Kids at school and vine sheets

If you’ve been looking for the meaty, personal, what’s-going-on-with-the-Cottrills posts, it’s not that nothing has been going on.  Actually, there has been a lot going on – so much that I haven’t had time to write about it.  When I do have time, I don’t know where to start, or else I want to forget about it all for a while and write about something else!

Rather than write one post with a bunch of different topics, I’ll try to write a few.  First topic – children and school…

Hannah and Nathanael are still enjoying school.  We were able to attend a flag ceremony on Monday, which was fun.  Hannah’s class were the flag bearers this time, so she’s been practising marching since the first day of school.  We saw more of the country’s patriotic ceremonies (and realized how much we still have to learn!).

The flag ceremony – see Hannah?
We’ve had the challenge of trying to figure out the homework assignments that the kids have, and the other instructions that the teachers give us.  It’s not simply translation – we also have to decipher the teacher’s handwriting, and figure out if she’s writing a full word or an abbreviation (yikes!), and then understand what in the world she means after all that.

A couple of weeks ago, we were told we had to go to a papelería (like a stationary store) to get a "vine sheet" – for the next day.  I decided to drive all across town to go to a larger store.  For one thing, I had no idea how obscure this item was, and for another thing I was still looking for one item on the original school supplies list.

First I asked for the item from the original list – a ball.  But not any ball, a very specific type of ball, which supposedly we can buy at a papelería.  Well, not this one.  The ball they had was a type we’d already tried, and the teacher had told us it was all wrong.  So I’m still looking for the ball.

Then, the vine sheet.  I had no idea what it was, and neither did the lady behind the counter.  She looked at me as if I was crazy (people normally do that, of course, but this time more than usual), and I shrugged my shoulders and told her that’s what he teacher had asked for.

Fortunately, another lady behind the counter said to the first lady,"Oh yes, a vine sheet.  Just look in the back, you’ll see it labelled" (ok, she said something like that.  Didn’t catch it all).

Sure enough, she found one.  It was a tiny item shaped like a leaf with a little hole in it – something for hanging pictures.  It cost 2 pesos – less than 20 US or CA cents.

So when people ask why we’re so busy when we only go to school six hours a day, I think of that day – trying to translate the homework book, then trying to understand it, driving all through the city, trying to get the sales lady to understand, then driving all the way home.  A typical unexpected addition to our day.  Life is never dull.  🙂

Meanwhile, we’re trying to get the English school going at home.  You remember our challenges trying to get the books from Canada, right?  Well, after all that, it turns out they forgot to send us about 15 books!  Apparently, the person who was in charge of shipping the books to us "no longer works for the organization".  I see.

So, the books were shipped, and today we’re trying to figure out how in the world to get them from the USA to here.

We’ve started a bit of the school stuff at home, but it’s quite the huge complex system, and it’s taking us time to figure it all out.  Maybe things will be clearer when everything arrives?

Anyway, we’re happy to see Hannah and Nathanael learning lots and making friends.  We’ve got to meet some of the parents as well, so maybe there will be opportunity to serve them too.  Little by little the kids are picking up the language and learning how things are done here.  We’re very happy with the school, and the way the teachers try to work with the parents (from what I’ve heard, involving and informing parents is not always a common thing in Mexico).  Lots to praise the Lord for!