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 :) )

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!

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!