han visto means you all have seen

I am finishing my last week of the first half of my research portion of this program. That’s a complicated way of saying it, but I don’t really know how else to explain it. I feel fairly comfortable in this town, especially since I spend all day walking around and exploring it as I visit schools, in comparison to San Jose where I spent most of the time in the ACM building taking classes, and only knew some about the city itself for the first couple weeks. With this comfort comes a mentality that I usually think I look like a normal person walking around, and often forget how much I stick out. Here’s a story to help explain,

This morning I went to a school to measure kids (the usual). However, this was the biggest school in town, with over five hundred kids (most of the other schools range in size from forty to a hundred and fifty or so students) so I had only distributed surveys to a portion of the classes, and only intended to measure a portion of the students. However, I couldn’t really remember which classes I had visited. It was also the morning, and I had distributed classed in the afternoon, so I assumed that none of the students would be there, but I thought I would check anyway. So, I began to search for them. I stepped into a first grade classroom, and spoke to the students, saying hello and watching them smile as they herd my foreign accent. I then asked them if they had seen me before. They all immediately answered yes. Perfect, I thought, that was easy to find them. I then asked who had their surveys. No one responded with a yes, and many looked a little confused. Oh great, I thought, they all forgot. Then I asked if they could bring them another time, and my response was more confused faces. So then I asked if I had even ever given them any handouts. They said no. This process continued in almost every single class.

I realized asking them if they had seen me before wasn’t a good clarifying question to see if I had distributed surveys to the class. Pretty much every student there had seen me, at one time or another. But not because I had visited their class. I am the only gringa here, and I walk around, a lot. I only have three scrub options to wear every day, so my wardrobe is pretty limited and doesn’t blend in that well with the rest of the town. So in the past two weeks, they all probably had seen me, and knew who I was. So much for thinking I am starting to blend in like a local.

And some photo documentation of my new school friends:  

Everyone wears uniforms, the kinder kids wear all light blue (its terribly adorable)

Bunny ears is an international photograph pass time