Fe y Alegría

It's been a slow start at Fe y Alegría for the past few weeks. At the end of our first week we got the call we'd been waiting for to go to Ecuador and claim our visas, which will allow us to stay past the tourist deadline of three months, and so we skipped off north on an overnight bus and were gone for a total of five days. The trip deserves its own entry, so all I'll say here is that we now have religious visas, making our "temporary nun" status official in the eyes of those who check our passports.

When I was considering coming here and heard "school in a shanty town in Peru," I was thinking of a few rooms, a couple teachers, and a chalkboard; thankfully Fe y Alegría is much more developed than that, but in a way it makes it more difficult that the school is fully functional without any help from us at all. In a place where everybody more or less has their schedule and their established ways of doing things, we have to figure out the most beneficial way to spend our time and then create a place for ourselves based on that. Catherine spent the first week as an aide in the kindergarten through second grade and sixth grade classrooms to get to know her future students. Then, starting last Friday, she began to teach them English. She says the sixth grade is going well, but the kindergarteners are basically a zoo, which is frustrating for someone trained as a secondary school teacher. The other big issue is materials: there aren't any, at least not being handed to her. Whatever she wants, worksheets, posters, textbooks, she has to either create or go ask somebody to help get it for her. The same goes for me--it's just that I haven't felt the lack of materials because I haven't really started creating lessons of my own yet.

During the first week I spent most of my time in the 8th through 11th grade English classrooms. The English teacher, Soledad, is a very nice, very graceful woman who speaks English well but knows she has an accent, so she asks me to help the kids pronounce the words they study. I've even noticed that she has corrected a few things about her own pronunciation based on what I've been teaching the kids, which is really professional of her. Not to mention the fact that she has basically accepted me into her class as an auxiliary teacher and been totally flexible about when I'm there and when I'm not. Flexibility, I'm learning, is one thing that this school and the teachers have in spades. Structure... not quite so much.

The first few weeks of English have been review for the students: introducing themselves, spelling (I made the more energetic groups sing the alphabet song), and vocabulary like fruits, vegetables, colors, and parts of the body. They only have two 45-minute periods of English per week. There are some hilarious things that get said in a language classroom, from the students who are "fixteen" years old to the literal translation of the school's motto on the wall, which reads, "Honesty, Laboriousness, Veracity," to the fact that not one group of students remembered on the first day that the letter Y is Y and not U. One class after another would get to "I'm sorry" on the chart of Magic Words and spell, S! O! R! R! U! (Monty Python fans--"Y, sir!"--"Y!" U is right out.) But helping with pronunciation is only so exciting, and I was getting bored, until just yesterday I started taking small groups of the more advanced students to the library for a little extra enhancement of what they're reviewing in class. It's going great so far. For tercero (9th grade), we took the colors they'd reviewed and started saying sentences like "I have a white shirt." For cuarto (10th grade), we expanded their review list of fruits and vegetables to include other foods and started to say, "I like to eat (whatever) for breakfast." It feels great to take the kids who are ready to go on and give them more to do. If nothing else, I feel that is a real gift I can make to the school this year. Of course, they are going to demand actual lesson planning, but I have a trained teacher as my Siamese twin for the year, and she's already given me a crash course in that.

So English is moving along for both of us. Our other projects are still in the works. For the after-school English club, we have to coordinate with the vice-principal for secundaria about the timing, plus decide whether we want one group or more, on what level, etc. I need to get Catherine and Soledad in the same place at the same time to discuss that... hopefully today... The hard thing is organizing anything, because it's all so unofficial that I'm never sure when something is actually happening or not. For my choir, the one that exists in my head at least, all I've managed to accomplish so far is to email my middle school choir director for advice on working with kids, and find out that all I'm getting is one rehearsal per week (on Fridays from 4:30 to 6! Gross!) with one grade, instead of two rehearsals per week with both third and fourth graders. Scheduling, you suck.

Finally, I have wisely or unwisely inserted myself into another classroom: the Comunicación classes for 11th grade, i.e. language and literature. This has been my big frustration recently, comparable to Catherine's kindergarteners and not for altogether different reasons. With only three 45-minute periods of Comunicación per week, there's not enough time to do everything the teacher needs to fit in. So far I have tried to lead two discussions on short readings from the textbook, and I'm totally talking over the kids' heads, but I can't figure out how to go more basic without sticking entirely to comprehension of the plot, which they are right on board with. I hate to lead them by the nose from one appropriate quote to another and thus to the point I want to make, but they don't seem to come up with it on their own, so I have no idea. Plus, besides the excerpts of classics in the book, they are supposed to be reading one book per month outside of class, which there will be NO time to discuss, so the teacher wants me to start a voluntary discussion group outside of class. Which is great, but I have to figure out how much I should try to do, analysis- and writing-wise, with the whole class and how much with the outside group; they should all be learning how to write papers, but... Such are the difficulties. And it's not really my class anyway, so even if I knew what kind of goals to aim for with this group of students, I might not be able to really work toward them in the way I'd like.

