Today I went with a few women from a local NGO to almost all the schools in the District inviting teachers to a workshop about a teaching methodology for ecology ("Enseñanza de la Ecología en el Patio de la Escuela - EEPE") that is propagated by the Audubon Society. Since I live in the community, they are depending on me to do a bit too much. They were surprised that I hadn´t contacted all 20 teachers on the invitee list I put together. Please. It was hard enough to get all 20 names, representing all the different schools in the District. There are so many teachers, and I certainly don´t know them all much less have time to go from school to school telling them about the workshop. Things are getting a little overwhelming. At the very least, I ended up going to two schools I´ve never been to before. I really like the directors in 2 of the rural caseríos. They act as both director and only have one other teacher there to help them teach the entire school. As you can guess, that is a challenging task. However, they maintain their humor and seem more motivated to teach than some of the directors of bigger schools, and to teach well. They both complained that the PC volunteers didn´t go to their schools to do "Tito, el Tigre Tonto". I told them before the end of the school year we would...ooh, promises I´m not sure I can keep. We actually were going to do it at one of their schools but nobody was there when all the volunteers arrived, so we instead did it at a school in my town that actually sent me an official document while I was gone requesting our presence.

In other news, I started reading the most gigantic book possible about Mao. It´s co-written by the author of one of my favorite books, Wild Swans. What a terrible, terrible monster he was. I already knew that, but the more I read, the more I wish he would´ve been shot as a kid. And I´m only on page 30.