Conexiones Entre Mundos

So here’s the short version of how I got my new job:  Carolina’s niece gave her boss my number, which she gave to her friend Mauge, who called me out of the blue on a Wednesday afternoon to offer me a job after she saw me selling cupcakes in a tienda near her language school.

Now for the backstory.  After I left my job at Carachipampa at the end of March, I gave myself two weeks to be unemployed.  I’m the type of person who, if given the chance, will turn into a feral hermit without structure in my life, so I scheduled mundane outings for myself every day.  I also deep-cleaned my apartment, got my showers fixed, slept enough to make Rip Van Winkle jealous, read a bunch of books, and began contemplating the purchase of a new cabinet for my kitchen.  On one of my outings, I saw a little storefront with a sign saying “Store for rent” with a phone number.  I thought about it for a few days, then called to see if I could check it out.

A week later, I opened a small, fairly unprofitable shop selling cupcakes on a month-long trial lease.  My dad, the baker, was STOKED.  My mom, the accountant, wanted to know if I had run the numbers (I had).  Though it wasn’t the most lucrative experience, it was fun, it gave me structure, and it gave me the opportunity to read my way through another shelf of books.  I continued to be impressed by how friendly everyone in the city is; it was a month of smiles from passersby and visits from my landlady and her little grandsons.  The store was also, coincidentally, about 60 meters away from a language school I’d heard about.

As everyone probably knows, the new Avengers movie came out a little while ago, and I was very excited to see it.  One of my students said something about it in the group chat after it had just come out (my plan was to wait a few days and then see it with a friend), and I threatened anyone who spoiled the movie for me with a 10-page essay, regardless of the fact I was no longer their teacher.  The Professional A**hole of the group then promptly started sending messages that I glanced at briefly enough to see a few character names.  It was already 9:20 p.m. and I was in bed, but I decided that this was the one movie I didn’t want any spoilers for, so I got up, got dressed, and went to the 10:00 showing.  Here, you don’t just buy a general ticket, you buy a specific seat, and mine happened to be two seats down from the Vargas clan, which includes two of my former students, two of my favorite former coworkers (Carolina and Rolando), and with whom I’ve spent Thanksgiving the past two years.  I chatted for a bit with Megan (Carolina’s niece), who works at Compassion International’s Bolivia headquarters, and, coincidentally, I mentioned that I had left Carachipampa a few weeks earlier.

As a general rule of life and a byproduct of being a millennial, I don’t pick up my phone unless I have the number saved (and even then it’s not a priority) or we’ve texted to confirm that a call can now take place.  But when my phone rang on a random Wednesday in early May, I picked up.  I couldn’t hear the person on the other end very well, but I made out “translation job” and “teaching English.”  I asked if the person could email me the details, and I gave my email address, hoping that the connection was better on the other end.  I honestly didn’t give it much thought until a little later, walking to the store, I got an email from Mauge, whose name I recognized from meeting her two years ago at an event for the hogar.  And who, coincidentally, is the director of a language school 5 blocks from my house.

It turns out that Megan, after hearing that I was looking for work, got my number from Carolina and gave it to her boss at Compassion International, who is friends with Mauge and knew that Conexiones was in the process of becoming a subcontractor for translating sponsor letters.  She gave my number to Mauge, who was hesitant to cold call a stranger, and told her that it was for a girl who’d been an English teacher and was selling cupcakes at the moment.  And that’s when my now-boss connected the smiley girl from the store she passed each afternoon to this mystery English-speaking person, and I got a call offering me a job at Conexiones Entre Mundos (Connections Between Worlds) Language School.

So now I teach English classes to grown-ups and evaluate translations for Compassion International.  Also, my commute went from 40 minutes in a trufi (one way) to a 10 minute walk, and I no longer have a twitch in my eye because of stress.



Various Things That Have Happened In The Past Two Months:

I’m still tutoring a couple of my former students, and one is hoping to improve her reading comprehension to prep for the SAT.  I’ve been giving her stories or excerpts to read, and one of those was the first chapter of Grendel by John Gardner (basically Beowulf, but from the monster’s point of view).  A few weeks later, she casually mentioned that she understood Grendel now because her neighbors had had a loud party the night before.  I was so proud.

The Juegos Suramericanos (the Latin American Olympic Games) are being held in Cochabamba this year.  It’s apparently quite a big deal, and there have been a LOT of fireworks just outside my window over the past week.  I imagine that living a block away from the event would be much more exciting if I cared about sports.

