Navidad

I gave my final day of class on December 23^rd of this year. During the first part of the class I gave the final exam. Before the final I explained that I would not allow any cheating or talking during the exam. I repeated this explanation about 10 times during the first 20 minutes of the exam with increasing amounts of volume and anger until they stopped talking and unabashedly cheating. After everyone finished the exam we had an end of the year Christmas party. At the beginning of the month the students had said that they wanted to have a Christmas party. I was pretty certain that this was going to be a bad idea but I was curious what would happen so I went along with it. Throughout the month there were a lot of goings on about setting up a Secret Santa, with a total of four separate drawings of names, but in the end nobody ended up bringing Secret Santa gifts to the party. People did bring wine and champagne, which I was originally against until the classroom across the hall had a party with champagne the day before ours.

So after the final I listened to raeggetón music and drank alcohol with my students, some of whom were approximately 12 years old. Some of them left the classroom and started running around the halls, but they also did that during normal class days under the pretext of going to the bathroom so it wasn't really out of the ordinary. Things got a little loud and out of control, but not blatantly so, especially not for Peru where pretty much everything is loud and out of control to some extent. The students got orange soda and cheese puffs all over the floor and left it for me to clean up, but that would pretty much happen at any party. Really the only thing that was a potential problem was the fact that all of the other teachers in all the other classrooms were ostensibly trying to hold normal classes, and my class' party definitely had to be disturbing that to some extent, so I was curious what would happen. My theory, based on what I had observed of the culture in general, was that nobody would say anything directly to me or take any steps to resolve the issue, but instead talk about me behind my back and start a bunch of gossip. This appears to be pretty much exactly what happened. Nobody actually came into the room or said anything during the party, although my students told me that one of the teachers was looking through the windows at one point and another student said a teacher had asked who was teaching my class. When I came in the next day a girl who was kind of my supervisor was like “So, I heard you had a party with your students yesterday” and I was like “Yes, I did.” And then she looked away and didn't say anything else.

During the Christmas party one of my students whom I had somewhat befriended while I was working there asked me if I would give him a perfect score on an essay even though he had never turned it in. That really pissed me off because I felt that he was trying to use the fact that I liked him to get out of doing work for the class. So between that and the students' cheating during the final I was feeling pretty bad by the end of the class. After everyone else left, however, two of the students stayed behind to help clean up a little and they gave me a t-shirt. That was really meaningful to me, because it reminded me that not all of the students were out to take advantage of me and that some of them were really kind and considerate.

So anyways the next day I came back into school to correct my finals, turn in my grades and collect my payment before leaving for Ecuador that afternoon. When I arrived I asked the lady if my payment was ready, and she said yes but not until that afternoon. At that point I reminded her that I was leaving at 1 pm, and that I had already told her this about six times, because I had anticipated that there would be problems and tried to avoid them by reminding her I would need to be paid early every other day for a week and a half before I left. I'm not even going to go into the ridiculousness that occurred before I received my payment, except to say that it involved three hours of negotiations and me showing the account lady my bus ticket as proof that I actually was leaving. After I received my payment the first lady made me promise that if anyone asked me how I had gotten paid I would tell them that I didn't know anything about it, to which I told her that since I was leaving the country in two hours she probably didn't have to worry. She made me promise anyway.

After I finished filling out, by hand, two identical grade and attendance reports and submitting them to the administration I got on a bus to Piura. When I arrived in Piura I realized, three months too late, that it was way cooler than Chiclayo, where I had chosen to live. Oh well. Later that night I took another bus across the border to Guayaquil, Ecuador. I was pretty worried about the border crossing, as my visa had expired a month before, but they simply made me pay 26 dollars without any drama, which I was very relieved by because it was 4 in the morning at the time and I really wasn't prepared to deal with any additional ridiculousness.

I spent the next day, Christmas Eve, in Guayaquil. It was pretty uneventful except for the time spent dodging traffic, which moves unnervingly fast in Guayaquil. Cars seem to typically travel at about twice the speed limit, which is quite dangerous when you're coming from a place where gaping potholes and unannounced cross-traffic typically limit vehicle speed to about 15 mph. Bailey, who I was traveling with, and I also spent several hours wandering lost through the slums of Guayaquil, which at least I thought was kind of interesting.

I spent Christmas Day wandering through airplanes and airports and dealing with an intestinal farewell present from South America. I arrived home in Minneapolis at 11:55 PM on Christmas Day, just like in the song, but not quite. Since then I have been trying to sort my life out, with varying degrees of success, and contemplating the Role of Biomass in America's Energy Future (RBAEF).