Little by little, things have been looking up. I honestly do love being at San Patricio, despite the chaos.

One day, after a particularly tough bought of homesickness, when I had been in the midst of that punched-in-the-stomach pit of loneliness, and was seriously asking myself what I possibly thought could be gained from this, an adorable eight year old named Luisa presented me with this:

Who knew a sticky note could have so much power 🙂

I instantly felt better, and reminded myself why I’m here

It’s hard. And it’s supposed to be hard. And that’s part of the point. But the little moments like these remind me of what I want to learn from this experience – figuring out at least some parts of the life I really want for the long–term. And I’ve discovered the insanely refreshing beauty of doing something for work that genuinely makes you smile every day – and that this possibility actually exists.

Even the days when I’ve been thrown unsuspectingly in with the tiny demons (especially the second graders…), I take a deep, solid inhale (after 5 un-interrupted hours of insane stress and adrenaline), and I smile. Hell, I even laugh.

“Meees! How do you say ‘el shopping’ in English?”

“Um, ‘Shopping Center’, Olivia. ‘Shopping’ is an English word.”

“Meees! In my holidays, I go to Deeeesnay with my fam-i-lee, and we stay at Howard Shonson”

“Wow, that’s great, Facundo, but can you say ‘Howard JOHNSON’?”

“Howard SSShonson”

“Meeees, sos de China?”

“Ummmmm…..no, Maria Luz, what do you think?”

I can just have finished four hours of screaming “Coco! Toto! Felipe! Santiago! Santino! MARIA!!! SIT DOWN AND STOP HITTING EACH OTHER!”, and one of the kids (even sometimes one of the trouble makers I was yelling at an hour earlier) will come up and give me a hug and I feel 10x more fulfilled than I ever did leaving my old office building.

Luckily, these hilarious and heartwarming moments are mixed in every day with the bad and the ugly.

Some of these kids are so messed up, and have serious issues, and the lack of even the slightest enforced discipline or regard for authority for some of them makes me worry for their future and wonder how a society can function with kids that are brought up like this. These kids are 100% at the top of the social hierarchy in this town, so I can only imagine what kind of messed up issues some of the kids in some of the poorer public schools here come in with, but the rich kids have their own brand of problems.

Moms and Dads who are never emotionally present (and constantly jetting off to New York while a family 100 yards away lives in a plastic shack…), yet shower their kids with the newest iPad or whatever, resulting in their child doing whatever it takes to be noticed. I can only imagine how some of them must behave at home with their poor niñeras. If their parents don’t give a crap and let them do whatever they want, (even if its purely by lack of being there to say “no” or model what good behavior is), how they hell does anyone think they are going to listen to a teacher telling them to follow the most basic classroom rules like sitting in their seat, not yelling over others when they try to talk, and not hitting their classmates?

Since when can a seven year old look at an adult with the eyes of an arrogant, pompous grown man and make you feel like an insecure, blithering idiot??? Since when does a kid blatantly and intentionally ignore a teacher who is calling him by name and making direct eye contact from just across the desk? You can spot these kids from a mile away, and after you’re done being infuriated by them, it’s impossible not to feel incredibly saddened. By yourself for caving in to yelling, but not knowing what else to do as an alternative, at their parents for raising them this way, at the school for allowing this shit to fly, and at them for being a tiny asshole! And at the fact that this is where our society is heading (at least a whole bunch of it…)

But so many of them are so, so, so freaking sweet, smart, kind and funny. And watching them learn and grow and improve even on a week-to-week basis puts a huge smile of my face.

I used to feel like I was stuck in an endless rat race, like I was spending countless hours doing nothing but slowly getting older, and not gaining much from it. Pry myself out of bed, painfully exhausted, race to work, spend all day in a weird purgatory of the longest day ever in which nothing happened at all, waiting for the countless hours to pass before I could race home, stress out, stay up too late watching stupid reality TV as I tried to forget my woes, and then go to bed anxious and exhausted so I could do it all again the next day. At this school, I feel happy and excited and like I’m really LIVING and doing something that matters every day. I can see my efforts paying off, and the reasons why I’m there are right in front of me with their goofy (sometimes devilish) gapped smiles.

Knowing that there’s even a shred of a possibility that something I said or I did made a tiny impact on them makes me feel like I’m doing something real – a huge, huge change for me, and one I need to hold on to.

The first few weeks have been…tough, to say the least.

The school is definitely a lot of fun, and by far the best thing about being here so far, although I definitely feel like a fish out of water. It’s a pretty big difference from my former life in multiple ways…good and bad.