And with all this, plus cooking twice a week with Catherine from our Peruvian cookbook, in a way I'm still bored. It's funny. At Dr. Tony's, I knew I was in a non-academic setting where my job was to worry about kids brushing their teeth and fighting over toys and peeing on the floor, and that was just that, and I got to know the kids and came to love them. But here, it's school, and yet I've been frustrated so far in trying to do some of the great things that I love about school. It's mainly because I don't know what I'm doing, either as a teacher or in terms of organizing new groups and activities; it takes a while to soak up all the information of a new setting enough simply to judge what needs to be done, not to mention figuring out how to do it. I've never been the one organizing people and making things happen, so this is my crash course. But it's a good course to have, crash or not. I think if I can just get a couple of long-term goals in my head by talking to the teachers and figuring out what goals they have in mind for their classes for the year, I'll have more of a direction to go in. The trouble is that everything seems very spontaneous, one lesson on this, one lesson on that, with no established yearlong curriculum, at least not that I've seen. I think the curriculum is in the teachers' heads. Anyway, such are the issues of the day. Catherine and I are planning to visit Ica for Semana Santa and need to figure out how to reserve hostels and bus tickets too. But at least we have learned to cook with aji and cilantro, i.e. pure deliciousness. Scones are coming up soon.

A little down time

We had over a week in between returning from Tony's and starting school, and it was a period of re-adjustment for me. Coming from Chaclacayo back to Las Delicias is certainly not as shocking as coming from the US was at first, but it is still a change--from green parks and paved highways in the mountain valley to the dusty streets of a pueblo joven. We had little to do that week, and we were both starting to get restless, especially when we heard from our fellow volunteers in Kenya who have been working at their official assignments for two months now and are well into the swing of things. A few of the things we did while waiting for school to start:

Got rid of the head lice, listening in the process to tons of salsa on the radio while combing through each other's hair. A lot of salsa, it turns out, is very explicitly about sex. "Don't take off your clothes, I want to do it myself" sounds odd to that upbeat salsa sound of trumpets and percussion.

Went to a meeting of the "volunteer network" in Miraflores. There were about twelve non-Peruvian volunteers there, mostly in their late teens or 20's, gathered for a little support and sharing and ice cream. I loved it because not only did I have a lot in common with them, but we all spoke different languages and had to communicate in Spanish, nobody's native language, to understand each other. There were 5 English speakers, 3 French speakers, 2 German speakers, an Italian, and a woman from Japan, all laughing about the weird things Peruvians do and the reasons we love this country. It was awesome!

Met up with Miguel, a friend of one of our friends from home who grew up in Peru. He's super nice and took us to a Pizza Hut in Miraflores, which is much nicer than Pizza Hut at home. We had pisco sours with our vegetarian pizza. Afterwards we walked around Miraflores and found a park-plaza where people were out dancing salsa at night--so cool.

Visited Catherine's sister's husband's sister and her family, who were incredibly nice as well and took us to a wonderful restaurant in Pachacamac so we could try lots of different Peruvian foods. We drove by big stretches of desert with Inca ruins on the way, low rock walls worn down by hundreds of years of sand and sun. The next week they invited us back, and Catherine went, but I went to the beach with some friends we met in Chaclacayo. The Pacific Ocean has bigger waves than the Atlantic! (or at least this beach had bigger waves than Bethany Beach, Delaware) but they break farther out, so you can swim around in the surf as it comes washing in. The mountains, which looked like huge sand dunes at this point, came almost right down to the shore, so you'd be on the beach with a huge cliff rising straight up a hundred yards behind you. It was hazy and the sun only came out for a short while, but there were few people and big flocks of seagulls that I enjoyed running at and setting aflight. On the way back came another very authentic Latin American experience--the car overheated, and we had to wait until some people stopped to help us with the appropriate mechanic tools to get us going again. Luckily there was a lot of traffic going back from the beach at that point, so it didn't take that long to get moving again.

Attended teachers' meetings the Thursday and Friday before school started. Catherine and I were not impressed by the discussions--the biggest meeting we saw was a workshop on how to plan lessons according to a certain model, but it did not seem to be working at all. There was supposedly a "transverse content" that would last all year and be worked into each lesson, such as "self-respect and respect for others," but then the discussion got bogged down in "abilities, sub-abilities, and sub-sub-abilities" that the students would demonstrate, each supposed to have its "proof of achievement" which is basically a bureaucratic way to ask if the student gets it or not, and there was more time spent on determining what the sub-sub-abilities and corresponding "constant necessity" were than on actually planning anything. Proof, I suppose, of the silliness of some of the things people come up with in trying to make sure that education is happening the way it should. But that's not to say that the school itself is unimpressive--it is actually astounding, considering that the people, with the help of Fé y Alegría, have built it up from nothing but dusty hillside, just like they build their houses and neighborhoods. The building is an open rectangle with a courtyard, gardens, and playground in the middle. The kids come in their uniforms every day to study math, Spanish language and literature, history, English, religion, art, and other classes, and the older ones have career-oriented workshops one afternoon a week. Catherine and I are hanging out in certain classrooms for the time being, getting the feel of things before we start up our projects like an English club, a book club (yay!), a choir (whee!!), and maybe an English class for the teachers. All of which has yet to take shape... for the meantime, I'm teaching some pronunciation in the English classes, and I've gotten some nice "thank you"s instead of "sank you"s out of the kids, so so far so good.