Month and a half

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.