sabato 2 novembre 2013

Change of career!

Hi everyone! 

Many days passed since the last time I could write a post. During these last two weeks I have been overwhelmed. I only had time for working and sleeping :)

Let's start with a bad news...my career as a tango dancer is over for the moment. Juan, the teacher, had an accident and he won't be able to walk for 4 weeks and then he will need physiotherapy for 3 months...it was very sad to see him like this, because I know that he lives teaching. I wonder how he will do...

Starting point.
The good news is that I now started a new career: I'm learning to work with mud for building huts :) So I started a course last Friday. Our goal: to build a place where poor people can be attended with natural treatments like medicinal herbs or receive psychological help if needed. The therapist will work in the clinic pro bono. 

Our dream!

 So we, 36 volunteer guided by an architect, started this adventure with a huge amount of positive energy end enthusiasm.
The first part was quite hard. We had to fill up bags with sands and use them as a stabilize the base of the future walls.
My first part of wall!


  So we filled 100 bags with an tremendous effort and then I was asked to calculate how many more we had to fill before starting the construction. After a quick calculation I gave the group the response: "More or less...100"
The group: "100!!! Ivan, are you crazy! What on earth are you talking about??? You must be joking!!!"
After a short explanation, I could convince them that Maths is not an opinion and that we really needed the 100 bags :) So back to work! Anyway, nobody never lost la buena onda!


When we started the construction of the walls in the afternoon, the group started working with a new energy! And After 3 hours, I could finish my first part of the wall!

The best part was jumping into the swimming pool to prepare the mud :) Unfortunately, I don't have picture of that part, because as you can imagine we were all full of mud everywhere...
Internal walls
 ...and my camera is not mud proof :) Afterwords we split in several small groups and each group was responsible for a part: external walls, internal walls, doors, windows...work...workand work...and then another great moment! It was time time to cover


External walls
the walls with mud. This process is quite easy: you prepare the mud, you took in your hand and you splash it against the wall. The mud sticks on the structure. Now, during this part of the construction passed some small "accident" like a handful of mud flying "accidentally" towards another component of the group :) 

Creative wall

Understandably, the person who was hit always thought that the mud had been tossed to him/her on purpose and reacted fighting back :)

Now I don't want to bore you with to many details. All in all was a great experience and I learned how to build walls using only sand, soil, water and some wood! We couldn't finish the clinic but we had a wonderful time together. Moreover, I will continue working on the clinic to help the therapists to finish it!






The merendero
  All this experience helped me a lot in this week. After closing the course I was called to a new challenge! Tomorrow we will build a mud wall around the "merendero" which is the  place where we give to eat to the poor kids(like Franco, whom you see in the picture). On top of that we entertain them with different projects like theatre and lots of games :)
The goal is to protect a little more the merendedero which has been vandalised a couple of time and to show the poor families how they can improve their barracks only using the things they can find around them! So far, all the kids and some women are working hard with us. We are missing the men power...we hope that our 40 volunteer who will come tomorrow will transfer some of their enthusiasm to the men of the Barrio! Anyway, during this week I was asked to help to coordinate all needs for tomorrow. I will only discover on Sunday if I did a good job ;)

So if you want to know what will happen, keep following me!

Bye! 

mercoledì 16 ottobre 2013

A wonderful camp

Hello everyone!

As you can easily imagining reading this post, I survived the 3 days camp with my students. I left the house on Monday morning fearing the worst but I ended up living a great experience!

The adventure starts at about 8:00 on Monday the 7th, all on the bus and...no! Oh no! There is a teacher missing! We wait...15 min...we wait...30 min...we call him, no answer...45 min...we call him, he answers! "Sorry guys, I forgot to update my watch on Sunday..." (we changed to daylight saving on the 5th)...ok, we go, he will reach us later.

We get to the camp at about 10 and we meet the second group of students. The camp is an idea of the government in order to reintegrate the young students who live in a critical context with (ours) with students attending a normal high school. Basically, they are 45 students of a sixth grade (diploma year like in Zurich), we are 27. I see they are somehow shocked at the beginning: our students are loud and, let's put it this way, use a colorful language.

