Back to school

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Wow, what a week! I thought that once we were a bit settled and doing the same thing for a while there would be less to tell but I think it´s probably the opposite.

As mentioned before, the school we´re studying at, El Nahual, is on the outskirts of town and was mainly set up as a non-profit organisation to fund providing education in various subjects for local children, mostly those that are not provided in the public school system. There are a number of other projects including cooking classes to enable people to get jobs in catering and a community garden. For more details please see: El Nahual

We start the day by leaving the house just after 7.30am to walk to school. At this time in the morning it is either frosty or foggy....either way it is pretty cold and we need hats and gloves. Having wet hair is not pleasant and showering at that time in the morning (well, standing under a hot dribble!) is a struggle. At 8am we start Spanish lessons. Each student (there are about 10 at the moment) has their own teacher and for our first two weeks Hugh has Paola and I have Maribel. The room we use is not terribly warm but once lessons start it´s so intense that you stop thinking about anything else. After 2 hours we have a half hour break and go up on the roof with coffee and bread. The sun is usually out by this time and this is the first opportunity to really thaw out. It´s also a good time to chat to other students and volunteers about what´s going on and it´s quite hard to go back downstairs to classes for another hour and a half.

Maribel, my teacher is really lovely and very interesting. We usually spend the first couple of hours just talking (she probably talks more than me but I´m really pleased that I understand much of what she says) which is the main purpose of the lessons. She has all sorts of stories to tell and I now know all about her family and parts of her life, including the birth of her two children in public hospitals (around 20 women in labour together!) and how her husbands mother married at 12, had 2 children by the age of 15 and then ran away leaving them with her husband and didn´t have any contact with any of the family until the eldest one was around 18.

After the break we concentrate much more on grammar and go over my homework (yes....we get homework too!) but it seems to get around to 12pm pretty quickly. Most days there is then some kind of group activity ranging from a lecture about Guatemala to salsa classes. School finishes at 1pm and we walk back home for lunch. By this stage the temperature has increased dramatically and many layers have to be taken off. There seem to be huge temperature differentials between day and night....probably over 20 degs...which means that you´re either too hot or too cold most of the time!

In the afternoon we have different volunteering schedules but at present they have quite a of volunteers so it´s only been a couple of afternoons. The first work we did was turning over the soil in some vegetable beds in the school garden - really hard work but we made some good progress. Hugh helped with an English class in the school another afternoon and I helped with an art class. My class was run by Merecedes who lives with the same family as us. She has been here for a few weeks and is pretty organised. The children are preparing for Carnival next week and making masks and cascarones - decorated egg-shells filled with confetti (you hope!) that are smashed on peoples heads. The children were around 9-11 years old and all really enthusiastic about what they were doing. They don´t get chance to do anything like this anywhere else and loved decorating their masks. They all want lots of attention - just like children anywhere - but it´s very rewarding even if much of the time communication is difficult because my Spanish is not good enough to keep up with them and they make no concessions for your lack of language skills.

H:
Sarah had done an online course on teaching English before we went away so it was a bit of a surprise for me to find that I was the one who was scheduled to teach English and not Sarah (I'm pretty sure I didn't mention it on my application form...). I was a bit nervous about doing this but after speaking to Tenaya, who I was scheduled to teach with, I discovered that she had it pretty much covered and that I would be assisting her.

We actually spent the first hour with 4 kids helping them with their homework from the morning and then the next hour with about 12 kids revising colours, numbers 11-20 and parts of the body and then teaching them about items of clothing.

For the first hour there were 2 girls doing their Spanish homework (so I wasn't much help there), one boy doing his Maths homework (addition and subtraction) and one boy who wasn't doing much (I'm not sure what he was supposed to be doing, but it might have been handwriting practice).

I set about helping Wilmer, the boy with the sums, on the basis I could at least do some good there. Looking in his exercise book he was only getting about 50% correct, so I persuaded him to go back through one of them and found he was saying that in the first column 15 + 8 = 25! I showed him how I could use my fingers to add 8 to 15 and he quickly worked out that the correct answer was 23. He was then able to use his fingers to finish the rest of the sum. I think he managed about 2 more sums before he got bored. After about 5 mins Tanaya suggested that he could do his sums on the whiteboard which was a great idea that Wilmer really took to. He finished all his additions, checking each one with me before moving on to the next, and we then had time to start on subtractions. At the end of the hour I really felt I'd made a difference.

