My Beginnings in Sucre

5/26/11 9pm
Starting to get settled down in the place that I will call home for the next three weeks. Yesterday was a holiday and most everything was closed, so I just got some food from the supermarket and rested after the long journey. There are holidays here constantly – the 25th of May was Sucre’s anniversary, and tomorrow is Mother’s Day, so things will be closed again, though not to the extent they were yesterday. There are four others staying in the house I am at, and I went out with three of them last night. Had papas a la huancaina, a dish that I had constantly in Peru with potatoes and eggs and a cheesy sauce, but here it was very different with a peanut sauce. My room here is on the lower level so it’s really cold down here, so hard to get out of the blankets in the morning! It’s a shared room, but each area is segmented off so I pretty much have my own area with a bathroom right across the hall. The water took a while to get hot this morning, but I was able to take a hot shower, such an important thing! Upstairs, there is a kitchen for the family and their living areas, and on the third level is a little kitchen that we can use. Dishes, pots, pans, and a stove, so cooking is definitely limited, but I’ll manage something, especially because food around here is more expensive than La Paz (I was spoiled by starting there) and I definitely don’t want to be eating out all the time. I miss having a microwave, they make life so much easier!
Yesterday, I was told that I would find out today about my volunteer placement and where to go, and that I would leave around 9am. This morning, though, the opposite of Bolivia time happened – I was heading upstairs to get some breakfast at 8:15 when there was a knock on the door and one of the workers from the day care was there to take me along. I was completely surprised and not really ready to go, but grabbed a piece of bread and off we went. She at first suggested a taxi, but it seemed crazy to have to take a taxi to work every day, so she showed me the way with the micros and walking a bit, which took about half an hour. Hopefully I’ll remember the route on Monday when I go back, people don’t really know street names much aside from the central areas, it’s just landmarks and memorization.
At the daycare center, called the guardaria, there are a total of 36 kids enrolled between the ages of 1 and 6, though there were only 20some today. The little ones stay all day, and the oldest only stay through lunch and then go to school in the afternoon. I don’t know much about the org, but it seems like they are mother children of single working mothers who pay a tiny bit per month, but very little considering that meals are included. Walking there and speaking to the woman who picked me up, I got the sense that it was pretty organized – there were three women taking care of the kids plus a cook, they split the kids into age groups, had activities, etc.
But when I got there, that was all proved wrong. There was definitely less chaos and more supplies than in Tanzania where I had 90 kids with nothing but a concrete yard, but it was still quite the madhouse. Right now things are apparently a little different than usual because there are some students from a university doing development assessments of the kids individually, so that offsets things a bit. But still, there was almost no structure whatsoever. Four walls and lots of crazy kids. They do have a few smaller rooms and hopefully we will separate the kids by age once with assessments are done, but from what I’ve heard from the other volunteers there, even normally they don’t have scheduled activities or anything. The kids got breakfast, wrestled around for a while, and then were all shoved around a tiny table and given photocopies of a spongebob coloring page. For the next hour and a half, the only input the staff had was telling the kids every once in a while to color pretty. You can’t expect kids to sit still and color on a single piece of paper for that long, but apparently that happens daily. I sat with a small group and tried to work on counting things in Spanish with them, and one of the other volunteers went over colors. After a snack of oranges and the kids got restless, the teachers put all the kids against the wall and told them to sit down, and then went off who knows where. There were some books on the shelves, so we each ended up with a pile of kids to read to in Spanish.
They were all getting so restless and crazy, so we asked if we could take them outside – apparently, they don’t have any outside time! The teacher seemed very surprised at the idea of it, but went to ask someone else and then allowed two of us to take seven kids and a ball out to the nearby yard. The first seven were allowed out the door, and the others were shut in without an explanation. They had lots of fun chasing around the ball outside, but dragging them back in was another story – they didn’t behave well for that part, and that was all the teacher saw of our outside adventure, not the part that they had fun and it wore them out. They are disciplined by being dragged by the arm somewhere usually, but we aren’t about to do that and they don’t understand that if they behave then they will get to keep having outside time. But hopefully this will be allowed again, maybe with more kids or with several different groups, and I’ll try to teach them some simple games like red light green light. Also need to come up with different interactive songs and games, just to have some structured activities during the day rather than just one set thing that they get bored of in ten or fifteen minutes.