The good: Being surrounded by smiling children who all speak in cute Argentine accents, stepping outside between every class in the lovely sunny courtyard, hearing Castellano everywhere, and spending all day at work interacting with people directly makes me feel so much more alive than I did in my former daily life.

(Side-note: is it me or are kids with accents automatically 10x cuter? I spent some time with my Irish second cousins last year who are ages 10 and 12 and those mini brogues of theirs upped their already intense cuteness level to about 1000%.)

The bad: The Argentine version of “organization” at an administrative level is pretty much non-existent…laughable even. The first few weeks of teaching have consisted of me frantically wandering around campus trying to figure out where I should be at any given time, since the “schedule” they gave me changes every single day and it seems that no one ever knows anything about what’s going on or who’s supposed to be where at what time, or even whom I can ask to find out.

My fellow teachers are kept just as much in the dark about everything as I am, so if I can’t figure out where I “should” be, I usually just pick a class and go there until one of the administrators tracks me down. This usually progresses to being scolded, “Yes, of course, darling, you should be in Marcela’s class in Quinquela Martin now! Yes yes yes. Thank you” [Walks away].

Oh, of course, silly me!! Sorry, Nuni, I forgot my mind-reading pills today. Just a few questions… Who is Marcela? Which classroom is that? Who’s Quinquela Martin? Which grade is that? What are they working on? Is there a book I should have? Do I stay just one period or more? When is the period over? Where do I go next?

And… it gets even better. In a few instances, after this course of events, I have arrived at said mystery classroom (after I finally figure out where it is…) only to discover that – Surprise! – the teacher I’ve never met is absent. YAY!! “Okay,” they say, dropping me like a piece of bait into a piranha tank of 8 year olds, “let us know if you need anything!”

Umm….just a few things!!

The first time this happened, it was a fourth grade class of hyperactive locos. It deteriorated almost immediately after the kids quickly realized I had no idea what they were working on in class, and my attempt at covering the most basic topic using goofily drawn cartoons on the board failed miserably.

“MEEEEEEES!! MEEEEEES! NO ENTIENDOOO! NO QUIEROOOO”, they shout like a chorus of angry baby geese. They make fun of my accent, hit each other, throw things, roll around on the floor, shout over me, steal each other’s pencil cases, and I end up shouting at them in a weird mix of Spanish and English which just makes them laugh at me even more. I try to appease them by playing a game of Pictionary on the chalkboard, but that goes downhill just as quickly as they practically kill each other fighting over who is on whose team and which team gets which side of the room.

After shouting doesn’t work (and I feel terrible after having given in to that in the first place), I try a new approach of waiting patiently with my arms crossed for them to be quiet, until Bauti is hitting Lauti because he ripped his book, and I have to dive in and physically separate them, yelling “BASTA!! Chicos!! No peleamos en clase!!” to which they collapse in a fit of giggles. Despite what I thought was my relatively good level of Spanish, I probably sound like Borat to these kids.

UGH! This one particular morning was topped off by a lovely experience in the cafeteria, where the babysitting continued. I was sitting at the head of the table after finally getting the mini Argentines to sit down and start eating in relative peace. I’m minding my own business and focusing intently on my salad from the salad bar (which is actually really good!), when I look up to see four or five of these same boys all leaning in staring at me and silently giggling as they sit with a ketchup bottle ready, aimed and about to fire straight at me. THANK GOD, I looked up right before the iron eight-year-old dirty fist squelched down on the bottle and narrowly avoided being showered with ketchup on my 5^th day at the school.

That was definitely one of the moments when I almost cried, although I held it together in public, luckily.

But these past couple of weeks have involved lots more crying than I ever thought I would do. Turns out, moving halfway across the world and having only one friend that you just met is Really, REALLY lonely. I should have known this before I left, and on some level, I did, but I have never experienced such long-standing homesickness and loneliness like this.

I always have a really tough time with transitions and I have always hated saying goodbye to people and places I love, but usually once I arrive in the new place I get comfortable really quickly, almost in an “out of sight, out of mind” kind of way. Even when I went away to college, I felt instantly comfortable and at home. Coming here was a different story.

It sometimes feels like I’m in a box of isolation at the bottom of the ocean, and I can see my loved ones and the comfort of my former life through the blurry surface of the water far above me, but I have no hope of swimming to the top. And it was my choice to dive down here. In fact, I had been daydreaming about and planning for this dive for the past decade of my life!

As hard as it is, I know that I came here for a reason, and that I’ve had this dream for a reason. This whole experience will surely be transformative in some way, I just need to ride it out and accept the discomfort until I figure out what the point of all this will be.