Why does the concept of scheduling not exist here?

Disclaimer: the following is a complaint session.

It's much harder to keep volunteer projects going than I really feel like it should be.

My trip kind of messed things up. I was just getting started with things, or rather, just starting to have some continuity, and then I had to be gone for a week and a half. And it's not that a week and a half is very long. But in Peru, once you tell people you're going to be gone for a while, they pretty much forget about you until further notice. That is, although I said to a lot of people repeatedly, The next class is on this date... I'll be back to work with the kids on Friday the 23rd... they were not, so to speak, expecting me or ready for my arrival. My private students did not show up on the day I'd said class would resume. The excuse: "Oh, well since I wasn't sure if you were back yet..." I have to call them, go find them, practically pull them by the ear to get them back into the routine we had so carefully set up. It just makes them seem completely irresponsible, like they don't care at all about what we're doing and are just coming because they're bored.

And don't get me started about the 5th grade teachers. In order to rehearse with that choir, every time I go--and I always go at the same time every Tuesday and Friday!--I have to argue, fight, plead, insist, practically drag the students out of the classroom by the hair in order to get them all into a rehearsal space. That is not my job. My job is to teach them to sing. Last Thursday I had a meeting with the teachers to try to agree on a different schedule, and the 2 out of 3 that actually came agreed that 3 to 3:30 pm was better than 5 to 5:30, because one of them could not possibly move his tests any earlier in the day, he always gives them during the last hour, etc. So then I went in the next day thinking this was all established--and he hadn't even told the kids about the time change! So naturally:

Me: Hi, everybody, time for choir! New time, hooray, now we can finally rehearse, right?
Kids: Huh? What? I haven't finished my work! I'm going to lose the points! Aah! Señorita, I'm dropping choir!

Every time I come they tell me this, and every time I come I promise to work it out with the teacher. Then I talk to the teachers, and they tell me in the meeting that the kids don't finish in the time given them because they fool around and work slowly and don't have discipline. So then, yes, when choir time arrives the kids have permission to go, but they know they have to prioritize, because they haven't finished their work. (This is true. When I go into these classrooms, the kids are often off the wall, walking around, talking, not doing anything, and the teacher yelling to be heard or else distracted by a small group wanting individual attention in a corner.)--I wasn't sure how to respond to that, because the only thing that occurred to me to say was, Who's the adult and who's the ten-year-old?! It's YOUR job as the teacher to make them sit down in their seats, stop talking, do their work, and finish it! You think the KIDS should be the ones responsible for disciplining themselves to work to a deadline and stick to a schedule?? YOU need to take some responsibility, take control of your classroom, teach some discipline to these kids, make them do what they're supposed to do when they're supposed to do it, and learn to respect a fixed schedule and stick to it!!

But I thought that might not be tactful.

So I went and complained to the vice-principal, Gaby, and there's another meeting this Friday. This time with Gaby present. And Gaby has the excellent idea that the teachers are now going to be responsible for SENDING the kids to ME, at the SAME TIME EVERY TUESDAY AND FRIDAY, and making sure that they have that space available free from the stress of missing important work. It's not too much to ask, trust me. It's half an hour twice a week, at the times THEY THEMSELVES have chosen. It's just a matter of them getting themselves together and actually doing what they've said they'll do according to the schedule they've said they'll do it on.

People who can actually be counted on to do this are gold in Peru. They exist, but they're rare, and they're the only kind you want to be working with. Try working with any other variety and the whole project just gets messed up, bent out of shape, becomes something it was never intended to be, and in the end stops happening. And then everybody goes, Oh, well, I guess not. Next time, for sure.

I just feel like whenever I go into the school ready and willing to help, I get told to go away and come back another day. The 6th grade teacher whose students I'm supposedly tutoring in reading had told me Wednesdays were good, but when I came back from my trip and showed up on a Wednesday, surprise! they weren't doing reading. They were doing a grammar lesson on adverbs. So the teacher hands me her lesson plan, which she had very thoughtfully copied for me, and was ready to let me take a group of kids away to teach them the exact same thing she was teaching them in the classroom. I was like, um, that's not the point. YOU can teach them what you're teaching them. I want to do DIFFERENT things, but still working on reading, so that when they're missing your reading lesson they're getting mine. She said, Tuesdays are better than Wednesdays. Come on Tuesday.

The only thing working in terms of me and the school, is Liliana and the Adelante class. And that's because Sara has no structure whatsoever to her mornings with the students, so I can come and read whatever I want with Liliana whenever it's convenient.