Just Say No to Drugs

Because there is no real internet access at school, messages are brought to teachers by a man who works with the maintenance department. It's so hard for me to communicate with him because he mumbles and doesn't speak very clearly, which is very difficult when you can't understand the language too well to begin with. He's kind of like the Spanish version of Boomhauer from King of the Hill. :o)

Anyway, he comes to my room last week and gives me a plastic bag with 5 pills in it. I was so confused. He handed me a memo with a lot of fine print Spanish as well. I just went ahead and signed that I received it but could not understand why I was being given pills. Had the school been infected with something and I needed to take them immediately? Did I take them for 5 days or what? Needless to say, I did not take them and decided I couldn't wait to tell Wilson that they were just handing out random pills at my school! Another American teacher and I were joking about it. He laughed that a school in the States that did this would have newsreporters all over it!!! And, as it turned out, they were some kind of anti-parasite pill that the school had ordered for something else and just decided to share the leftovers with the teachers. You were only supposed to take one--the other 4 were for family members. The American guy told me I should go to the administration and say that I wasn't feeling too well even though I took all five pills! Ha! They might have given me a full week paid vacation to keep quiet on that one! Ha!

Of course, what's a bit sad is that the Ecuadorian teachers probably just took them without even questioning it. There is a lot of blind following of leadership in this country--no one really questions things for themselves. The other dorky English teachers and I compared this to Brave New World, where the government gives out soma to keep everyone as mindless, happy drones. We, of course, refused! :o)