For the second hour, after revising previous lessons, we taught the kids various items of clothing. We did this by drawing items of clothing on the board together with their names in English, then we pointed to various items of our clothing and encouraged them to shout out the names. After this we gave them a worksheet with names of items of clothing on one edge and pictures of items of clothing on the other, so that they could join the correct ones together. To finish we played a game - we had 2 teams and used paper cut out items of clothing. In turn they had to name the clothing correctly and put it on a figure on the wall. Both teams struggled with the last item (a belt), they got this at about the same time which resulted in a tie.

This lesson worked reasonably well, but there were some kids who said and wrote nothing, some who only wrote down stuff from the board (and I think some didn't understand what they were copying), some who only did the worksheet etc. The kids are young, of differing abilities in English, so I think some of them will need several repitions before they learn this (but then that's often the way with my Spanish too!). I tried to make sure that the at least went away with correct worksheets.

Back to S:

After volunteering there are often other activities. On Monday there was a meeting for all students and volunteers to discuss the projects and talk about teaching methods. Wednesday night there was a game of football which I opted out of but Hugh said was a lot of fun. On Thursday they showed the film Pan´s Labyrinth which is in Spanish - an excellent film if a little brutal in parts as it´s set in the Spanish Civil War.

On Friday lunchtime it was group lunch which alternates between ´comida tipica´- Guatemalan food cooked by somebody local - and ´Ínternational comida´- all students have to make a typical dish from their own country. This is pretty flexible and the facilities limited so we made a veg curry on the basis that curry is now the most popular food in the UK. The other British couple made bangers and mash! There was loads of food but it all got eaten - I think homestay food is generally pretty limited in both range and portion size so it´s an opportunity for everybody to have a good feed!

As the week went on I was struggling to deal with the homestay arrangements - no one single thing but a number that added up to me not really being happy there. Ultimately I´m not very comfortable in other people´s houses and felt guilty about Angela having to cook for 3 of us, sometimes at different times because we have different schedules. She was not well with a bad cold during the week and also has high blood pressure which didn´t help. There is also a dog in the house - as many of you know I´m pretty scared of them so they have been keeping it locked up while we´re around. This means it barks a lot and doesn´t like us much - to the extent it has been using the patio outside our bedroom door as it´s toilet....I won´t go into details but not pleasant when you have to go outside to the shower in the freezing cold at 6am! So, part way through the week I had a chat with Alex at the school who was perfectly happy for us to move and said that it shouldn´t be a big deal. I managed to explain to Angela in Spanish that after 4 months travelling we wanted to be able to cook for ourselves and she seemed to be ok about it though I´m pretty sure she thinks it´s because of the dog.

So, after lunch on Friday we set off to search for a new home and finally decided on the most expensive (of course!) and furthest from the school (of course!) but in almost all ways the best. It´s right on the central park in the town and the down sides are that it gets little sun so is quite chilly but it has a heater and excellent hot water (bliss!), comfortable beds and a good table for doing our homework. We felt a bit guilty about leaving Angela as I´m sure the family need the money but Alex said he had plenty of other students coming through. Mercedes was also a bit sad to see us go because she has been in the house on her own for a number of weeks and it was good to have people to go out with and, more importantly, walk home with which is not really safe on your own at night. But there was no point staying if it was making me miserable.

We have both really enjoyed the week at school, so much that we have already decided that we are going to stay at least one more week than the four we'd originally planned. Apart from Mercedes all students and volunteers are younger than us, many still in University, but they are all very open and friendly and it´s been great to get to know some new people who all want to help such a great cause. Many of them have great Spanish and are very good at what they are doing making me feel rather inadequate but everyone is appreciated for what they can offer. The largest contingent is from the US but this week there has been Scandinavians, one from Singapore, another British couple and a British guy and one from Slovakia, one from Germany so it´s a very mixed bag.

Friday was the last day for one of the girls so we all met for drinks in a restaurant that night. They had live Cuban music on which was excellent. It was a bit too crowded in there so we all moved onto a slightly seedy, but cheap, bar near by. It was a lovely way to relax and have a few drinks after a hard but rewarding week.

So, that was the end of our first week in school. It´s been such a change from what we´ve been used to over the last few months but has worked out really well and we´re both enjoying getting to know a real town with all that entails like shops, markets, restaurants etc.

Hope that you´ve all survived the bad weather and that it´s calmed down a bit. Still not had much news about your holidays etc....go on, those of you that haven´t been in touch at all yet, it would be great to hear from you.....

Lots of love

S + H xx

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Comments

[jonathan]

Just a Quickie
to say hi and let you know I'm still reading and keeping up to date with your adventures (as if you ever doubted me!). You'll have all my news from my blog so keep on having fun. J x

[jon peacock]

national dish
veg curry - bliss! still following the story, keep up the food news, stuffed peppers sounded tasty until you mentioned soggy cardboard.