Somehow, a year and half of really enjoying myself have flown by pretty quickly, and I'm already staring down my last five months in Immokalee. I'm starting to field a lot of questions about what's coming up for me in the summer and fall, but I'm going to keep my focus on life in Immokalee before that stops being an option.
Things in 2011 have already started up fast, and if last spring was any indicator, it's going to be May before I have a chance to blink. The CIW is gearing up for their big protest against Publix this March, which means a couple of months of frantic planning in addition to weekly protests all over southwest Florida. We spent last Saturday protesting in Tampa and Clearwater, and will be on the road at least one weekend day for most of the next month and a half. As exhausting as it is to leave Immokalee at 8 AM and not get home until 10 PM, this past weekend was a reminder about why and how I fell in love with the Coalition (when we were on the same type of schedule in the fall of '09). Nothing brings a group together quite like 35 groggy and crabby road-mates, unexpected weather, confusing directions, incorrectly delivered pizza, or a mega-phone that unexpected fires off a siren noise in your ear every 10 minutes. And I mean that completely without sarcasm - I love these road trips more than anything else about Immokalee.
On a side note, the Coalition made big news once again with an article that made the front page of the New York Times business section - click here to check it out.
On the Habitat front, it's been decided that I'm officially part of the roofing team, which means that, whenever it's an option, I'm to be laying plywood on the roofs of the houses going up. This is all right with me mainly because I love the roofs - they're like big-kid jungle gyms that hover a story off the ground. I've got decent enough balance that my jelly-legs usually go away within a few minutes of arrival, and there's nothing quite like working on a roof at 10 AM on a sunny morning in January. This switch also means that I get to constantly embarrass myself with my lack of finesse with the saw, my lack of upper-body strength and thus extreme struggle to carry full sheets of plywood, and my inability to put a nail down when the plywood is bouncing up and down and my coworker is breaking his legs trying to hold a the roof beams in the right location. I usually prefer to work on the projects that will directly translate into my future-homeowner skills (shingling, tiling, siding, etc.), but that probably defeats the point of volunteering, doesn't it?
And finally, your after-school update. In case you don't quite know the set up, in our after school program, each class is made up a composite of kids from 2 or 3 regular (day-time) classes. The programs classes are held in regular (day-time) classrooms, which means that the classroom we're in for after-school is almost always different than the ones our students use during the day. Also, many of the real teachers are still in their classrooms after hours, which means that they're at their desk working on paperwork or grading while you're trying to run your class. This can go many ways, but usually it's one of two: 1) the teacher in your classroom appears to love you, or 2) the teacher in your classroom appears to hate you. The first half of this year, I was in a classroom where I was lucky enough to have drawn the (1) card. In January every year, we switch classrooms - this time, I drew a (2).
In addition to the regular kinks that need to be worked out with the classroom transition (what we can and can't use, where the kids can sit, what tutors can borrow but kids can't, etc.), one of my boys decided to pee all over the bathroom. Our new host teacher didn't enjoy this much. I gave a big speech on Friday, we devised a system for figuring out who had been in the bathroom last, and we started randomly checking the bathroom after kids had used it. This must have made a big impression on my kids, because the next week, when our new host teacher went to use to rest room, she found something a little different. This time, what appeared to a collaborative effort result in urine on the toilet, wall, and paper-towel dispenser, and, impressively, someone had pooped on the floor. The result was a pretty horrifying (though well-deserved) rant from our new host-teacher, whose voice is so perfectly "grade school teacher" that I found myself avoiding eye contact and grumbling "Yes, ma'am..." with the rest of the class. Things have kind of picked up in the last week or two, and my kids now know what "feces" means, so at the very least it counts as an educational experience.
To close things out, here are a couple of Kids Say The Darndest Things moments from this month so far.
- While talking with one of my boys who was explaining how he lost a shirt he liked:
"Bryan, I thought this was the story about how you lost your shirt though?"
"Oh, yeah. Then I lost it later."
- One day, in the cafeteria, one of my girls pulled all of my hair back to the top of my head and started giggling at my Lackey hairline. She then held her hands on top of my hair, giving me the appearance of complete baldness, and composed a pretty impressive rap song for the rest of the class:
Mr. Dennis is an old old man, he's a oooold man, he a old man, old man, old man,
he look like a papa, he a papa, he a papa papa papa,
he so old he look like my grrrannnddma,
but even my grandma don't cut up all that hair on the sides of her head,
which mean Mr. Dennis is a really old man,
he older than my grandma, he old old old, he older than my grandma,
Mr. Dennis you's a oooold man, ooold man, Mr. Dennis you's an old old man
- This one's not quite a quote, just a story. For my first week back, I was still sporting my mustache from New Years, so I told my kids that I was "Mr. Dennis Mustache," Mr. Dennis's twin brother. I was in town for a little while when he was sick, and I had learned all of their names from pictures over the holiday. None of my kids really bought this, but I still got my kicks. I was planning on keeping the mustache for through the Steelers playoff run. Then, on Friday of that first week, I was working on homework with one of the nicest, sweetest girls in my class when she looked up, completely seriously, and said "Mr. Dennis Mustache - when's Mr. Dennis coming back?" He came back on the following Monday.
As mentioned, these next few weeks are going to start getting hectic, but I'll do my best to keep the posts and pictures coming. Thanks for reading!
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