Bookshelves!

Disclaimer: This post was written last week, but the power went out before I could post it. (Meaning the internet went as well.) Because I am some what technologically incompetent, I could not find the post after I had power once again. My blog page is also half in Spanish and I am not up on my blogger Spanish vocab, so please forgive me.

It has been quite the adventure to get there, but we finally started school on August 23. The original plan was to start Thursday August 19, but there were several loose ends that needed to be tied up before doors could open to students. In my American mind it at first seemed crazy not to start school when it was originally planned for. But when I am honest with myself I was extremely grateful for the extra time to plan. You can't always complain :) We also didn't get all of the curriculum and textbooks until after school started. Again, very strange in an American mindset, but for some reason it wasn't!

Much of my time has been spent in my classroom. I quickly learned that when I am there it is one of the few times that I don't mind being alone. Most of you who know me well know that I can not stand being alone, no matter what the situation. Apparently things are a little different at school. I have fallen in love. Organizing, arranging and decorating consumed my thoughts and time for the week and a half before school.

It was also fun to be creative and resourceful with the random materials I had. For example, I only have one set of cubbies in my room for storage. These are to serve as students' lockers and storage of my own. Having brought several large boxes of materials and discovering MANY more boxes upon my arrival, I was at first very overwhelmed. But thanks to Mother Necessity, I got to work. My favorite thing that came out of this whole experience was my "bookshelves". Cinder blocks and wood are my new favorite things. I now wish I had documented the process.I think it would have been entertaining for you all to see me first describe a cinder block to a Dominican hardware store employee, try to find cinder blocks with the store employees in the back garage (of course they wouldn't know where they were) and then purchase and load the cinder blocks into my friend's trunk from the garage in the middle of a forceful rain storm. Then of course, there was me searching through the school's huge scrape pile to find suitable (and safe) pieces of wood for the shelves, finding a random bucket of paint on my house roof and finally going to town with the paint in the middle of the JCS soccer field.

Needless to say, these kids better loooove their library bookshelves!