Tag 76 - Patience Thread

The older gentleman in the first photo sits on this street corner every day. I pass by here when I ride my pink bike to the project. He sells these deep-fried dough things that have a cottage cheese or cheese filling and are then rolled in sugar. There are two types. The old man only has two or three teeth left and he hears very poorly. I stop here often and buy something. Our dialogues always go the same way:

Before I can even say what I want, he asks: "Two?" - "No, I would just like one of these." - "Two?" Then I show it with my fingers and he says: "Six!", meaning it costs 6 Cordobas. Then he wishes me a mumbled nice day and I move on. Today I asked him if I can take a photo. He sat down a little neater and made a very serious face. Tomorrow I will buy two, let's see what happens.

The class that Luis took over from Gloria is noticeably more undisciplined than his other classes. I always work with the same group of four children, three girls and Jose Angel, the younger brother of Mariana, all about 9-10 years old. I don't know how to describe it. They get distracted at the slightest potential distraction, all four of them. They simultaneously and repeatedly ignore some instructions as if they were deaf. Today, for example, I asked Leydi three times to put the book away because we are using the worksheets copied by Luis. She completely ignored that and, on the contrary, wanted to show me her progress in the book every three seconds. I was almost at the end of my tether. And some situations leave me speechless and bewildered. In another, more advanced class, we have only been talking about verbs and conjugations for a week. One day, the homework was to create a specific list of verbs. As soon as we left the class after the lesson, Isela pulled me aside and asked me what verbs were.

As I said, if I learn anything here, it's patience. Tomorrow I'm going to yoga and finding my center.

Hot, dry day with lots of wind.