La Obra

There's something spectacular going on outside of my house, and this is what I see whenever I come home. Obra.
I remember learning that word in a Spanish lit class and spending a lot of time trying to figure out what it meant. The first time I saw it, it was written as "mano de obra" somewhat poetically, and it confused the hell out of me. In fact a direct translation still kind of eludes me at the moment, but it's something like: work or manual labor. In many cases, it just means work. Here, when they do construction jobs, they call them obras. In an effort to use more vocab than just common sense cognates that require little more than proper pronunciation (i.e. construccion), and to describe the situation I'm dealing with for teh next 15+ days, I'm attempting to put this word into daily use.

Unfortunately, it's not very beautiful or poetic, just kind of noisy, and it's managed to obstruct not only the normal path to my door, but also my normal morning shower routine. It's possibly tmi, but the water was cut off this morning...alas. When I went outside a few minutes ago to document the situation with my camera, the leader of the project walked over to make sure I wasn't taking pictures because there was a problem. No. No problem sir... I just want to remember the details. The water's back on now, so what more could I really ask for?

Turns out just about everything is a work in progress, including my job. I'm still deciding whether to be friend, teacher, disciplinarian... idk. Most days I make a few faces and laugh at or with them in between writing on the board and telling them to sit down or colorear.


This week, I went in every day, which is sooo not normal, because I'm only assigned to work 3 days a week. It's a good life, indeed. Anyhow, yesterday, the gym teacher came late, and I felt obliged to stay and hang out with Encarni's tercero class as they waited to have educacion fisica on the back patio. They get into a lot when they're left alone, so I stayed for a bit before heading upstairs to my usual class. I don't know if that helped or not...

Anyhow, I should send them these photos after I leave. In a year or two, when they've progressed a bit more, they'll laugh about what they must've been doing jumping around and shouting on the patio that day.