week one complete...

     My first week as a teacher is complete.  In light of how overwhelmed I felt at the beginning of the week, it feels like a huge achievement.  At the end of Monday, I thought, "These kids are great, I love them, and I'm a pretty decent teacher."  At the end of Tuesday, I thought, "These kids are monsters, they're making me crazy, and I'm a terrible teacher!"  The best thing about my class, which others have told me and which I have also observed, is that they are very adaptable.  By the end of the week, the rollercoaster of changes (for them and for me) leveled out and I was able to enjoy by time in the classroom with them much more.  They are a great group of kids and I am looking forward to moving beyond the "teacher survival mode" that I am in now to a place where I can really be creative and make learning fun for them.
    Many people have asked how I am doing emotionally and in terms of culture shock.  It's funny how surreal life can be at times.  My friend, Katy, left me a message just today that said, "It seems so natural that you are here, just like you never left" and I find it funny that she feels that way because that is exactly how I feel.  At times I forget that I have only been here for 10 days.  I really feel like I was on vacation or something and I've just come home and picked up where I left off.  It's hard to describe how at home I feel because I'm not sure that even I understand it completely.  All that to say that I am fine...better than fine, I'm great, and enjoying every day of life in Lima!

Kids Say the Funniest Things

On Monday, my first day of teaching, I explained the concept of an interview to my third graders and let them interview me as practice. Most of the questions were simple things like,"What is your favorite color?" and "What is your dog's name?", but the funniest question, by far, went something like this:

Leonardo: "Miss Ward, do you have an esposo (husband)?"
Me: "No, Leo, I don't."
Angie: "You will soon...you're in Peru now!"

Thrown in the Deep End

     The last few days have been the craziest whirlwind of my life.  I finally got to bed around 3am on Thursday morning and by 7:30, I was already awake and raring to go.  I think I've been running on excitement and adrenaline ever since then because there hasn't been much sleep to speak of.  Last Sunday, at my going away party, someone asked me when I would actually start teaching and jokingly, I said, "Oh, probably Monday".  Well as it turns out, the joke's on me.  When I got to school, I quickly found out that my promised weeks of preparation were no longer and that I was to start teaching on Monday.  I said okay, calmly left the room, and as soon as I was out of sight, ran in a panic to my friend, Katy, who helped me get together all of the papers and schedules and lessons plans and everything else that I needed to start teaching.  

     I spent Friday at school from 9 to 9, taking down decorations, putting up new decorations, making lesson plans, creating seat assignments, and all manner of teacher duties.  I also had my first parent-teacher conference on Friday night.  The meeting had a slight twinge of irony to begin with considering the fact that I haven't yet taught her daughter.  On top of that, my interpreter got called away about a minute into the meeting and the rest of the meeting I had to do on my own... IN SPANISH!  Talk about getting thrown into the deep end. 

     I spent most of Saturday at school as well, rearranging and decorating my classroom, until our principal came in and used her principal voice to tell me, "I think you're overdoing it. Go home."  

     The highlight of my Sunday was the fact that I understood the entire church service without any help.  There is hope for my Spanish yet!

     That's most of my news for now.  Check out the video below to see my kids' reaction the first time they saw me.

     

My New Casa

Our apartment has 5 bedrooms and I am lucky enough to have the master.  It's a good thing that I have
my own bathroom because I am what my friend Emily calls, "bathroom time intensive."
I think that's her way of saying "high maintenance".

A whole wall of storage...my favorite part about my room. 

I don't have much in the way of furniture or decorations yet
but I will make it homier eventually.

My roommates, Kari and Natalie, made me a sign for my door that says,
 "Welcome to Peru, Amber!". They're the sweetest.

