Villa la Cruz

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The majority of my time here has been spent volunteering in the shany-towns round here. The next few entries will be about that...

VILLA LA CRUZ

On saturday mornings I go up to VIlla la Cruz, a campamento an hour or so´s micro ride away. ´Campamento´is a squatter´s shanty-town, a campment, a collection of about 1.000 people living in tin, wood, plastic, cardboard, or old-political-billboard shacks on the outskirts of Viña and Valparaiso.

Villa la Cruz is up in ´Reñaca Alto,´ which is a politely-termed euphemism: Reñaca is the swank, rich summer beach resort of the Chilean wealthy. The ´alto´of Reñaca Alto is several planets away from that. Where I teach is at the very end of the settlements - after that it´s pure open country-side. The view is spectacular: behind the green hills are mountains, and above those are the cordillera, the Andes - the end of Chile.

In march I started teaching english in V.la Cruz, for an organization called ¨Un Techo Para Chile,¨- ¨A Roof For Chile¨. It´s like Habitat for Humanity except a lot cooler: it´s all university students doing all kinds of activities: legal advising, budget management, small business entrepreneurship, health/sex education, and ´school re-inforcement´- english, math, and spanish help for kids. Then, after a whole battery of workshops, we all get together one weekend and build a few sturdy wooden shacks for families who have completed a certain amount of courses.
Basically, it totally rocks.

Part of the reason I came to Chile was to do some sort of volunteer work. It´s something that everyone wishes they could do if they had time, of course. And here, since my studies are on a pass-fail basis, it was easy to make my work for Un Techo my #1 priority.

My first day teaching english to children at V. la Cruz was nuts. My co-teacher told me to meet her at 10 at a café so we could go up together (´since you don´t know how to get there´- which I did, it´s just everybody assumes that gringos are completely incapable of fending for themselves). So I decided to humour her and was at the Café Journal at 10. At 10:50, she still hadn´t shown up. This was late, even for Chile (if you want to meet at 10, you have to say 9:30, because it´s understood that people will show up a 1/2 hour later than the agreed time. People don´t even think twice about it. It´s like being in a different time dimension...).

I got up there 20min after 12, panting, all worried because I was showing up late on my first day ... but, of course, this being Chile, no one had shown up yet, because ´show up at 12´ actually meant 12h30.... argh.

My boss, a french girl named Clémence, had set out very specific instructions - take down name, age, grade, and have a little test to see their level, give them a lecture on the requirements of the course, etc. It sounded so easy.

It was a beautiful day and there were only a few shy kids, so we brought the tables and chairs outside. There was a little scuffle over where they should go and who would get which chair and finally we were all sitting down, ready to go.

I was just about to have them write down their names when two more kids showed up. Then there was a whole nother uproar because they brought our more desks and this girl didn´t want to sit next to that boy and meanwhile the 4-yr old got bored and slipped over to the dirt pile and his sister started yelling at him to get back and then someone knocked over a chair and three more kids came...

A half-hour later there were 20 kids and of course not nearly enough space outside because I thought we´d only be 6 and now there were 20 swarming everywhere. My perfect rock-solid plan was desintegrating. I contemplated going into a Mr. Edwards-style baboon-imitation rampage, but it was the first day and I knew all the mothers were spying on me... plus kids don´t have a choice being in my dad´s class...

Another half-hour and finally they were all sitting, attentively. This took considerably more work than it sounds like, because it was like playing Whack-a-Mole with just getting this side quiet when the other would get bored and go sprinting off to play. Anyways. Now I could take down names! except I forgot that latin americans have 20 names each and in the poorer areas these mostly consist of american TV-series actors or brazilian hair products.

Within the hour I´d just gotten names, age, grade, and done the test, and so were were about to play Red-Light, Green-Light when Valeria, my co-teacher, showed up, fuming because I ¨Hadn´t waited for her!¨

-¿When did you show up?
- ¡Only an hour late!

Nobody had heard of RLGL before so I was kind of excited to show them one of my favourite child-hood games. Nobody seemed all that thrilled, though, which I wondered about until we started playing and I realized, Duh, RLGL only makes sense in countries wehre road signals are actually respected. To them, yellow was a brisk trot, red an optional slowing, and green and all-out sprint. And after riding round Valparaiso for 4 months I can say that´s actually pretty law-abiding, comparitively.


