I returned this morning with hopes of a more productive day, even though my game plan started out as just watching Nicole, the 14 year old English teacher, do her thing, see what level the niños are at. I battled this self-conscious feelings of awkwardness as I followed her from class to class--okay, that's a slight exaggeration, using the word "class". The interior of Carita Feliz is essentially one giant room with myriad picnic tables set up. Each group of students has their area of the room, a teacher and whiteboard accompanying them in their chatty energy. So essentially what happens is that we go from table to table, whiteboard to whiteboard, scrawling lists of vocab words and conversations to be translated into Spanish. Handfuls of curious niños glanced over at me, this sweating gringo watching the lessons silently, not saying anything about the wrestling boys or the gossiping, hair-braiding little girls.
I couldn't help but notice the little things. How different all their faces are, how some of the boys are wearing red sox/American sports team hats, from a country they've never been to, much less a culture they've experienced (all though they have definitely dreamed). There was a boy who had a tip of a thumb attached to his hand by a skinny strip of flesh and he smiled with these wide wide eyes. There were these little friendships and tiny romances and all the small hands and smiles. I tried not to be too creepy staring at the students who ducked their heads in concentration to focus on the board, the lesson, the foreign words and Spanish pronunciation. I wanted to freeze those faces, those moments, those looks and say here! Keep it! Hold on to who you are right the very now! Don't lose that innocence and struggle! Don't forget how to be spontaneous and studious and precious! Don't trade your little kid smiles for jerky teenage smirks. Stay golden, stay crayon-scented and chatty.
They won't, of course, but I hope it anyways for their little hearts and their little spirits in this rough and gritty, wonderful wonderful country.
I returned for lunch at our house in all my midday sweat. Even on a cooler morning, that building just accumulates heat, which intensifies in my body because I'm just a gringo, just a Canadian kid trying to live life in a tropical climate. Returned at one and resumed my silent position but not for long. Around two, a group of Americans came around with the principal, evidently on some kind of volunteer thing. Here I am siting there silently while these two American guys squat down by the kids and start chatting. It's loud enough that I can't hear but it certainly looks like they are speaking fluently, which renews all my self-doubt and makes me feel like an awful volunteer for not instantly diving in. We move on to the next class where I am involuntarily commanded "ayúdame!" by this sassy seven year old, and then the ice is entirely broken, and I limp along in my small Spanish to try and do what I can, explaining what the word hungry, happy, angry is in Spanish without saying the actual Spanish equivalent.
We move along to the next class; by this point I have pieced together that one of the volunteers' names is Andre. It is through the precociousness of the kids in this second-last class of the day that I learn the other guy is James, and that neither of them can speak more Spanish than me (less, actually) but they are trying. So I try right back and make fast friends with a gaggle of girls, one of whom doesn't blink at my lack of Spanish comprehension and chats away while the others play with my hands, write me barely legible Spanish sentences so that I can only say buen trabajo and smile really big. One girl gives me the drawing at the end of this post, my first gifted drawing that has me absolutely enchanted. It is something special; I'm sure I will devise a whole bunch of meanings for its pencil pictures at some point. As we are leaving, I am bombarded with hugs from these precious kids who literally just met me but ¡No importa! It doesn't matter, we are friends now. So I make sure to tell them Hasta mañana in hopes that they will remember me for tomorrow.
It is as we are walking from the main building to the kindergarten building that I make official acquaintance with James and Andrew, the latter of whom is from Lexington, Kentucky. They are here for another three weeks, so I will have some English speaking compadres in my afternoons. At this point I am feeling way less defensive about being the only volunteer, especially since they are so excellent with kids and willing to help out. The rest of their group is in the kinder building, three girls and one other guy. After listening to the little ones yell MOTHER! FATHER! SISTER! BROTHER! for thirty minutes, I get the chance to talk to Andrew and James and the other guy. Learn that they are doing a program through the university of Miami (and Ohio? maybe?) wherein they are learning spanish in the morning and volunteering in schools in the afternoons. I hope to get all their names tomorrow and maybe invite them out to our weekly trivia night. They are very friendly and were very kind in meeting me. So that is literally amazing.
And that is the story of my first day of work. I'm thinking that for the rest of this week I will probably just do what I did in the afternoon and hangout and chat with the niños, helping them where I can. And then either next week or the week after I might try offering a lesson or two up for the older classes--and definitely going to teach "head and shoulders, knees and toes" to the knee-high kindergarteners. We shall see, but for now I am such a happy camper with where I am, all the eat and noise and screaming and running notwithstanding.
Hasta pronto.
dftba
-k
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