I saw a meme that was so funny but so niche that I intentionally recommended the series it’s from to one of my former students who’s been reading some of my books.  He’s going to read 4,000 pages just so that I have someone to share this meme with.  Fortunately, he’s enjoying the books so far.

During a lesson that I was observing at work, a student (note:  this man is a 40-year-old pastor) looked my boss in the eye and said “You are a poopy.”  The question was, “What is Sofi?” and there was a rather unfortunate pronoun mixup coupled with a catastrophic mispronunciation of the word “puppy.”

After four weeks of deliberation, I bought a new kitchen cabinet.  I love it.  I am officially old and boring.

Life Update

I have become significantly more high-maintenance in the past couple of months.  For one thing, I finally got the fire-shower repaired (after a mere seven months of very fast, cold showers or washing my hair in the sink).  I no longer have a thin film of dust on me at all times, which is an exciting development.  The other major change is that I now sleep in a bed.  I abruptly terminated my years-old practice of sleeping on the floor after I found a massive spider on my pillow, leading to my relocation to the guest room.  It’s pretty comfortable, so I’ve stayed.

I started tutoring some former students of mine a few days a week, which has had the added bonus of learning a few Korean customs.  My favorite one thus far is that it’s traditional to bring toilet paper to someone’s house the first time you visit (I will admit to googling it afterwards just to make sure it wasn’t a practical joke).  I’ve also learned that whenever I have trouble getting my point across in English, I now switch instinctively to Spanish, which is profoundly unhelpful in this specific circumstance.

I’m still making cupcakes and selling them; because I don’t pour fruit juice into them, they’re much better than traditional Bolivian cakes (not arrogance, just a fact:  no one likes soggy cupcakes).  Figuring out high-altitude recipes has been mostly fun, and I also have two frosting guns now.

Made these yesterday for a lady who wanted pastels for her birthday.

The biggest change is that I resigned from my job a few weeks ago.  I’m not a huge fan of burning bridges, so I won’t go into the details, but there were some things going on that I felt were unethical to the point that I could not continue working there.  The good/bad news is that I still hear from my students all the time; it’s been three weeks, and there hasn’t been a day yet that I wasn’t visited at my house, run after in the street, called, texted, emailed, asked to edit a paper, or had photoshopped images sent to me by my former students.

My favorite of the aforementioned photoshopped images, sent with a near-complete transcription of the song “When I See You Again” - the blob on the left is the school’s logo; the blob on the right is my face.

As my way of saying goodbye to Carachipampa, here is one of my favorite memories from my time there:

The Parade

Towards the end of last school year, our school was invited to participate in a parade and ceremony in Quillacollo (during school hours, of course), so we loaded the entirety of the high school onto buses and headed off.  We got to the city center, where we quickly organized the students into rows, just in time to join the band that was passing by.  Off we went, marching along, until one of the other teachers suddenly realized that this parade was, in fact, going in the opposite direction of the main plaza.  Yes, we had joined the wrong parade.  Why there were two different parades happening in a tiny town at 8:30 on a Monday morning is beyond me.

We quickly reoriented ourselves, heading back in the correct direction, at which point one of the 7th graders grabbed my arm.  “My feet are bleeding, Miss,” she whispered urgently.  Fantastic.  We swapped shoes; I was wearing black socks, so I just carried on in those.  I’m fairly impressed that I didn’t get any foot parasites.

By the time we had gotten to the plaza, everyone was in an absolutely abysmal mood.  Wandering the city streets being nearly run over and honked at will do that to a group of teenagers.  There was a long, boring ceremony that did little to improve morale, and then we were finally released.

We herded students back to the buses, and I got back onto my original bus with my clipboard and did a very fast roll call before we started off back to school.  Three minutes later, the usual quiet chatter was pierced by Pau’s plaintive voice:  “Miss D?”  “Yes, Pau?” I replied.  He stuttered for a moment, then choked out, “Uh, there’s a dog on the bus.”

Now at this point, silence fell over the bus, and I fought the urge to laugh.  “Why is there a dog on the bus?”  Pau’s now-tiny voice replied, “Um, he looked lonely.”  This pronouncement was too much for the 8th grade girls, who burst into giggles.  I sighed, then turned to the bus driver, “Hey, would you mind pulling over for just a second?”  He obliged as I instructed Pau to get the dog to the front of the bus.  What I wasn’t expecting, however, was for the dog to be absolutely enormous.  Pau guided this monstrous creature to the front as we pulled over, then the driver opened the door and the dog calmly got off the bus.

It was only after I’d chastised Pau that I realized how the event must have looked to the people on the street as a school bus stopped to let off a single, very independent dog.

We were in the wrong parade in this picture.