Safe and Sound in Lima

     One of my less-than-brilliant ideas was pulling an all-nighter the night before I left for Lima.  I had to get up at about 3:45am anyway, so I figured there was no point in going to sleep.  Plus, I was so excited and nervous and anxious and ___________ (insert any emotion you can think of here) that I couldn't sleep anyway.  So by the time that I arrived in Lima, got to my apartment and fell into bed, I had been awake for 44 consecutive hours.  Not smart.
      I arrived at the Pellston airport at 5am on Wednesday morning for a 6:15 flight and at 8:00, I was still there.  My flight from Pellston was cancelled because of a mechanical problem on the plane (leave it to Pellston to only have one plane) and after some frustration, a few minutes on the phone with Delta, and a some fatigue-induced tears, my mom and my grandpa were in the car racing down to Traverse City to catch the next flight to Detroit.  On the way down, I don't know why, but I felt like I should double-check my itinerary, so I pulled out my iPod, opened up my email, and promptly shouted, "WHAT?!"  At the top of the itinerary were the words "Thursday, May 19".  So there I was rushing to Traverse City for a flight that didn't leave for 25 hours.  After a frantic 15 minutes on the phone with Delta (which is, by the way, the nicest and most helpful airline I've ever used) while my mom kept saying, "Should I stop or keep going?", I had a seat on a flight for Wednesday, May 18.  The trickiest part happened when I got to Detroit and had only 39 minutes to make it to my next gate.  Booking it through the airport, I arrived at the gate just in time to walk straight into the boarding line and onto the plane.  After a 7 hour flight, I stepped off the plane and breathed in the smell I'd been waiting to smell for months.  If you've been to Lima, you  know that that smell is a combination of fish and smog...not the most aesthetically pleasing combination, but to me it smelled like home.  A really long line at customs and a lost-luggage scare later, I finally walked out of security to see my friend Katy and Kari and Natalie (2 of my roommates) holding a "Welcome to Peru" sign, yelling my name and jumping up and down.  By that point the excitement had kicked in and I had forgotten that I hadn't slept in 40-some hours, but by the time we got back to the apartment, I remembered and was asleep about 1.2 seconds after my head hit the pillow.  It is now Friday and I much more news but it will have to wait until tomorrow.  Hasta entonces...

Packing

I am not typically a light packer (those of you who know me are shocked, I'm sure) and being forced to limit the next 18 months of  my life to two 50-lb. suitcases was not a challenge I was looking forward to.  I am proud to say though that in the end, I got my money's worth out of Delta: two suitcases that each weighed EXACTLY 50 lbs, my backpack (as heavy as I could stand it), and my guitar.

Step 1: Unpack everything from Cedarville in hopes of figuring out where I put all the stuff I want to take to Peru.

Step 2: Laundry

Step 3: Piles.  The yeses, the nos, the not-until-summers, and the only-if-I-have-extra-rooms. 

The saddest casualty of my packing: my baby blankets.  I finally admitted defeat and
retired them to the keepsake box due to their lack of suitability for international travel. 

May Newsletter...

  

Graduation

September 2006

     In September of 2006, I visited Cedarville for the first time.  It only took me about 10 minutes to realize that is was the right place for me.  I was so convinced that I didn't even apply to any other schools.  As it turned out, I was right.  My time at Cedarville changed me in more ways that I can count.  Academically, I know more, I work harder, I think more critically and I ask more questions.  Socially, I made friends who became my family and met so many people and professors who invested in my life in invaluable ways.  Spiritually, I love Christ more. To say it that way sounds simple, but the truth is that that is the bottom line.  Cedarville's investment in my walk with Christ has, above all, just made me love Him more, and that love has created my desire to serve Him.  Leaving Cedarville was hard, but it's time for me to take what God has taught me through Cedarville and put it to use for His glory.

May 7, 2011

     When we took this picture after graduation on Saturday, my mom told me something she had never told me before.  She said, "When we dropped you off here at the beginning of your freshman year, I never thought we'd see this day.  I never thought we'd be able to make it happen financially."  Cedarville is expensive. I knew that when I chose to go there, but in my naive 18-year-old mind, I just thought, "It will all work out."  I had no idea that it "working out" would mean so many ups and downs and detours for me.  My path to graduation at Cedarville was unconventional to say the least.  It included a lot of extra work in high school on AP, CLEP and dual enrollment classes, a semester at NCMC and a semester in Grand Rapids at GVSU, which were all ways that I pinched pennies to make my Cedarville experience possible.  As complicated as it was,  God used it in so many ways, to teach me perseverance, to teach me patience (a lesson I'm still learning), and most of all, to teach me to trust Him.
     A post about Cedarville wouldn't be complete without taking a minute to express my overwhelming gratitude for my parents.  Something I appreciate about my mom is that she didn't tell me that she doubted I'd graduate from Cedarville until I was actually graduating from Cedarville.  She continued to support my desire to go there and she and my dad did everything humanly possible to make sure it happened, even when they thought it was impossible.  They spent hours with the course catalog, the checkbook, the budget, all to make sure that I was in the place I believed God wanted me to be.  The funny thing is that they could have said the same thing when I told them I wanted to go back to Peru - "I don't think we can make that happen".  But they didn't.  They believe that that is where God has led me and they have, and are still, doing everything they can to help me follow Him.  Call me biased, but those are some pretty great parents.