Lots of Changes!

You can start reading our new blog titled Lorrenza (that's what most people call me, or Loli or Lorenz) as this one will be pretty much abandoned now. I won't post much here after this.

I ended up not being able to do anything with the au pair agencies, as the only one willing to work with Bolivia is based in La Paz and I'm not willing to live there.

We moved in with my friends, and then moved out to the 12th ring and stayed with Karl's godfather (padrino) Cristobal and his family for a while, until his padrino's son Vidal started picking on Karl too much. Machetes are not cool toys to play with! So we moved in with Elly until the school I was working for told me I had to move closer.

I taught 4th, 6th, 7th and 8th grades in English, all classes in English, and the subjects were English, science, social studies, and creative writing. Loved the topics, loved the kids, had a few problems with discipline (these kids do NOT want to learn, in many instances) and got super sick.

The school nurse insisted I go to the doctor's and they sent me, paid for everything, even took me there so I would know where it was at. She kept saying it was a parasite, I told her no, didn't think so, a parasite would make me hungry and lose weight, not have a lack of appetite and lose weight, plus fever, headache, exhaustion, I told her it was stress. I was so tired I was drifting off to sleep in class, standing up talking to my students. The doctor ran tests for HIV, dengue, yellow fever, which I have a shot for, TB, and parasites. Everything came back clean. He asked me what I thought it was. I told him stress. He said yes, I think so too. He told them they had to take away my worst class, and they did. 4th Green English. No reduction in pay, either.I still had them for science, though, but many of the kids were upset they were losing me for English.

English was five times a week, science only two, and for a half class at that. I didn't like the English books, though. It's a program called Thumbs Up and it had to many situations that were either way over my students' heads, or too babyish for them to take seriously. That link is to the only version I could find on Amazon, and it's for third graders. I don't expect perfection in the books I use to teach, but I do expect something realistic. These were written by UK writers (but published in Mexico, and printed in China, WOW!) and I was constantly having to explain that in America, we don't write colour, neighbour, honour, and so forth. The school had no UK teachers, only those from the USA and Canada. It wasn't just the workbooks, either, it was the readers we supplemented the class with.

Anyway, we moved back to living with my friends, but at a different location. They own two houses, and another lot. We had been living with them, right behind the family store. Now, we were back in the same house, just a different room, that we lived in when we were here in 2009. Completely different people. We could have our cats, and Karl seemed to start a collection right away.

The neighbors, mostly young guys, hated them, threatened to kill them. I told the one, who were are now friends with, (we're actually friends with all of them, even the one I had to lock in his room to get him to listen to me) that the cats were just as precious to me as his family jewels were to him, and I knew he slept outside, and was drunk quite often, so it might be best to leave the cats alone for his own children's futures. He quit messing with the cats.

The landlady gave us three baby chicks. They grew up. One is an adult, one died before he got out of chickdom, and the other, well, our friend bought him, and then ate him. Karl cried a long time over that. He didn't seem to have any problem spending the money, though, and even insisted on getting an extra 5 pesos, about 80 centsUSD out of him for the bird. Then, instead of doing as I asked, he took the five pesos outside and promptly lost it. The other is the neighborhood terrorist now. Everyone is afraid of him. Us? We walk up to him and he bows his head a couple of times, and we scold him, then grab him. Most of the time. Sometimes he runs away. Bought him two hens, and they've had several chicks each.

The neighbor guy ended up taking a liking to me, and I gave him a chance, spent a bit of time with him and then he took that inch and tried to turn it into a lifetime journey, screw the proverbial mile. He needs a post all his own. Yeah, with video even.

The neighbor guy got so bad in trying to court me that I couldn't work, got behind on the rent, and they kicked him out. He'd stand outside in the road and whistle songs to me after that. *sigh* All over a dinner we didn't even eat together. Yeah. Bolivian men are a strange kind, but some are pretty cool, like my friend Juan Pablo. He lived in the UK and speaks English.

Then, we were told we had to move. They want to build a second story onto the place where we were at. They already did the same at their place, and then the neighbor lady across the street did the same thing.

Now, we live around the block, but it took us a long time in finding it. Maybe more on that later, not sure, it's a very long story and was very tiring to go through. But, there are kids here for Karl to play with, and we can still have our cats and the chickens. Some of the people like cats, too, which is very cool.

But yes, for everything that has been going on, and I will be posting after the fact, now that I have time, thanks to a very nice-paying client, I can get caught up on everything. You can find that over at my Lorrenza blog.