On Tuesday morning we went out to Ian’s site in Bello Horizonte, it’s a really small. On our way to the town we stopped at the nearby school to spend the morning teaching and observing classes. To kick things off, Kidist and I taught an English class to 10 and 11 years olds. We worked on numbers and colors. The kids were really cool and seemed interested. The teacher also participated in our activities, which helps keep the kids in line. The teacher actually asked us if we would come back the next week to teach again….I would love to help out, but I think the 9 hour commute from Lima would be a little much :-P After our English classes we observed Kelsi and Ian give a charla to the kids about the importance of communicating with parents. After watching though we were split up amongst the other segundaria classrooms to give charlas on the same topic. Kidist and I went in with what we thought were pretty good ideas, but neither of us felt like the class went well. We had a lot of trouble getting the kids to participate. That’s something we have all been told to expect in our classrooms at first, so it was a good lesson. We also had some kids with attitude problems, which was irritating, but the tech trainers said we both did a pretty good job dealing with them. Over all that morning’s lesson was to have WAY more planned that you think you’ll need. Factoring discussion time into a session plan only really works if the kids actually talk :-P
After the school we went to the restaurant that’s nearby for lunch before heading all the way to Bello Horizonte. So like I said, it’s pretty small, but there happens to be another group of gringos working in the town as well. It’s a project with students from Yale and University of Ohio to build a health post over the next three years. It’s a really cool project and it was an absolute riot when we came walking up over the hill and encountered another group speaking English. Everyone just stopped talking and stared all confused- like for a few seconds. I was particularly excited to meet this group because it reminded me that we all may have to opportunity to work with other charities or NGO groups in our own sites. After a fond, English farewell to the health post kids and a walking tour of Bello Horizonte (roughly 15 minutes); we went to an aldea (orphanage) that Ian works with. There are about 55 kids at the aldea right now and unfortunately most of them are there because they had to be removed from their families. This aldea seems pretty amazing. The kids live in small groups with a tia to look after them. And we certainly can’t prove this, but the tias just might be angels. Most of them have families of their own but they live 6 days a week at the center looking after the kids. According to Ian they work for nothing some months if the money from the government doesn’t come on time. It turned out that some of the residents of the aldea were actually in our classes that we taught in the school, so we got to hang out with some of the kids more. We turned up to the aldea with grand plans of educational games and self-esteem activities, but the younger kids saw a big group of gringos and just wanted to play. So we busted out the volley ball, soccer ball, football and Frisbee…..all on the same concha mind you, so sometimes you had to catch the Frisbee and kick the soccer ball with in seconds of each other. It was great!
After the aldea we caught a combi back to Trujillo. We had our evening meeting and we all got assigned a solo charla for the next day. Yikes! I was assigned to teach 8 and 9 year olds about the importance of hand-washing and how to make a tip-i-tap. A tip-i-tap is a wonderful little device that allows you to run water to wash your hands with even if there is no running water in your house. In Peru it’s very common to only have running water for a few hours a day. A tip-i-tap is just a plastic water bottle hung upside down with the bottom of the bottle cut off so you can pour in water. Then you loosen the cap on the bottle just enough to allow a trickle of water out. You can even save the bottom of the bottle to use as a soap dish if you’re feeling fancy. The idea is to fill up the bottle when you have running water and then use it when the water is turned off. Pretty cool, huh? Yeah I think so too, but at the time I was more concerned with figuring out how to teach a class by myself for an hour. After the meeting I went out for pizza with Ian, Sabrina and Richard. This pizza was amazing; it had real tomato sauce on it! After dinner I went back to the hostel to prepare my lesson plan and convince myself to not be nervous….it didn’t work :-P
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