My first 3 days at La Casilla

Hola! I begin this post wishing all my students from M4e, M5g and N6n a successful year! I hope you all had a good start!

Finally, I got to the place where I'll be living during the next 4 months: La Casilla in Montevideo. On Monday morning I reached the place and started to know the people who are involved in the project. I was very well welcomed from all the nuns and the teachers working in the "centro juvenil". From the first moment I realised that things here won't be easy...

Basically, we are working with 60 kids between 12 and 18. They got here for several reasons but most of them for they were not accepted in neither public or private school due to their poorness, aggressiveness, or due to their bad school achievement caused by their outrageous life conditions. 

They are divided in two groups: in the morning the one who would like to get back to a public high-school, who are taught typical subject like Spanish, Maths, English, History...the one who, on the contrary, would like to learn a job, come in the afternoon for learning the basics of some manual jobs.

So far so good...the problems start now...these kids don't know the meaning of the word "House", sometimes they don't even know the meaning of "Family", "Mother"...some of them simply live on the road. Others sleep in barracks with no doors or windows, with their 6-7 brothers in a place which is smaller than the half of our classrooms. The don't have a floor...so they basically sleep on the soil which becomes mud as soon as it starts raining. Their toilet is "cup", which can be empty besides the house when full. So they survive there in the night and come to school in the morning...but the rules they bring and respect in the school are mostly the rules they need to respect "en la calle", as they always say. And these rules don't get on very well with the education we would like to give them. So it becomes normal for a teacher to see that from the 10 students in your group, 1 is sleeping on the table, 3 are just chatting about their private lives, 2 have no idea what they are doing there...2 are disturbing the...only 2 who are trying to do something, just for the sake of it. During these days I'm only attending class to observe and understand. Then I'll have to try to find my way to help them as far as I can...let's see...it will be challenging...

On the teachers side, there are 12 Uruguayan teachers for the different subjects, 4 very active and modern nuns ready to help with other projects like theatre, or "informatica"..., 2 excellent cooks and...and a still-a-little-bit lost Italian volunteer :-)

The infrastructure is not that bad:

Classroom

The two directors for the two groups

Chair in the morning

Chair in the afternoon

Ah, just a last thing: the "barrio" where I'm living is not very dangerous, however, we took some precautions to avoid to receive guests during the night ;-)

Fence all around the house...

Letting all the difficulties apart, these first days have been very intense and full of interesting experiences, I'll tell you about them in the next post! Only three days are gone but for me is like 2 weeks...

So, it's getting late, in less then 9 hours my present students are getting back to school, so I might go to bed to recover and get ready for a new day!

Suerte!