On the Pleasures of Teaching with a Mean Case of Montezuma’s Revenge and Other Adventures in Global Education: Part Five

The really refreshing thing about urban kids is, when you tell them they’re going to hike up an active volcano, they flip out a little. They don’t blindly trust everything is going to be okay, that they won’t be swept away in a torrent of hot lava.

They say things like, “Heeeeell no.” And, “Uh-uh. I’m not trying to do all that.”

Which makes sense, right? We are talking about an active freakin’ volcano here. They might not be familiar with Pompeii, but they’ve seen enough disaster movies to know what happens when man beefs with Mother Nature.

Not to mention urban kids are on closer terms with death than your average suburban kid. When odds are you’ve lost a friend or relative to some sudden and senseless tragedy, you know better than to tempt death. At least in so foolish and cavalier a way.

So when Joseline breezily mentioned that this particular volcano goes off every thirty-five years and was five years overdue for its next eruption, there was no high-fiving or collective shouts of “Cool!” There was only trepidation. Some of it vocalized in shrill, uncensored protestations; some of it tucked away only to turn up later in the form of a mid-hike panic attack.

Ya-Ya took the latter approach.

When she first glimpsed the volcano, she gave me a look that said, “Really, Bomphray? Really?” It did look quite steep. And it was completely black, as if permanently charred. It looked like one of those piles of sand you see heaped on the shores of industrial rivers in the Midwest. Only a lot a bigger and purportedly really hot inside. “It’ll be alright,” I assured her, exuding Grade A suburban yeah-I-did-shit-like-this-at-summer-camp swagger.

About halfway up she looked back at me with real fear in her eyes. The trail—if it could be called that—zigzagged up the gravelly slope in a particularly treacherous fashion. She watched white-knuckled as Kevin, a surer-footed hiker than she, sent a little avalanche of sand and stone tumbling down the mountainside in his wake.

“Bomphray, I’m scared,” she muttered.

Ya-Ya was not a hiker. Nor was she much of a walker, or anything at all really that required her to be in her body. Ya-Ya didn’t like her body. Loathed it, is more like it. Which made it a hell of a lot easier to just not use it than be constantly reminded of its perceived shortcomings.

“I’m behind you, Ya-Ya. If you slip, I’m here,” I offered. This was the educational process in miniature, everything I ever learned in teacher school distilled into its purest and most literal form. If you slip, I’m here.

Ya-Ya did slip. A couple of times. But she caught herself. And she kept going.

When she finally made it to the top—palms blackened, no insignificant amount of tears dried to her face—she beamed the uninhibited smile of a newborn. Which—overwrought  clichés aside—in a way she was sort of, born again.

This could not be her body, not that old ball and chain, too awkward even for, say, a brisk pace on the way to school, let alone the climbing of mountains. This Ya-Ya stood on top of an active volcano. And she had her own two suddenly very capable legs to thank.

As I looked out at the shockingly green countryside, so much in contrast to the blackness of the volcano as to seem unreal, I felt lighter too.

Day 17

Everything is harder when you have diarrhea. I don’t care if Ed McMahon (in zombie-form, sadly) is at your door with a giant check with a bunch of zeros on it—if you have diarrhea, you will not “jump with joy.” The temptation to elate unrestrainedly is balanced out by a biological fear of an unrestrained colon, and, well, you see where I’m going here.

The diarrhea sufferer is physically incapable of forgetting they indeed suffer from diarrhea. Half of their mind is occupied with their daily affairs, while the other half is dominated by the ticking time bomb of a thought, “I really might shit myself if I’m not careful here.”

And so I began our seventeenth and final day in Nicaragua. A little worn out. A little “over” the whole group leader thing. And battling some all too literal personal demons.

That evening, we threw a graduation party for approximately thirty local street kids who had been my students’ students for the last two weeks. The class was Basic English, but it was really just an excuse for youth from different cultures to get together and break figurative bread. My kids exported ‘The Jerk’ (of course); their “students” shared what it was to be young and poor in Nicaragua.

This isn’t to say my students didn’t teach a little English too. They brainstormed lessons, made handouts, devised sugar-centric reward systems, and just all-around looked forward to teaching each night. Some even felt the acute frustration of teaching a bad class. After one such class, Marissa looked at me and said, “Teaching is hard, Bomphray.”

“I know,” I replied, feeling—I’m ashamed to admit—more vindicated than empathetic.

The actual graduation ceremony involved a lot of screaming, speech-making, and post-speech-making screaming. I took pictures and kept a close watch on the state of my bowels.

The good-byes at the end of the night were touching and sad. Touching because the kids liked each other so much. Sad because the realist in me knew how all those promises to return someday would end.

Sad too because we were the ones leaving. After all, it is “the leaver” in this kind of relationship who wields the power, and that is never so clear as during the good-bye. Perhaps if they could leave, it would feel different. But they can’t. Mobility is privilege—and they ain’t got it. We were a momentary light in their lives, a strobe flicker.  And now we were gone.

I guess two weeks is better than no weeks.

On the walk back to the hostel, the group’s energy was electric. They sang Top Ten R&B hits (Kiss me through the phone/ I see u lata on), danced their way across the park, and basically chattered non-stop, oblivious to the scene they were making. The source of the electricity was a mixture of end-of-trip jubilation, gooey sentimentality, and the anticipation of home.

I allowed myself to trail behind; by this point, the kids knew León better than I did.

As I walked, the sound of telenovelas drifted out of open doorways. Old couples sat in rocking chairs and breathed in the cool(ish) night air. Young men on bicycles rode past with their girlfriends balanced perilously in front of them, not one bit perturbed by the pothole-laden roads. On the horizon, a heat lightning storm pulsed.

Despite the noises coming from my stomach, I felt at peace. And despite the fact that my teaching year began in earnest in less than four days, I was glad to be here.

Later that night, after lights out, I opened my bedroom door to make sure there were no hangers-on in the common space (or illicit last-night-without-parents make-out sessions, for that matter). The hostel was dark. The students were in their rooms. But the place veritably buzzed with the sound of their voices—happy, hopeful voices that dramatized the trip’s most dramatizeable moments, declared in effusive tones just how hella much they were going to miss Miguel and Joseline, and described in precise detail what they were going to eat when they returned stateside tomorrow, and how much of it (measured, once again, in hellas).

I lingered outside my door. It was something I wanted to remember—this image of a dark hostel alive with excited, young voices.

I felt lucky to be, for one strobe flicker of a moment at least, at the center of it.