School's In

This week marked my one month anniversary of work at Escuela Aliñambi, so I thought I might share a little about the school and what I do there. For those of you unaware, Aliñambi is the school at which I am currently doing my volunteer work for the foundation. It is called an "Escuela-Jardín Particular Mixta" This means essentially that it is part orphanage, part school, and part farm. The school is for children from the ages of 4-12 (except for the one kid that I swear is either 14 or on steroids) and for most purposes functions like a regular school. Class goes from 7:30AM until 12:30PM with an hour for lunch/recess. Kids learn history, reading, writing, speaking, art, and all of the other basics you should get from elementary school. There is one catch however: remember that "orphanage" part from before, well that is what makes Aliñambi a little different. The children that go there are all in some sort of situation that prevents them from going to public school (usually fairly expensive in Ecuador.) Dead parents, extremely poor families (can't afford food poor), and street children are all very common at Aliñambi. As you might imagine this makes those basic elementary school skills much harder to teach. Most of the kids have absolutely zero education before they enter the school. Many of them do not speak very well, and even the older children often cannot read or write.

More importantly though from the perspective of an educator is the fact that the children have no discipline whatsoever. And who can blame them? It's not their fault that to survive they have focused more on how to steal from figures of authority than how to respect them. To give an example, on my second week there I was asked by the director of the school to "teach some basic English and watch" the second graders for a couple of hours because the teacher had to leave. So there I am alone with a class of 20 six-year-olds who have never met me before and are difficult to control under normal circumstances. Needless to say that it was a complete train wreck. After the first 5 minute honeymoon period they were completely impossible to control. It takes a surprisingly short amount of time for kids to realize that they can take advantage of someone three times their age. So I spent the next 2 hours playing firefighter, just trying to prevent as much damage as possible. Only in this situation it was like fighting a forest fire with a water pistol. For about 30 minutes I was able to keep most of them interested with puzzles (throwing the pieces at each other, not solving them) and reading books (looking at the pictures.) During this period I only had a couple of kids try to fight or escape by climbing out the window. For the last hour however, I was the captain of the Hindenburg. It was all I could do to keep the kids from killing each other, and I wasn't even very successful in that regard. Note: lets keep in mind that these are kids who don't even speak Spanish very well and I would not consider myself fluent in street-child Spanish so I couldn't understand half of what they were saying. Anyways, during that last hour the kids managed to turn the room into what looked like an atomic bomb test site; they destroyed a class project model of the school, two kids escaped through the window, and one kid punched another girl in the face and her nose started bleeding.

Of course I cannot blame the kids for this (well maybe a little), I blame the woman who thought it would be a good idea to put an eighteen-year-old volunteer with no teaching experience in charge of 20 six-year-olds for two hours. Aside from that experience however the school is not all bad. My duties there are basically to say a few basic things in English when I can (good morning, hello) and to act as a teacher's aid for kindergarten. I am starting to develop the eyes in the back of my head that are a prerequisite to being a kindergarten teacher, and I'm getting very good at telling kids to stop fighting and cut it out... but that doesn't always help. Sometimes the kids are just a real pain in the ass. And yes, I realize the irony that you can catch me as a child on the premiere of  "America's Most Annoying Children" coming to TLC this spring. I certainly have a whole new respect for any teacher of young children anywhere, it takes some special form of masochism to want to devote your life to trying to control a bunch of little feral, rabid, energy-sucking monsters.

I have to say though, this experience is certainly an excellent stepping stone and learning opportunity to prepare for my next project: Wild Animal caretaker in the Amazon.