First day of volunteer work

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Hola! Today is Monday the 10th and the first day of my teaching in Otavalo. On my team are Daylin (college student from Hawaii now living in New York) and Allison (new to the group, from Kentucky and has already been in Ecuador for two weeks).

Wow. What a first day. Our teaching times are 2 to 5 in the afternoon. So we got there around 1.30 and there were already a few chicas waiting for us there. They are all so cute! By the end of the day we had over 20 kids in our class. It was a little intimidating, yet really informative and a lot of fun. Because we STILL don’t have our luggage (tonight we will get it, we pray) we still don’t have our teaching materials for the kids, which was all checked with our luggage. So today was a pretty lax day for my group. We taught the sentences “My name is…” and “I am ___ years old” and the questions for those too, as well as numbers one to twenty. This took up a lot of time, and it was interesting to talk in Spanish so much…I think the students think I{m crazy and know absolutely no Spanish,but that’s ok they are still so cute.

So first of all, we played futbol (soccer, silly) (and sorry I cant get the accent to work..go figure,even on a Spanish keyboard haha) and I scored 2 goals. Yeah that’s right Grace. Maybe I should try out for the team next year..ha ha ha ha. Anyways, then we did school for a while. All the boys and the girls separate, the girls sit at the front of the room and boys in the back (b-c boys have cooties of course) and it is so funny. We finished early because we really didn’t have any supplies so we went outside and played duck duck goose. Well the girls did. The girls and boys separated again and so we had two circles. I played with the chicos and I didn’t know how to say duck or goose in Spanish so we played bird-bird-cow (pájaro-pájaro-vaca) in Spanish, and eventually in English. It was fun. I can´t wait for the next two weeks!

Oh, yesterday we saw a beautiful waterfall, I don’t know if I will be able to put pictures up after I post this. My other thing I just posted today, but I wrote it yesterday, but it didn’t publish bc I didn’t have any pictures yet. Oh well. I also haven’t taken pictures of my kids, I didn’t want to scare them off. Haha. But yeah hopefully in the next pictures we will be wearing different outfits!! Fingers crossed!

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Photos

La cascada
It was such a beautiful waterfall!

beautiful house
I think it was deserted, but it was on the way to the waterfall.

sunset!
one word: gorgeous

Comments

[rick werner]

way to go laura
Wow! What a great adventure. I will be following your updates and rsponding again soon. Best wishes from Rick and Karen. Love ya