Thanks to the help of the hosts of the camp, the ice is soon broken. The students of Durazno realize in which situation they are going to live in the next 3 days and react the best way! They are ready and open to get to know us without prejudice!



And after a stroll...we get to the beach!

Oops! But where is Carlos, the missing teacher? He should have been here by now! We call..."Hi Carlos, where are you?"
"I'm at the camp!"
"We don't see you!"
"Neither do I!"
"Are you at Kiyu camp? Are you sure?"
"Kiyú? Ehm Kiyú..."
"Carlos?! Where are you?!"
"In a camp...well, I'll reach you soon!"


Waiting for Carlos, we have fun playing on the beach!
The great thing is that our kids are playing with all the other one. For this one time they are all one, they are all just young people having fun together! 

 
 Unforunately, it is now time to go back to the camp now!

And...here he is! Carlos, after a 5 hours walk got to...the right camping place! Finally in Kiyú :) Now the whole team is complete!

Cynthia and Viviana conforting Carlos
after his 5 hour stroll along the
south coast of Uruguay :)
 And after some night activities and a dance...it's finally time for the big challenge! The NIGHT(mare)...
...but incredibly, apart from a couple of strange noises typical of a night with 16 adolescents in a bungalow, and some pine cones flying in the bungalow...everything was perfectly fine and we could sleep 4 hours! (Much better than the 4 minutes I was expecting to sleep :) )

domenica 6 ottobre 2013

Con el barro en el barrio

Hi!

I'm sitting on a sofa to enjoy the last hours of quietness. Yes because tomorrow I'm starting a new adventure: we go 3 days to a camping place on a beach with 35 students. As in every spots in the world, 35 adolescents spending two nights together, won't probably spend their nights sleeping in their bed, so we, teachers, are called to our duty. 

But facing this new experience, I want to tell show you the first step of a project we started in the "Barrio", the place where our students live. As you probably remember from my pictures, they live in barracks, which for us is difficult to call home. The problems is, they don't have whether the money nor the knowledge to build normal houses. This is maybe going to change. Mariana, one of the nun living here, met a man who might be able to make a change. He is a man who builds houses made of mud. Mud is something which is not missing at all, so we can start changing our enemy (the mud that invades all the barracks when it rains) in our best friend!

At the end of October we´ll have a 3 day course to learn how to build block of mud and the architect is then going to come with us a week later in the barrio to help us building the first walls and teach something more. We already started getting ready!

Piling up sand.
 








Everyone helps as he or she can! For the moment, we have mothers and children working hard for building their houses. The men need some more time to get convinced to lift their bottom from their chairs. 



Filtering



This is a house now...

This is how we would change the house above
  
And after some hours working hard, we all deserved our plate of spaghettis :)

Well, I'd better go to sleep now, because I won't sleep for the next two nights!

Have a nice week!

Bye!

martedì 1 ottobre 2013

Who are my students?

Welcome back to my blog!

I hope you're all fine and ready for my new post! 

Today I'd like to tell you something about my students and the Uruguayan education system.

Here students start primary school at the same age as our children in Switzerland. They attend 6 years of primary school before going to high school. Here the first difference. There is no other option than attending a high school for the they are obliged to study until the third year of high school. If you want to keep studying you can attend year 4, where all the children basically receive the same education and then year 5 and 6 where classes are pulled apart and then rebuilt according to the profile (scientific, linguistic, artistic,...). This systems generates very inhomogeneous classes up to year 4: in one class of 40 students you might have the future Einstein and Shakespeare as well as some students who can barely read their name, you might have very quiet and attentive students and some whose aim is to destroy the school and the teachers with it, or in the best case students who only go to school for socializing. What happens then? The students who can't cope with the system because they are slower in understanding or misbehave are expelled...and come to school like mine. Here they call it "Aula comunitaria". We are supposed to teach them the same topics they need to go back to high school and finished at least the third year. This is what we try to do. Here it becomes difficult...

