March 6th, 2012

We spent most of yesterday moving in. After setting up the fridge, I covered the box, it came in with my sarong to make a kitchen counter. I supported the box with bricks and sticks but still it wasn´t up to holding cans and heavy stuff and it tumbled over to be rethought. Late in the day, I started a quarter sheet painting in the street. The rain moved in and my mountains disappeared. However, this is the first quarter sheet painting that I have started on this trip. In the early evening Ernesto got a phone call saying that Lucy, my teaching assistant, was on the bus that had broken down and wouldn´t make it to Aucapata in time for tomorrow. I started learning a few more absolutely necessary terms in Spanish (such as the names of the four kinds of teeth since this art project has the double aim of making dental health important). Jim busily cut chicken wire into pieces (for our papermache tooth project) and we got ready to pull off today´s art class just the two of us. Then suddenly the bus got fixed and Lucy arrived. Ernesto and Lucy speak no English and our Spanish is so bad that we can´t talk about anything. I did cook supper for us all and then continued sorting the art supplies that we brought with us.

I was up at 7 am this morning working on a few extra ideas. A four hour art class is very long. We were supposed to start at 10 but at 9, Lucy told me the class was three hours and didn´t start until 11. This was the first time when I realized that remaining totally flexible would be really really important to surviving our time here. Once we got to the school and had our official welcome, we got our class. Instead of the fourty we´d expected we had 24 and all are really young. No big kids in this group. I did a sketch in the class and showed paintings of Nova Scotia. Then I introduced our project ¨Tus dientes limpios permanecen para siempre¨. We gave a diente mascota (pet tooth) to each student. Everyone gave their tooth a first name and then they had the mystery of figuring out its´last name. Once it was decided that it´s last name was Molar, Premolar, Caninos or Insisivos, they drew their pet teeth and painted the negative space around the tooth in primary and the resulting secondary colours. Then we started the papermache teeth. No problem forming the giant teeth with the chicken wire. Then we handed out newspapers and tried to get the kids to tear them into pieces. This was a new concept and it took allot of convincing. Then we rolled up our sleeves and gave out six large containers of flour and water pater. What a huge mess! The only failure I ever had teaching school art (for fun) was paper mache with Danica´s grade three class, and for some reason I had decided to try paper mache with little Spanish speaking kids. I had thought that I had fixed the problem by substituting chicken wire for the burstable balloons that I used twenty years ago, but we still had a big mess. At 1:30 pm, I made an executive decission to end paper mache and clean the tables and the kids. Then I gave out boxes of tooth picks and plasticine and we had an activity that everyone loved and no one wanted to stop doing!