Heading to Los Angeles

I found out my placement!  I’ll be living the next 8 months in Los Ángeles with a woman named Vicky and her son Claudio.  Vicky’s sister works at the school where I’ll be teaching, which is a K-8 school with about 700 students.  I’ll know much more about the school and my own students once I get there, but I do know that I’ll be teaching 5^th through 8^th grade and that the school is very excited to have a gringa from the U.S. come to teach!  My host mother and I have been emailing each other this past week, and she even added me as a friend on Facebook… not quite the experience I was expecting to have, but I’ll take it!  She continues to express her excitement about my arrival, so all looks good so far.

Our WorldTeach orientation ended last Friday and we are now in the final days of our Ministry of Education Inglés Abre Puertas training.  WorldTeach’s orientation was great – we had two directors training only five of us, and our sessions on lesson planning, behavior management, teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL), and speaking and listening activities, just to name a few, will be so beneficial and gave me a huge boost of confidence in my ability to lead my own English class.  This current Ministry orientation involves a much larger group of volunteers and has been a bit repetetive and less fulfilling, which has frustrated us WorldTeach volunteers a tad.  We’re all so antsy to take what we learned from WorldTeach and apply it in our classrooms now, so we’re unfortunately not enjoying this week as much as some other volunteers might be.  However, the Ministry definitely has some valuable lessons to teach, and they’ve also provided us with a couple hours of Spanish class every day which has been a great review.

Being volunteers for the Ministry of Education also means that we’re kind of important!  Monday morning we went to a kickoff event for this year’s volunteer teachers at the United Nations building, and we felt pretty special once it was over!  There were lots of reporters and important people there who were extremely interested in meeting us, hearing our stories, and taking our pictures, and the experience definitely reaffirmed my decision to do this and the fact that my help really is needed and appreciated. 

While this past week has been even busier before, we have had some time to do some more exploration of Santiago.  Last weekend we went to Cerro San Cristobal, which is the tallest hill in Santiago.  You can hike up the hill, which takes a couple hours, or take the funicular, which is like a single box car on a track at a 45 degree angle, up to the top.  My WT group and I took a funicular up to the top and, thanks to a fortunately clear day, were able to have an amazingly beautiful view of all of Santiago with the Andes off in the distance.  A huge statue of the Virgen Mary stands at the top of the hill keeping watch over the city, and there was also a church, a small art gallery, and some shops up top.  If you are on Facebook, check out my pictures there - the internet in our hostel is really patchy so it's hard to upload pictures.  Here are a couple:

Santiago!

Today we were also able to explore some great, huge markets in Santiago thanks to a Ministry-sponsored “cultural excursion.”  We went to the main seafood market, the Mercado Central, and had ourselves a taste of some sea urchin.  Most of us were not too pleased with the taste or texture, and our reactions were quite entertaining for the fishermen.  We also walked through La Vega, which is the big produce market and was pretty much heaven for fruit-lovers like myself.  It was like a farmer’s maket on steroids, in terms of size and quantity, and we took some great, cheap fruit and delicious avocado back to the hostel.

Alright, one funny story for you before I go.  Last week, before our WorldTeach orientation ended, my group started brainstorming ways to thank our two amazing field directors, Thomas and Meghan.  We concluded that a dance was the best way to sum up our appreciation, and we shamelessly choreographed and performed a dance for them, which they loved.  We rehearsed this dance in front of our hostel staff the night before our big performance, and by the next night word had spread throughout the hostel that we gringos had quite the dance to share.  So, last Friday night when our group returned from the hostel we were surprised by a group of  15 or so chileans chanting “Per-for-mance!  Per-for-mance!” when we walked in the door.  After some begging by the chileans, the song was put on, our dance was performed, and a huge chilean/gringo dance party ensued.  They then came up with their own dance moves to the song in return – a cultural exchange like no other.  Anyway, Meghan recorded the dance when we performed it for Thomas and her, and she kindly put it on Youtube for all to see.  If anything, this video shows how fun and awesome my group members are and how great our two directors were as well.  Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2tpgYW1TDQ