. We were going to kill it with poision but the thought of a rotting rat in my box spring isn't that appealing. So, we are continuing to try and trap it, but he's a tricky little bugger.

English: The other volunteer near here and I started our community English classes on Sunday. We still teach in the high school, but this is for whoever wants it, including high school students who want more. We have a huge turnout (like always for the first meetings of things like this), including the principal and the high school English teachers (who, in reality, don't speak a lot of English) The teachers insisted that we start a class just for them, because they want to learn the methodology of teaching English. We relented on the condition that all the adults take one class and the younger students take another. Here comes our two problems: 1-Neither Claire or I know the "methodology" of teaching English, and in reality there are only two teachers that need to know this. Plus, as they already teach English, the methodology should already be known, right? 2-Since we had so many students, we wanted to split it into two classes, but to us, the logical way to split them was to put the students who already had some English knowledge in one and those who don't in another. They thought it was smarter to put adults in one and students in the other, never mind some adults know nothing and some teach English and some students know a lot and some have never been exposed. Heaven forbid a teacher sits in the same class as a child. So now, some of them will be pushed to go faster than they should and others will drop out because they are being taught stuff they already know. Will be interesting.

Luz: Translation, light. When the lights go out here the saying is "La luz se fue", meaning "the light went out." The last few days have been one storm after another and the "luz" has "se fue" a ridiculous amount of time, as has the internet. It is still shocking to me, even though the lights go out all the time here, people are still almost shocked when it happens a lot. I sit on the porch and watch the high school kids cheer (They go to school at night and if there isn't any light or it goes out, school is cancelled).

Thanksgiving is in a week and I am super excited. The volunteers put on this huge feast in the capital, so I actually get Thanksgiving type food!