being far away.

late last night i received tragic news: that one of my compañeras from university, emma bailey, had been killed in a car accident on monday, driving to london from wales with her best friend kelly who was visiting her from ottawa.

this kind of news never comes or settles easily. right now i am still trying to piece together in my head that this really happened. being so far away from that world makes it seem somewhat unreal.

my heart goes out to her close friends and family. i am devastated for their loss. i wish i could be closer in order to support my good friends that knew her well.

if anything this makes us realize how fragile life is, really. i mean, everyone says that but no one actually feels it until a tragedy like this unfolds. 23 is too too young, she had so much more to do here. and every SINGLE day we need to tell the people we love that we love them, because really you never know.

the thing that makes me so scared about it is that it really was anyone. it could be anybody. it could be carolynn, sarah, katie, kendra, my brothers, alex... whoever. and i´m so far away.

so there was not much sleep last night, and not a lot of food being eaten. erin´s classic symptoms of shock and sadness.

i am thinking so much about all the people that i love today.

and of course i am sending so much love and positive energy to emma´s close friends and family. she will be dearly, dearly missed.

perspectives from a grade 9.

WHY IS BAD TO LIE

1. It is bad to lie because when lieing I am conning myself.
2. It is bad to lie because people will think very bad about you and your repuation will start to go down.
3. It is bad to lie because when doing it, it is not showing education.
4. It is bad to lie because I give a bad image to other people of me.
5. It is bad to lie because people will not believe me in the future.
6. It is bad to lie because people will not want to be with the lieyer any more.
7. It is bad to lie because some people will hate you.
8. It is bad to lie because when lieing to other peson is the same to lie to you, to myself.
9. It is bad to lie because sometimes people will think very bad about you and maybe you aren´t.
10. It is bad to lie because you will recieve a chastise after doing it.
11. It is bad to lie because most of the time you lie, people will know you are lieing.

(yes,i knew that he was lying)

In conclusion I think that lieing is not a good way to take problems away, it is better to confront them an accept the error that you count. It is better to not be because your friends and the people that you live with will think very good abou you and you will have a very good reputation.

Ms. Erin, I am sorry of lieing to you, I don´t want you to think bad things of me, that was just an error.

- signature.

(thanks to one of my special students who thought he could get away with lying, and quite obviously, to my very face. that is gutsy. oh this letter makes me laugh.)
(and why 11 reasons? not sure.)

teacher band!

today after school is the first practice for a genius initiative that ruben the music teacher and i came up with. teacher´s rock band. yessir.
so, obviously, the most important part of making a band is coming up with a cool name.

please leave your suggestions below.

i am going to play simple guitar chords and jump around like a rockstar. pretty much i can´t wait to be sort of like sarah harmer.



i think i can do it.

5.1 on the richter!

not joking,
we´re in earthquake country.

early tuesday morning an earthquake struck manizales around 4 am.
30 seconds of severe shaking later, it settled and we were ok.

i survived my first REAL earthquake!

the funny thing is that most people seemed relatively non-plussed. it was the only thing i talked about yesterday, pretty much.

put on your amazonicas.

it´s wednesday morning and i am getting back into the swing of things at school after a life-changing weeklong trip to the brasilian amazon with my grade 10s. yesterday we had parent teacher interviews, and today i am spending the day actually teaching before the madness of ´congreso de literatura´ begins tomorrow, this incredible congress that the spanish department puts on every year. the students are all busy decorating and at the moment we have a big SHIP outside in the courtyard, as well as about a thousand yellow butterfly cutouts hung up (from one hundred years of solitude). cool beans.

we left for amazon at 4am saturday the 14th of april. if you had the pleasure of talking to me the week before amazon, i was pretty much the most stressed out i´ve ever been. taking 25 kids over the brasilian/colombian land border and spending a week in the middle of the jungle? and i´m in charge? i was crying most nights, let´s be honest.
but 4am on saturday rolled around, and we piled on a bus to pereira, caught our flight to bogota and then to leticia, crossed the border into tabatinga, and took a boat 5 hours down the amazonriver and then the jabarí, where reserva palmarí is located.
maybe it was my lack of excitement in general for being responsible for 25 16 year olds in brasil, but en serio, the experience shocked me to the core. the amazon and reserva palmarí are possibly the most magical places i have had the pleasure of visiting.
we spent mornings on the river fishing for pirañas, swimming with pink dolphins, kayaking through essentially a water jungle, hiking to mud baths, canoeing in traditional amazonian canoes and getting bitten by every kind of bug imaginable.
the afternoons: canopy climbing and ziplines through the forest, walks to the surrounding communities, making artesanias and natural tattoos, boating to nearby lagoons, going to an indigenous community called marubos to try rapé and venomo de rana.
the evenings: one afternoon we hiked an hour into the jungle and camped there in hammocks, with a campfire and spirit of the forest spooky tales. at about minight, maybe 8 of us walked into the woods about 15 minutes, turned our headlamps off, joined hands and made our way back to the campsite in pitch black. the glowing worms and mushrooms, the incredible sounds of the nighttime jungle, and the ability to really FEEL the path with your feet and know whether or not you were going the right way. undescribable.
we spent another night sleeping on a platform 60m up in the canopy. it rained all night, and it was pretty effing hilarious.
we went nighthunting for crocodiles.
we played a severely out of tune guitar and sang at the reserva.
we became incredibly close with the guides and staff at palmarí. we were truly welcomed into their entirely different lives for the time that we were there. the experiences shared with them were so valuable to me and the students.. being able to closely relate with someone who lives their life completely differently from what you know..
anyway. here are a few shots. check out the bookface account for some more.
i want to go back.

re.spekt.

y ya se acabó la semana santa. boo.

lovely week of vacation. i have to post fast, cos i have 65 exams to mark, 41 papers to mark, natural bug spray to make, grocery shopping to do and i should probably just generally freak out since we are leaving for amazonas next saturday.

this entry will outline the highlights of my funny week off. in point form.

