School Work

Katie, during this time was working more with the school. She worked hard on a “charla” on how to compost, and build an abonera. She got the kids to help dig a hole to start putting the organic material in for future compost. We will need it, the school doesn’t have very good soil, and we have plans for both a flower and a vegetable garden.

Here are some photos of how hard the kids actually work to take care of the school grounds. This was a planned workday, though they did focus on a lot of the areas were we plan to try to grow flowers and veggies. Even the smallest kids work pretty hard, and they all know how to work a machete and “azadon” (hoe).

We also started teaching English classes. It is crazy how difficult that is for us… it is a tough language, and we were never taught how it all goes together in school, or why we say certain things in certain ways. We started by focusing on the teachers, most of whom have to teach English as part of their curriculum (funny, since they can’t really speak or read it themselves). We also opened it up to the students above the age of 9. The interesting thing is that the kids that showed up, and have proven to be the best students are the 10 to 12 year olds. The older students pretty much didn’t show up… too worried about being cool I guess. It is that age (over 12) that we have the toughest time hitting it off with. If we had a good “cancha” nearby I could play soccer and maybe meet them that way, but the “cancha” is way off down the hill. Pretty much no one is there except for scheduled game times, very different from other communities where the cancha is the center of “town”.
One exception to that age group thing is that there is a group of the “instituto” (high school) girls that use us to help with their English homework. We enjoy having them come over and quiz us on English… mostly we are probably just doing their homework for them, but we do learn some new Spanish for our trouble…