The boy who cried wolf


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South America » Bolivia » Chuquisaca Department » Sucre
April 17th 2012
Published: April 17th 2012
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The title of this post is tenuous. It´s vaguely linked to a dog we´ve come to befriend but is largely an attempt at a pretentiously symbolic title to try and rack up a few blog-views. A more accurate title would be: "The boy (manly man man (me)) who saw a dog that scared the crap out of him because it looked like a wolf, which then followed him around everywhere and acquired the nickname wolf, and actually turned out to be a very pleasant canine", but this title would be terrible, and I doubt there´d even be space for it on the screen. Thus, I´ve got your hopes up with the above title that suggests some funny I-told-you-so incident happening, such as me repeatedly feining travellers diarrhoea before actually getting the illness for real whilst sitting on Will´s bed and him refusing to believe me and so on and so on. This did not happen (I´m glad to say) and I hope you don´t feel so decieved as to not read the rest of this intricate yarn of lies.

So, we are here in Sucre, the acclaimed capital of Bolivia (although the capital is basically La Paz) where we have been for a tad over 2 weeks working in a nursery, having some spanish lessons and teaching a bit of english. We have been staying with a local family, in the legendary Casa Vicky which has been absolutely great. Due to the huge extended family that used to live there, the house takes the form of 3 or 4 bungalows with a small garden area in the middle. Now that the majority of the family have gone they rent out the rooms to travellers and volunteers, so It´s a great way to get the experience of living with a local family but also meeting other travellers at the same time.

The work in the nursery has been very good although often stressful and very tiring. It´s located out in the suburbs in a fairly poor area of the city, nothing like the glistening white central area. There are roughly 30 children that come and they range from the ages of 3-6. We´ve been working mainly with the eldest group of about 8 children, which has given us the chance to actually try (and I stress the word try) to teach them some stuff, like numbers, letters, shapes, haute cuisine, string theory, complex algorithms, you know - the standard. It has proven fairly difficult though and their extraordinary willingness to excrete at will (not at Will, as in at will, maybe they have pissed on Will without him realising, its very possible) makes this doubly difficult. All the same, apart from the misbehaving we have made certain amounts of progress and are about to implement some supernanny-esque star charts and naughty corners, so hopefully things may improve. The food they get is awesome though. An extremely tasty soup starter followed by the filet steak of the naughtiest child that morning. I jest. Its actually of the best behaved. I still jest. Its actually the... Ok enough of this I could go on for ages. No, they get a main of rice and meat or pasta and veggies and meat and pasta and rice and veggies and rice or pasta. No rice though, except for all that rice I just mentioned. The point is it´s seriously tasty.

I´ve been doing the spanish lessons with Fox Language Academy, not much to report there really. And teaching english has been with the same company, teaching 3 twenty something year olds who have already learned the basic grammar but need practise to improve fluency and pronunciation and general revision of the stuff they´ve already learnt.

This largely covers the main activities of our stay here in Sucre. I don´t have time to carry on but will do another post shortly on all the little things like observations from around the city, funny stories etc... For the time being, chao chao!

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