In each class we have between 10 and 20 students, it depends from the day. The absence rate is extremely high. Today for instance we only had 6 students out of 20 in one class. All the students here have a very difficult life. They generally live in very big families with stepbrothers (3,4,6 up to 11!) with adults, who aren't mostly their parents. Others simply live on the road. In these first weeks I heard stories of fathers beating mothers, of brothers killed on the road, of sexual abuses, of girls who need to work as a prostitute to survive...the story of a 14 year old girl who is pregnant...the father is 15...I heard stories of children abandoned and beaten...the point is, these stories are their stories, these lives are their lives. And I have all of them in front of me...
So they come to school, can have lunch here and go back "fighting" to survive outside. Since they are little they are surrounded by violence, drugs, prostitution. The great majority of these kids have been to prison or have brothers who are now in jail. They have been beaten. Some of them are probably using drugs. To get to the crux of the matter: they live or have lived an horrible life which make them be tremendously aggressive or totally apathetic. Dealing with this situation in class is an enormous challenge.

The typical class works like this. Generally, the students need 10 minutes to get the material ready, at least 2/3 of the class. 1/3 on average just keep looking at you or doing other things. So we start for example with an exercise: let's say, solve this equation...during the time they solve the exercise we (teacher) need to: hear provocation but not respond to them, ask 20 times to be quiet, avoid some unidentified flying objects, make some jokes, beg the student to copy what we are writing on the black board, beg the students to lower the volume of the music, try to stop them writing sms or calling friends...I forgot, we also need to lock the door of the class, otherwise we'll receive visits from students of other classes who managed to escape...after doing that, we can proceed to the second eq...ah no...there is no time left...45 minutes are over! So in 45 minutes we have lost one equation...
This is a bad day though! On a good one we can also get to solve 3 equations. 

 Anyway, apart from teaching them what we can, we try to help them with their lives simply making a cake for Carla's birthday for instance (she has long lived on the road...)

 ...or cooking some "tortas fritas" on a cold day.

...or organizing a meeting with Christian Namus, the girl in the middle, who is a rpofesional boxer, world champion, who visited our school. The kids were going mad for her :)




We can also spend some times playing with them...I think I was in a better position...even though I didn't manage to win because after taking the picture my opponent got slightly upset and all the pieces flew all over the place ;)


We also organize 3 days of camping for them. Monday we are off! We'll go to a beach, where we rented 3 bungalows and the students will have the occasion to escape from their routine for 3 days and have fun! So next week I will tell you how it was! After sleeping for a couple of day for recovering the 2 nights there :)

Take care!

Bye!


martedì 24 settembre 2013

September holidays!

Hi!

I hope you are all fine! So the summer is over for you and spring starts for me...even though in Montevideo the temperature barely reaches 5 degrees...

It's quite a long time I don't write. The point is, I had some days off!

Last week we had September holiday, so what an occasion for discovering one part of Uruguay! I couldn't miss it, so I left on Wednesday morning heading to Mercedes, which is a small town on the west. 




 The weather was beautiful and I asked all the people around to move away to let me take these pictures :)






As you can see in this picture, Uruguayan fight the heat of the summer days, eating with their legs in the water :)






Once in Salto I could enjoy 3 Summer days. Salto is famous in Uruguay for its thermal waters. I just needed 2 relaxing day after all challenges of the school!  
Not only did I bath though! I got to know 4 very friendly Uruguayans with whom I spent some times and who made me discover some part of the city. The most funny part was when they discover where I live...in "La Teja". At the beginning they thought I was working with kids of "La Teja" not actually living there.

As soon as they understood I was actually living there, they looked at me with widening their eyes in disbelief and started asking how it was to be there. Some of them have been living in the city for years but never dared to come even close to the place where I'm staying...So I was explaining them and showing them some pictures :)
 
So let me know if you still want to visit me here ;). It'll be adventurous to be in place where even the people from here judge as a "no go!". 





Apart from the Therms, there was not really much to see around the city, so I ended up learning how to use the potential of my camera...I let you judge if I was successful :)

Chapter Tango: yesterday I had my second class. After the big success of the first one, I was plenty of expectation...the problem was that the teacher too was if possible even more plenty of expectations than me. So he was trying to teach me like 4 different moves which was quite a difficult task for me...

 


<-- What I tried to apply...

What the teacher wanted me to apply...........-->










But apart from hitting some couples which were on my (our) path and hitting a door and stepping on my partner feet 4-5 times nothing else went wrong :) But I don't have to give up! But yeah, it's more difficult than I had thought two weeks ago! 



