Let’s talk about activities.
It is customary for new
volunteers in their first week to choose to go in whichever activity they want
to and shadow the other volunteers. In my first week I tried to be active and
visited almost all of the schools and centers that were available. The
activities are mostly games with the kids, such as musical chairs, basic card
games, games that involve physical activity and coordination. Some volunteers
focus mainly on having fun with the kids and making their day and some other
try to develop new skills for the kids, like drawing, painting, speaking
English or learning planets, animals, countries etc.
Both approaches seem
valuable to me. Some of the kids in the schools we work with probably come from
poor, abusive backgrounds, maybe their families have history of violence,
poverty, drug abuse. They go to schools that have little to no infrastructure
(you would be surprise at the state some of the poorer schools are at) and some
of their teachers are complete pieces of shit. For these kids, having a
volunteer come at their class with energy and positivity may be the only time
in their day that someone is gonna treat them with love and respect. Case in
point: the students from the poorer communities are the ones that get more
excited when they see us. They hug, kiss, run around excited, high fives all
around, generally they seem genuinely happy. They may react like this because
the teachers tell them to (highly doubt), or because it means that they don’t have
to have a lesson any more (probable), but I have a strong feeling that they
enjoy the company of the volunteers. And especially some of the volunteers
here, who treated the children with love and respect, they were paid back by
the children ten-fold.
The educational approach is
also valid for me. The context in which we operate is not formal, meaning that
the information that the kids receive from us does not come with a certificate
in the end of the year. But that doesn’t mean that in the 45 minutes you have
with them that you cannot teach them something. We have volunteers who draw
with the kids, teach them how to walk in a busy street, how the traffic light
works, what drugs do to your body, how smoking affects your life, the names of
the planets in the solar system, how to introduce yourself in English and the
list goes on. The teachers in the schools are bound by the formal curriculum
and the educational practices that are dictated by the government. We, the
volunteers, have a lot more freedom, and a very meaningful way to exercise this
freedom is to try to cover the gaps of the mainstream educational system, even
if it’s for a couple of hours a week.
The place I mainly went to this
month is a center for special education called Primavara. It is in the edge of
the town, a place full of trees, clear skies and clean air. What I do there
mostly is that I go in the morning (10 o’clock) and interact with the kids,
sort of like a teaching assistant. Even though I don’t speak the language, the
best thing about Primavara is that most of the kids are non-verbal, so we are
learning the language together. I feel like we are appreciated in Primavara,
because the kids show love and the teachers show respect, so going there feels
right to me.
