Teaching and Pinatas

We have entered yet another week of teaching and the infamous search for a third teacher is not going so hot right now. After Emory told me there was a problem with the kinder teacher moving and her daughter coming to teach kinder I talked with the kinder teacher today and she sounds like she would enjoy teaching science and her daughter wants to teach kinder. So what’s the problem? The world may never know. It’s one of those secrets that goes down in history along with how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop (1, 2, *crunch*, 3).
I talked to Teodoro yesterday for a little while. He’s the security guard at school and apparently he has 11 kids! ELEVEN! Four of them are grown and out of the house, one is in second grade at Mayatan, then three are at the public school ranging from first to sixth grade. The other three are at the house but working, I suppose. His second grade son is having a birthday on Saturday and I made a joke with him that there was going to be a big fiesta and pinata! Well then I felt bad, because Teodoro told me his family can’t afford a pinata. I think that I’m going to buy them one to take to him at work tomorrow or Wednesday so his kid can have it on Thursday with the family. That would be fun, yah?
I was also a heathen this weekend according to local Evangelicals. I went to the Catholic Mass and I’ve already had at least 10 people ask me about it. Some are Catholics and were really interested in me going and wondered what I thought of it. Others are Evangelicals that are asking “if I go to many churches that worship idols.” I was a little taken aback by that much hostility. I knew that people around here didn’t get along with each other in that regard, but people here are super over the top with the not getting along part! It’s not such a great thing. I loved the Catholic Mass though and I’m planning on going to the Thursday evening mass at 7. Lourdes, one of the cleaning ladies, said that she goes there and is friends with the priest so if I want to meet him we can do that some time pretty soon. She said he would be very excited to meet me because while the Evangelical churches have all sorts of short term mission teams come down here to work and bring money the Catholic church doesn’t have that luxury. So he will be very excited to have an American or two in the service. I’m not sure if that is using me or not, but I don’t even care, I want to go cause I loved the service. I will talk more about what it’s like in my next post or two after I’ve gone to a couple masses.