Chainsaw man inter alia

Chainsaw man
You have to be prepared for surprises in Quito—I already mentioned the man juggling the flaming torches in the middle of the traffic.---
-----Think a crowded Luas tram or a crowded tube in London
-----the doors are closing
–----- Man shouts----- –“ Wait wait Let me in”
—---doors open man steps in holding a chainsaw aloft.
Now live chickens and geese I accept are part of everyday life on the transport system, but chainsaws?
Now is that normal or am I just over-sensitive?
Why do the words Texas and massacre spring to mind?

Markets
Sometimes you can judge children harshly. Maria is the worst behaved child in the market in Sangolqui. When the others are singing she shouts, when the others are colouring she throws the ball. If you hug her, (no that is not against the law!), you feel a skeleton. As I was bringing Maria back to her market stall Anita, the social worker , told me the story.—She effectively has no parents, they are both drug addicts, and she comes to work in the market with her granny. Maria is seven with the body of a small four-year old.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Danny, who runs the activities for the children in the market , is fantastic with the kids, not simply amusing them but providing learning through play,eg a pre-writing skill –exact manipulation with the finger and thumb—stringing pasta pieces – Jonathan’s joy when he succeeded in stringing two pasta pieces. (The names have been changed to protect the innocent)
In the markets and in the homework club we weighed and measured all the children. 80% are under weight for their age. (Now the standard we compared to may not be totally appropriate for Ecuador, but it shows the general trend) That’s the easy part—doing something about it is the hard part. At the same time many of the children are sucking candy the time, but not proper nutrition, yet there is such a wealth of fruit and veg in the markets. You can see it in the children, so many are small and puny.


Homework Club
The homework club in Santa Isabel has many challenges but it too has its lighter moments. Doing the “times tables” with a group I asked Carlos (he is bright at everything) to be the teacher and lead the rest through one of the tables. He not only led them through one of the tables but put on an act of being an old and cranky teacher, lifting the whole exercise to the level of fun.
I am no educationalist but some of the methods employed I think may not be good for the child’s self confidence. – There is a multiplication to be done on the board, say 784x49,-- the teacher runs a game of chance - an “eenie, meenie, minie, moe” –type –so some unfortunate has to do the sum on the blackboard in front of his or her peers, who can be unkind at times. For me memories of failure doing a geometry theorem on the blackboard for Fr. Scully flooded back. . Frequently the process of doing homework seems quite futile. Today Domingo had about fifteen statements such as:
+ + (the formula wont reproduce here) but it is like the square root of ((x-1)squared /36 )+square root of((x+3)squared /25 ) to reduce to the simplest form, I’m sure such an exercise has its value, but not when the child doesn’t know the first thing about square roots or squaring functions, but the priority was to get fifteen correct answers on the page so that he wouldn’t get a bad mark, so his sister and another person worked furiously so he could copy down the solutions.. Frequently the English exercises are approached in the same manner—just get the answer on the on the page, regardless of understanding or ability to actually say the sentence. There seems to be no attempt in the English teaching to develop oral ability. We try do some teaching through simple songs—all suggestions welcome of songs and simple activities/games to teach English ages 6 to 12 with practically nil oral ability in Englosh.