Good, I better go to sleep now because tomorrow is going to be another long day here! I hope you enjoyed reading this post and could laugh a little! Next time I'd like to write something more about my students and it'll be less funny but I hope equally interesting for you...

Have a nice week!

Bye!

mercoledì 11 settembre 2013

Between a dance and a soccer match

¡Hola gurices! ¿Como andan?

Disculpe...I forgot I should write in English...so, it's a long time you don't get news from Montevideo. 

In last days I was busy with different tasks. In the school I was help some teachers giving their class. We generally split the students in two groups and try to answer all their questions. This is often a quite difficult task because the students are used to ask: "Teacher, tell me how to do this!". Basically, they are only interested in finishing as soon as possible without understanding what they are doing. So I always try to answer with an another question: "You tell me, what you think first, then I might help you...". They don't usually like this...it's very hard for them even to stop for a minute and try to think with their own brain...well, I don't give up, so as long as I'm in class either they start think or they get frustrated because I don't tell them the solution...One very big issue here is the difference which exist in the class. So in the same class I have students who can work with functions, others who can only use the four basic operation and others who need to calculate 7x3 with their fingers...this make the job of the teachers incredibly difficult. Obviously, we don't have the resource to split the classes in different groups, because we don't have the rooms and the teachers to do that...so Obama's slogan was slighty changed into; "Yes, we do what we can!"

We are organising two excursions with our classes: 3 days in December. We'll go camping on a beach.

 In order to pay for the trip we organise  a  sort of street sale in the school every month.


  Each of this peace of clothes costs 10 UYU = 0.40 CHF. Some of them are quite nice. There were lots of people coming for buying so we ended with 6´000 UYU...not bad :-) 











But now, let's come to the title! It was time to get involved in the lifestyle of Uruguay. And in Uruguay there are two things you must experience: a soccer match and...tango. 
So I started on Monday with my first tango class...and I was quite unsure about how much I would have liked it...Of course, I couldn't take a tango course for tourists and go dancing in an elegant and expensive dance school :-) . So I ended up going with two teachers of my school in a very old colonial house. The first impact was a little scary. I was the first coming, as a good "Swiss" should do. I got in the house, which was like a ghost house. With broken walls, strange decoration, candle lights. The atmosphere was somehow tense. In this house lives Juan. He is a young guy who lives renting some rooms in the house and giving tango classes. One hour costs 50 UYU = 2 Swiss Francs!!! Sometimes we say: "you get what you pay for". This sentence couldn't be more wrong in this case! Juan is a great dancer. He travels all over the world giving tango shows. Now two other teacher of this school are in Russia for instance for a show. Juan lives for tango. After decripting what Juan was telling me (he isn´t the easiest teacher to understand because he puts a lot of feelings in the dance!) I started learnig the basics with enough success and even more important, a lot of fun!
My level now



...not yet my level :-)











The only thing which is more popular than Tango here is...la celeste. The national team of Uruguay is trying to qualifying for Brasil 2014. Yesterday they played vs Columbia. So I was in the "Estadio Centenario" to see the match. In this Stadion took place the first final of a WC in 1930!

Curiosity: you know the meaning of the 4 full stars and the empty one in the middle? Well the 4 full stars stay for the 4 World Cup won by Uruguay. Everyone soccer fan in the world knows that Uruguay only won 2 WC...but Uruguay is the only place on Earth, where Uruguay won 4! How is it possible? Well they calculate the olympic titles they won before 1930 as WC because the WC didn't exist :-). And of course the fifth star, stays for the title they are going to win next year :)
 The atmosphere in the stadium was very warm. All singing and jumping all over the place and when Uruguay scored some people almost cried! People were very correct. Each part of the stadium was encouraging its team. The Uruguayan and Columbian also collaborated perfectly when it was time to insult the referee.  This is the third most popular sport here :)So, two nations, one voice: "Hijo de p...! Vos sós un hijo de p...". "p" stays obviously for Paraguay, the country the referee was from :)

 Well, I let you admire a sunset over Montevideo now. I will put some news online very soon! Bye!