- eating donuts in the airport with brett, while he was waiting for his flight to canada. you don´t realize how special these are, we don´t have donuts in manizales.. and when a sprinkly chocolate one appears for 500 pesos you pretty much have to buy five.
- finally finding sarah who arrived from mexico. she had to get her luggage checked since in general she is sketchy, and she had a funny time trying to get through colombian customs with her version of french-spanish.
- going out in la candelaria to this crazy electronica bar. i thought i was in new york city. everyone was so posh (poshe? poche? posche?) but then we headed to a nearby salsa place and i felt normal again.
- watching the santa fe vs. millonarios soccer game at the bogota beer company.
- meeting a nice man who helped us with our bags in tunja, even though we didn´t need it. i bought him some kind of fruit salad afterward.
- eating delicious organics in villa de leyva
- getting a really wierd sunburn on the way to the chronosaurus fossil (really cool, pictures to come) (not of the sunburn, but of the fossil)
- having romantic dates in candlelight at tomatino
- the nice man at the hostal we stayed at whose name was domingo (translation: sunday)
- anton´s version of two truths and a lie. his stories were as follows: 1. i took three shots of some wierd alcohol within 5 minutes. 2. i made 500 pancakes in one morning. 3. i want to open/ live in a pancake truck.
obviously i thought one pancake story was going to be the lie, however, we were all shocked to find out that the three shots of whatever were a lie and that anton was actually obsessed with pancakes.
- meeting alex´s warrior friend meredith
- making a video on the way up mont serrate in bogota (to come on meredith´s blog, will include a link)
- making it back to manizales last night since today it has been sooo cloudy, and i´m sure all the flights in from bogs are late/cancelled.
- discovering regina spektor. you can see her music videos on her website, and they are incredible. check out especially: samson and fidelity.
- having homemade ajiaco from juanma´s mum. the best treat.

ok, here are a FEW random shots, but i was by no means the photographer/videographer on this trip. i will post links for more pictures when they become available.

saris i MISS you alreadY!


corn!


city square during easter week. jesus, never more. (?)


villa de leyva. it is great, you should go.

it´s you and me, music.

was reminded today from a westcoastal music and tea package about my love affair with shad k. if you have not heard him, check out his songs at shadk.com. i saw him open for common last february and oh i WISH i had bought an album then. laura can you get me a copy?

WARNING: ENTRY ABOUT DISSECTION. DO NOT READ ON OR LOOK AT PICTURES IF YOU MIGHT FAINT.

strange and yet excellent day.
i planned an excursion for my 10th graders to the university of caldas this morning. being a new teacher and also not the most experienced dissector of all (remember fainting in 200? right) i was feeling hesitant about doing a mammalian dissection just me and my students. so we called up the uni and they offered to have us for a morning to dissect a fetal cow. these fetuses come from mummy cows who have been killed for meat, so i was happy to be learning from them rather than them just being thrown away.
i was excited to take part in the dissection with my students. the guy who led us through the process (and gave my kids an awesome lecture beforehand about the beauty of life and life processes) is a prof in the veterinary department. he was incredibly passionate about what he did (what i caught from the rapid spanish was that he studied fetal development in mammals for his PHD) and really challenged my students to think about what constitutes life. cool beans.
then we moved on to the dissection which was just so different than anything that i am used to. to set the scene, we were in a large sort of farmlike room with tables to put sick animals on. there was a horse, a puma and a dog, all being worked on (draining blood, preserving the samples, etc) and an ENTIRE crossection of a pig. also bones, skulls, dental anatomy.. kind of all over the place. at the back there was a room with SO many specimens, unprotected, just sort of waiting to be treated or preserved.. really sort of creepy. there was also a room full of bones.
it was an odd, odd place.
so, this lovely passionate man started to show my kids these cow fetuses. he did an awesome anatomy lesson, let all the kids touch them, and then began to open one to study the inner organs. it didn´t bother me all that much, it was just so haphazard (is that how you spell that word?). he would remove organ after organ after system, naming the parts and showing them to the kids and passing them around. i found this really wierd, i think just because the norm is to keep the specimen as intact as possible. these parts were just sort of discarded on the table.. and people moved on. so weird! i was so used to ´´putting things back´´ and disposing of the specimen as a whole.. not in its parts. out of respect for something that was alive, or atleast could have been.
anyway since this whole activity was happening in spanish and i didn´t know what to expect, i kind of had to let go of it all.. let them do things the way that is normal here. also, i was dealing with a phew woozie kids. and figuring out how i was going to debrief this whole thing.
afterwards, we thanked our lovely passionate PHD man with a box of chocolates and a card (i feel so bad at this point for not remembering his name.. yikes) and the kids boarded the bus to go back to school. all in all the kids definitely learned a lot, it is always great to have a hands on experience especially with someone who knows so much about the topic. tomorrow i am having them write a reflection and hopefully a discussion about the activity.. and maybe the respect for life thing will come up on its own. i hope so, since we have done some interesting ethical activities on dissection before we even started them.

so THAT was the adventure of a fetal cow dissection! want to see some pics?
no they aren´t THAT graphic.

ok, next entry actually about life. only 1.5 weeks until weeklong breakie break!


smart boys.


the group. horse. yikes. right, i´m in colombia.


neat picture of the brain. it really is an incredible and beautiful organ, in serious.