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Published: April 11th 2011
Nicole
One of the girls from familia Sol Aldea Yanapaay
Christmas Party at the school We arrived in Cusco the week before Christmas hoping to start work that week. Unfortunately this was not to be as the school finished with their Christmas party on the 23rd. We were invited to help out at this. Nothing could have prepared us for this! We were told that we would be helping to keep the kids under control which seemed like an easy task. However when the doors opened at 3pm hoards of children ascended to the rows of benches that had been put out in school 2. This is in a courtyard with a small garden near the toilets on one side and on the other side there are the 2 classrooms at the side then one large one at the back then a staircase and balcony with 3 more classrooms on the 1st floor. An awning was hung from the 1st floor balcony as the risk of rain had never been far away that week.
So the children started to ascend and they totally about 70 by the time we were ready to start, all excited about getting presents and proving quite difficult
to keep under control! Yuri, the school director started the proceedings with talking to the children and creating a magical place. This was followed by various presents being given out to those children who had been good and school that year. This made the kidss even more excited! This was then followed by helpings of hot chocolate and panettone which added to the kids excitement. More presents were given out then the proceedings ended in a rather hotpotch fireworks display about 20 metres from the kids behind a cardboard shield! It didnt end in too many tears thankfully. The party ended an hour over schedule but the kids had had a great time laiden with presents and then a new set of clothes each.
Rest of the time volunteering For almost all of the time I was in school I was with the older children in school 2, those aging between 7 and 13. The first week was a week for tidying and sorting things out as not many kids were expected due to it being january and the kids were on school holidays until march. Having said this though the only thing which really reduced
attendance was when it rained hard. January actually turned out to be quite a busy month, probably due to the lack of rain. For the first half of the day I spent most of my time in art or games. Art proved quite challenging the first week partly due to there being no specific theme for that week so we just did fun things with the kids. My creativity actually surprised me though.
The second half of the school day is taken up by from 5pm circle time where the children sit with their families and then they answer questions and get to express themselves. This happens for 20 minutes then you go into the separate classrooms to discuss the theme of that week. or the first 3 weeks I was with Cielo (sky) which aged from 7-8 years mostly boys who were quite uncontrollable at times. They were a good group but I found it quite frustrating as it took them a long time to understand things and as each week we had to prepare for a show on friday it would take most of the week for them to remember even the smallest of things so you
had to keep it simple.
After this time I moved to group Sol who were 10-11 years. There were some really clever kids in this group but again they could be quite rowdy at times. There was normally about 6-8 kids that came regularly. The themes we did with them were countries Nigeria - we taught them some tribal language and they acted out a traditional dinner scene for the show, modes of transport in english where we gave them the task of designing a word search all in english and england where for the show they acted out round the cauldron from macbeth, which we had translated into spanish. They were very quick learners and we had to prepare lots to keep them occupied.
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