Ñandú

I know what you're thinking: "But Mike, ñ is always for ñandú!" Bear with me.

One of the school's many educational tools was a deck of 54 alphabet cards, one pair for each of the 27 letters, each featuring the letter and an animal whose name begins with said letter. A is for armadillo, B is for búho (owl), C is for conejo (rabbit), and so on. This deck and our focus on basic literacy (letter recognition, to start with) made the theme of this journal a natural choice. (My alternate subtitle, by the way, was G is for gimmickry, N is for navelgazing.)

(Ñandú, for the curious, means "ostrich." Other long shots include wapití (some kind of deer) and xilócopo, which according to the picture on the card is a bee, but none of the native Spanish speakers I've asked has ever heard of that word.)

The kids like to use the deck to play Memory or Go Fish, both of which are good educational games, but for a while the sight of the cards would fill me with dread. Two reasons:

1. A few of the kids seemed bent on doing whatever possible to avoid actually learning the alphabet. When we played Go Fish, one kid in particular would often just shove a card at me and say "this one."
   
   And which letter is that?
   
   (Shrug.)
   
   OK, which animal is this?
   
   He'd eye the picture of a seal with its name (foca) printed underneath. "Nutria!" (otter)
   
   All right. Easy to mix up. "No, it's a foca. What letter does foca start with? fffffffff..."
   
   "D!" No. "R!" No, (ffffffff). "J! I don't know. Give me the card."
   
   And so it went on, over and over. We tried different ways of getting him to start recognizing the letters themselves, and we made slow but measurable progress at it, but (speaking as a nerd) he had a shocking and innate-seeming aversion to actually learning anything.
   
   
   
2. They smelled. The cards, that is. (Some of the kids did too, but you can't walk into a school for street children and expect everyone to be washed and tidy. It's ugly but true.) The combination of grubby hands and open mouths (a few of the kids would absently suck on the cards while waiting for their turns) covered them with a visible, tactile, odoriferous extra layer that was one of the many reasons I was thankful that I had thought to invest in a small bottle of hand sanitizer before leaving the States.

Still, as time went by, and with the arrival of other whimsy-loving volunteers, I grew to enjoy the game and the simple pleasure of yelling ¡'Hache' de hippopótamo! ¡'I-griega' de yac! at the kids. I like to think we all learned something interesting from the experience, but I wouldn't hazard to say what it is.

(Although for me, it may be that the Spanish words for raccoon and magpie are mapache and urraca, respectively.)