A. Chiquitos School
It’s late June and if you’re lucky enough to be 8 and enrolled in an expensive private immersion school, school is most decidedly not out for you. In response to a craigslist ad, I spent three days doing janitorial-type tasks for headmistress Isabel, most of which could be categorized either as fighting entropy or lifting heavy things. The first task was to make the “music room,” a small classroom filled with books and aluminum piping, into a usable classroom. I moved about 500 lbs of stock paper out of there, futilely tried to tune all their toy guitars and “set up” (read: plugged in the ethernet cables on) a few PC’s.
Over the course of my stint at Chiquitos, I also powerwashed about the entire usable exterior of the building, a past apartment complex, mowed 80% of the waist-high grass lawn (before the gas ran out on the mower) and climbed up on the tool shed to clean Grey Recluse webs out of the rafters. Pros: Tax-free, under-the-table, minimum wage. Cons: They ran out of stuff for me to do after three days, putting me back on the job market.
Also, I found myself stuck in the middle of some interestingly awkward tension between Headmistress Isabel and ex-husband Romin, Chiquitos’ tech guy/plumber. Their 8-year-old daughter is an an enrolled student. Romin, a native Iranian, speaks exactly zero Spanish, presumably to spite his ex-wife and co-workers. Most of my interactions with him consisted of delivering messages from Isabel and sneaking undetected into his “den” to unload antiquated, unusable computer parts. At one point, Isabel sent me to borrow a screwdriver to put together the table I was supposed to assemble:
Me: Do you have a phillips head I could borrow? Isabel asked me to put together one of those tables.
Romin: She asked you to do that? You do not do that. That is my job.
Whoah, dude. I am not a threat to your weird little distopia here. I just powerwash. All in all, not a bad gig: The kids were cute and I got to practice my spanish with the faculty, all of whom hailed from various spanish-speaking countries. It turned out to be Isabel who brought up the apparently comic inversion of the white kid doing grounds work for the Hondurans. Ok.
I did send them a resume and cover letter for a vacant music teacher position, but I never heard back from them. On to greener pastures…
