Auditioning singers, setting up tutoring (sort of)

After getting over my illness (mostly), I jumped into auditioning kids for the 4th and 5th grade choirs in Fe y Alegría. What a job. Almost everybody is interested in singing, so I have to listen to every kid in the two grades, about 170 little Peruvians all told. I took them out of their classrooms in groups of 6 or 7, taught them a little song, rehearsed it several times, and then listened to them sing it in pairs (or alone if they wanted to.) In honor of last year, the fourth grade all sang "Los Pollitos" ("The little chickens"), but 5th grade graduated to a more grown-up-sounding church song.

I was listening for the basic ability to stay in tune, alone or with me or with a partner. It was really fun for me to play around with the different voices, see if this person can stay in tune if they're next to this one who's a strong singer, see if these two can hold the melody without the third, etc. Both grades this year seemed vastly improved from last year's fourth grade auditions, when it seemed I could hardly find anybody with good pitch; this year there were lots, especially lots of boys, so that I even had to do callbacks to get the numbers down to 22 per choir. With the behavior of these kids, especially the fourth graders, more would be simply chaotic.

I had four afternoons in the school to do my auditions before they had a four-day weekend for Holy Week (which deserves a post of its own so I won't talk about it here.) Then suddenly it was the last week of March and I didn't even have choirs going yet, let alone the tutoring work that I'm supposedly doing! Part of the delay is due to my Mondays off: since I teach classes on Saturday mornings and do parish things on Sundays, I have claimed Monday as my free day on which to do NOTHING. (or on which to plan my English classes, arrange songs for the choirs, do my cleaning, etc.) I finished the final cuts for the 5th grade in typically Peruvian, spur-of-the-moment style: stuck my head in the door of class 5A and asked the teacher if I could steal certain kids; was told that the Ministry of Education had monitors there that day so I couldn't take anybody out that day; went to the library to organize my lists, and was discovered there by a bunch of curious kids as soon as the bell rang for break; told those kids to run and get me the people I needed to listen to again; listened to them in the middle of all the noise in the library, and then I had my 5th grade choir. There was a big group listening, eager for news of who'd made it, and I had to tell them all to run and play during their break and that I would come on Friday.

Fourth grade has now had two or three rehearsals, and they have good pitch but awful behavior. They don't really know how to be a choir... which last year's group didn't either, so I guess they'll learn. But fifth grade has had only one rehearsal and they are absolutely delightful. Nine of the 22 of them are from last year, so they know what they're doing, they pay attention, they follow me, they sing do-mi-sol, plus they give me hugs and kisses on the cheek and say, Señorita, when are we singing again? It's utterly adorable.

(I feel almost disturbingly like Julie Andrews, living in a convent, carting a guitar around everywhere, and teaching do-mi-sol to little children. A convenient arrangement, that of Maria: be a singing nun until the right guy comes along! Sweet deal.)

So the choirs are up and running.

Katie, the new volunteer who's working in Tambogrande, is also serving in a Fe y Alegría school three days a week, but in her school one of the sisters is the principal. I wonder if that means that they have a better idea of what to do with her--i.e., that they give her more concrete direction about how to go about her service. In my school, I had a meeting with the vice-principal to talk about the idea of tutoring, and she nodded very approvingly and told me to work it out with the teachers. As soon as I finished the auditions I went to talk to the sixth grade teachers, and they're eager for help, but the details are basically up to me to determine: which kids, inside or outside the classroom, how long, what subjects, everything. Which leaves me feeling rather lost and helpless.

I guess this could be called part of my service--helping both the school and NDMV figure out a structure for the volunteer placement in the school. What this program really needs, although I kind of hate to say it, is someone to supervise the volunteer much more directly than I'm being supervised--right now, nobody checks in with me to ask when I'm coming and nobody cares if I don't show up (except the singers, of course. Tuesday and Friday afternoons from 4:20 to 5:40, I am held strictly accountable.) Because when you combine lack of direction and supervision with the Peruvian mentality of "Schedules, what? Just come whenever! Oh, she didn't come today? Mañana, then. Or if not, then next week.--You know what? Today's not really good after all. How about next time?"... then that little voice in the back of the volunteer's head going, You need to be working! Go find somebody to tutor and tutor them! gets frustrated and starts to drift off to sleep. Especially when I feel like I'm bothering the teachers for showing up at their door unannounced, interrupting their class, and trying to remind them what the vice-principal said about my tutoring project.