WEEK 2:
Valeria and I had decided which kids were in which ability-
We had books and I had a lesson all ready-
The kids were all lined up and paying attention, eager-faced-
Everything was going according to plan ... so I opened up with a Good Morning Vietnam-style ¨Hey, wassup guys! How ya dooing!?¨ and tried to give a high-five to the neartest kid.
Blank stares. Dammit. Robin Williams made teaching english look so easy and fun. I tried again.
´When you say Hi to your friends, you don´t say ´Hello. How are you?´ all boring like that, you high-five and say ´What´s kicking!´
More blank stares.
I pointed at a girl named Priscilla.
You, how do you say hi to your friends?
She stared at me for a second, then lifted her hand, and said ´Hello. How are you.´
This was not working. I got up and turned to the board and wrote some stuff down while I thought of an emergency plan B and so didn´t think much of the giggling.

When I turned round again and tried to talk about all the cool reasons to learn english, the giggling instantly stopped and I was presented with the same totally expression-less faces, and when I´d turn to the board again, more suppressed giggling.

I was getting more and more perplexed and frustrated and scared. Clemence was going to be so mad! I was a total failure! Why didn´t they like me? What could I do?...
Teacher? My brother has something to say to you.
Yes?
and Her Brother pointed shyly at my croth, where my fly was gaping open. Remember, I was standing and they were sitting three feet away. It was pretty ´in-your-face´obvious, shall we say... I tried to pull it off by throwing in an impromptu lesson about XYZ and did they know the alphabet?


THIRD WEEK:
My loins properly girded, I went boldly up to V. La Cruz for another lesson.
This time, things went well. We made progress, I was feeling good. That is, until Fernanda went over to the corner for a paper and found the spider.

She came screaming through the class-room and shot out the door. This put everyone else into a panic and so there were five minutes of everyone running round in circles screaming and knocking over desks. The two littles kids took advantage of the distraction as an opportunity to go dump out the toy-box and start playing. I had forbidden it, and so as not to be noticed they made really quiet burbling sounds for the trucks instead of their usual roars.

Meanwhile, I caught Fernanda and asked what was going on.
¡A spider!
I sighed and said, Spiders are good, you shouldn´t be afraid of them! and to prove my point I went over and scooped the spider into my hands, and brought it out into the middle, which promptly set Fernanda and everybody else into absolute hysterics.
What? Spiders aren´t dangerous ... Why are you so afraid?
¡¡¡That one is!!!
It was a god-damn Black Widow.

I shrieked and threw up my hands and the Black Widow went shooting off, except it had attached a thread to my hands, and in the confusion a few kids had run right into the web, and so the next few minutes were me trying to chase down those kids to make sure they didn´t have a deadly spider on them, except they thought I still had it and so would not let me within a kicking centimetre of them...



Yesterday, july 2nd, was the graduation. We held it in an old palace in Viña, which was thrilling for the kids - they hardly ever leave the campamentos. Since it´s all dirt roads, the micros can´t make it up the hills when it rains - and so in the rainy season they basically don´t leave - not for school, not for anything. Even if they could get out, their parents can´t afford to wash their clothes if they´re out getting muddy every day. And so, at school, in class-rooms of 45, they just get dropped behind. So for them to come to Viña del Mar - flat, paved, clean, sparkling white, was like coming to another world.
Not ´like.´ Was...

It would be nice to say that I had a big impact, but I don´t think so. Of the 12 weeks I went, I only got to teach about half, what with the rains, bus problems, or family problems. I made really good friends with the kids, yes - especially a 5-yr old named Bastian who would lurk in corners or on roofs and then leap off onto my back and then we´d wrestle and I´d go sprinting through the campamento with him clinging to my back...
Probably the most important thing I did was just to show up on time, every week, treat them fairly, and be nice.

Every day was always an extreme of happiness and sadness... We´d get a lot done, make real progress, and I´d be really proud of the kids and we´d all high-five and then I´d look round and remember we were in a wooden shack that floods in the rain and that Briyitt´s mother had abandoned her and her sister and now they were living with her grandma, that more than learning the stupid alphabet they just wanted me to tell them about the world out there and love them and so they´d show up an hour early just in case I was... Or how an 11-yr old girl, Camila, who couldn´t read or write, would stand out-side in the cold and watch through the window at our lessons, even though I´d asked her to come in ... or that at the end of my few hours I´d leave and go have a proper meal and my students would go back to a leaky roof, an alcoholic dad, teen pregnancy and feudalistic classicism.

The three hours I spent going to and from the campamentos was mostly spent staring out the window.

One of the last times I went, it was thick fog down in Viña. V. la Cruz, however, was about 20m above the fog ... after the lesson ended and I said good-bye to the kids and was handed an armful of fresh bread, I walked back down the road to go catch the micro. The clouds were spread out to the horizon and looked just like an ocean - even the cerro (hill) nearby had become an island. The sun was setting and had turned the whole world into a spectacle of hot colours cooling off...

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