Teaching at Santa Maria de Jesus

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Morning routine

Our mornings started by meeting everyone at the coffee shop in Antigua, where all the volunteers got together before heading off to either Itzapa or Santa Maria de Jesus for the day. Our shuttle bus usually arrived around 8am to drive the teachers and stove builders to Santa Maria de Jesus, which is located on the side of Volcano Agua. Once we arrive at the viallge, and we all clamber out of the mini van, different children each day welcomed us with hugs and big smiles. During the weeks that Dan was building stoves, he would meet up with the masons at this time, to travel to the house of the family whose stove he was building for the day. I would normally head up the road to make photocopies and buy coloured cardboard for my classes' activities of the day at a small paper shop.

Some of the boys would gather to play with their trops on the narrow lane which makes up the street outside the school in the mornings and if they weren't concentrating hard enough, you would get a 'Buenas Dias' from the ones that you knew. The lane is used frequently by local men and their donkeys pulling wood or corn leaves and so some days when the rain hadn't washed it away, you would need to side step the donkey mess on the way to the school gate.

The school

The school consists of 2 buildings on grounds that were kindly donated by the family that live in the gated compound. Concrete bricks provide the structure of the buildings, but the walls consist of corn stalks and the floors are made of concrete. Each small building is divided into 3 classrooms, partitioned by temporary corn stalk dividers that can easily be peered over by the children. My class was grade 1 and consisted of mainly 6-7 year olds. They were a great age to teach and were easier to deal with using my intermediate Spanish skills. The children speak Q'echi normally, but speak Spanish at school (when they weren't swearing at you or fighting with their classmates!). There were 16 children in my morning class and 12 in my afternoon class.

Most of the children also attend a govenment school in the half of the day that they do not attend our lessons, but the teaching there is poor and so our school is what they need to be able to pass their exams. GVI are aiming to have the Phoenix project school accredited, so that the government exams can be performed at the school. This way, there will be no need for the children to attend the government school.

The children that don't attend the government school work with their families during half of the day. Some of the kids have blisters on their hands from manual labour and others are so exhausted that they fall asleep at their desk. I had two 6 year olds that were so exhausted in my afternoon class, that it was difficult to keep them awake some days! Daniel saw young children carrying very heavy loads when he walked through the town on the way to where he needs to work. The adults tend to carry heavy weights using a strap that they hold up with their heads and sometimes the children do this also.

Teachers at the school

When first starting the teachers are given teaching plans that are to be used as a guideline for what should be organised for the children. Spanish speaking children learn to write using phonetic syllabals, so I taught my classes the new syllabals of la, le, li, lo and lu, as well as da, de, di, do and du. Much reiteration was required of the syllabals that they previously learnt and I continued to teach the children the mathematic concepts of conjunctions (groups of items), groups with more and less, sums and number sequences. We covered big, medium and small and made origami hats and puppies during craft time. It was great to see the progress that the children made during the time that I spent with them. In our last week at Santa Maria de Jesus, when Dan had completed all of his stoves, he joined my class as the teacher aid. His presence was very much appreciated by the boys in the class. Most of the teachers tend to be female and so it is nice to have male adults around.

Fruit breaks

We were told that the children didn't always get to eat breakfast or if they did it might just be a cup of coffee, so the school provides the children in the morning class with a bread item when they arrive to help with their concentration levels. Half way through their school time, there is a fruit break, where the children each get a piece of fruit and get to play with their friends for 30 minutes. A narrow concrete path separates the buildings and at the base of the walled complex there is a concrete sink where the children wash their hands before they line up for fruit. There is not much space for the children to run around, but the girls normally keep themselves busy playing jacks in the classrooms and the boys take up the space outside playing with their trops. I even had children doing extra work in their break time which was great to see, especially when one of those children was a boy who, at the beginning, had difficulty sitting down in class and completing any work! What an improvement to see by the end of my time there.

This same boy used to sleep at his desk, would get up and run around disrupting other classes and also make trouble in the classroom. By the end he was completing more work and did not visit the other classes. He still was a ratbag during class when he wasn't working, but miracles can not be made in 3 weeks! He was even carrying my heavy teaching boxes out to the office when the class was over to help me. Dan liked to play trops with him after class had ended, which I think was also good for him.

The poverty is very noticeable, as the children come to school dirty and usually wearing the same clothes each day. One boy in my class has problems with his eyes and needs to have his face very close to the paper to be able to see what he is writing. I made a comment to the organiser of the school and was told that he was given glasses as part of a medical program that was run years ago, but because his family needed money to eat, they sold the glasses that were gifted to him to pay for food. They discontinued the optical program, due to issues like this and so the boy will just have to continue through life without being able to see very well. It is very sad to see this when you can not do anything about it to help.

End

of my time at the school

After working so hard, seeing the progress, finally knowing the children for their individual needs and levels and enjoying the cuddles and smiles from them all, it was sad to leave the school. I really think by having more time at the school, I could have made more of a difference, but our schedule dictated that we needed to leave and so that is what we did. It is sad to imagine how the children must detach and reattach themselves to the different teachers that pass through the school so frequently, but they all seem to be very adaptable. Having the school with its ever changing volunteer teachers is so much better than not having the school at all.

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Photos

Morning class - Year 1
We made paper hats that day, can you guess?!