service learning

(i'm sure there are lots of typos in this post but firefox has decided to not spell check for me and I'm too tired, so bear with me!)

A part of this study abroad trip is a 2-credit service learning/volunteering experience. I'm volunteering at a Kindergarten school (here they call them Jardins de Ninos!). I go for 4 hours twice a week; from 8-12 (which is the school day) on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The school has a fence/wall around it (like every building here...) so to get in at times other than these is dificult because you have to have a key to enter or exit. Even parents can't always come it; sometimes they just drop stuff off throuh the gate, and when they pick up kids they wait outside.
The school itself consists of 3 buildings: the office/teachers' lunch room, the large meeting room for parents' night and other similar events, and the classrooms. These surround a large concrete patio, and there's also a big grass hill and at the bottom (abajo!) there are swings, a slide, monkey bars, a merry go round and a large netting thing to climb. I haven't taken any photos yet because I'm sure that will be very distracting for the kids, but I will before I leave.
There are seven classes, and I volunteer in classroom A. There is one teacher (the kids call here senorita, professora, or profi for the most part, and that's what they call me too sometimes if they forget my name) and 27 kids. The teacher is very competent and I feel like normally I don't have that much to do. My technial volunteer position is to teach English, but they can't learn that many words every day. So far we've done red, blue, yellow, "I am a girl" and "I am a boy". Girl was a very dificult word for everyone, including the teacher, to say because they don't have that sound in Spanish. I also feel particularly helpful when they're doing a writing activity because they need lots of hints and reminders to pay attention. There are two kids that seem to be a lots slower at learning than the others and I feel like a lot of time they just get overlooked because the teacher can't help them (which takes a long time) and help everyone else. They're all pretty demanding; they want to here "Muy bien!" or "Perfecto!" even if it really is already perfect.
They also really like my attention; the first few days I was partically novel to them, although they've gotten more used to me now, I think.
Short cultural aside: Ecuadorians in general are much more touchy than Americans are. Americans really have a "bubble" around them that Ecuadorians don't have or understand (which I think is a good thing, for the most part!) In a classroom at home, the first person might sit in the front-right ish, and the second person would therefore sit in the back-left ish. Here, the second person would sit right next to the first one. You also always give sort of an air-kiss on the right cheek when you say hello or goodbye to someone you know, or if you're being introduced to someone new.
In the classroom, the kids and teachers (women, at least) always exchange hugs, kisses, hold hands etc. Teachers and older folks also use terms like "mi amor" (my love) liberally when talking to others/kids.
SO, I'm not exempt from this since I'm American; quite the opposite. The kids love to hold my hands and hug me and get my attention. During recess I can pretty much just stand there and have a small crowd around me or pretty content kids. They do love it when I push the merry go round though, and it's a good workout for me because if they had their way, I'd do only that for the half-hour-long recess. That or monitor the swings. There are technically three but one is broken and for 200 kids, two swings really aren't enought so my kids frequently come and tell me that "They aren't sharing and I want to use the swings!". I spent one recess sort of monitoring the sharing of the swings which was incredibly boring so now I just tell them to share and that pretty much works.

Now that should give you a general idea of what I do on a normal day. Today, however, was not normal. First, there was a new boy, so the teacher was talking to the parents and I was just standing outside the kids because they were about to do their little morning outside drill but that was interupted. I've only seen that once so I had no idea what to do. Then, they had music (one of the dads brings his accordion and teaches songs) while the teacher was in a meeting, but then he left, and as he did so he said the meeting was going to be long so I was just supposed to stay with the kids. That's it, no instructions from anybody on what we were supposed to do, or anything. I tried to teach them Heads up Seven Up but it was much harder that I was expecting to explain in Spanish (to kids who aren't very inclined to listen) so I gave up on that and we did lots and lots of puzzles. It was slightly stressful for me because they kept finishing them and trading/asking for new ones so there were always at least 15 unfinished puzzles (which looks like a huge mess, fyi) but it was fine. Then it was lunch time (still no teacher!) which fortunatley is very easy to supervise. Then they went to recess and I cleaned up the rest of the puzzles, thereby avoiding half of my "push the merry go round time"! I went down to the playground and after about 5 minutes, Amy came up to me and said something about throwning a rock and pulled me towards a congregation of kids in the corner.
Another aside: the kids are exteremly difficut to understand. They don't enunciate at all or speak slowly, and at recess it's noisy and half the time they're tattling so their voice can furture disguise what they're saying haha.
So, I followed Amy over to the corner, and there was Jessy sobbing with blood all over her neck. I yelled at one of the other volunteers (there are 7 of us) to get the teachers, and they fortunately took care of Jessy, who was with them for an hour but she was fine. It was scary, though, I wasn't expecting to have any bloody accidents and comforting someone and/or adminnistering first aid is much more challenging in Spanish. Recess ended right here, but all the kids were crowded around the sinks (which are outside) since the teachers were attempting to stop the blood flow/calm down Jessy. Now of course Jessy is also in my class, so my teacher was therefore occupied for the rest of the day as well. Yay for Alex the teacher. We colored the page in their workbooks with blue/azul, red/rojo and yellow/amarillo and then played with clay. They had to make a circle, square, rectangle, and triangle (fortunatly another teacher had poked her head in and recommended this). Then my teacher came back about 10 mintues before the day ended, so I cleaned up the room and we all went home.
Not my typical volunteer experience, thank goodnesss.

We're going to Otavalo tomorrow; it's major claim to fame is the huge indigenous market there, so here come the souveniers!

love alex