I went with one of the teachers to take the youngest ones across the path to the cafeteria for lunch; they definitely need to get there way before the others because they take forever to eat. They each get a bowl of soup and have to finish that to get their main dish. We had 7 or 8 one to three year olds, so there was quite a lot of spoon feeding, playing with food, and violently refusing food, but we eventually got it down them. The segundo (main dish) was rice with veggies and meat, but apparently it had a pretty spicy sauce and a lot of the kids were not fans – though once the older kids came in, a few of the boys kept acting like big macho 5 year olds and saying they liked it spicy, though the girls would only eat their rice.
I left after everyone finished eating and headed into the central part of the city – basically, got on the bus and got off when I saw a bunch of other people get off. After the usual confusion and difficulty reading a map, I eventually found the central market and spent a long time wandering there. There is everything, from stalls with clothes to cleaning supplies to electronics to every little thing you’ll never need, and the aisles of meat, the piles of fruits and veggies, the aisle of many types of fresh bread,the fresh juice area (which will definitely be my favorite place to go, though today I got a fruit salad with yogurt because I hadn’t had lunch yet). There’s the spices area, with open piles of everything you can think of, and the eating area that’s a bit like a crowded open air farmer’s market where everyone is selling the exact same dishes and the tables are crowded with locals downing big plates of cheap food (unfortunately at lunchtime, all meat). Wandered lots around central Sucre and got semi-oriented to the area.
I’m in Sucre through a program called Fox Academy, which primarily provides English and Spanish lessons but also sets up housing and volunteer placements. My primary things were of course the housing and volunteer placements and I said I would think about Spanish lessons. But when I checked my email around 3:30 today for the first time in several days, I had an email from the director saying that she had set up my first lesson as a two hour session for 3pm today and the teacher would be waiting. Um… Well, I found my way over there and felt a bit obligated to explain myself and take the second hour. People typically come here with very little Spanish experience and take four hours of lessons a day and even though it’s cheap, that adds up and I don’t need that level of intensity, I can communicate perfectly well! I talked with the teacher for an hour and she complimented my Spanish quite a bit, even saying that my tenses were mostly correct when I thought they had been mostly off. It would be helpful to work a bit on Spanish with her, but I’ll probably just end up losing it again as soon as I leave Bolivia and stop practicing. I’m still debating what to do, but I think after tomorrow, I’ll probably back out of it and try to just work some grammar on my own.
Fox has Spanish classes for travelers and cheap English classes of different levels that meet nightly for locals. The English teachers are Bolivians who have learned English and gotten certified to teach, but they use volunteers to supplement their lessons. I set up to work with a class at 6pm, and ended up staying for the 7pm class with the same teacher. The classes were tiny – apparently not everyone showed up tonight, but we only had 3 students in each class. They had a workbook with similar activities to what I had in Spanish at UCSD. The first class was at a lower level and we worked on ‘who’ questions and a bit of the verb to be. The teacher was pretty distracted and texting a lot, but I went around and worked with them on the exercises individually, needing to use Spanish to explain most of it since they knew very little English, but managing to get my point across pretty well. The second group were a bit further ahead in the book and we focused on telling time, which got pretty confusing for them (and the teacher got confused too!), but I think after testing them with a ton of examples, they started to get the hang out of it (translating from the Spanish version in their head to both six fifteen and quarter past six) and will hopefully practice a bit tonight. The students seemed to like having a native English speaker in their class and were both excited and shy to talk to me when I walked with them and asked basic questions in English after class. One girl who I thought was about my age was just sixteen – which is awful to know because I constantly see girls here looking that age carrying a baby or two of their own. I talked to Cinthya, the teacher, afterwards, and she just turned 19 and this is her first English course that she has taught; she recently got her certification and says that she is pretty unsure and nervous about what she is doing. Her classes are every weeknight 6-8, so I’m going to co-teach with her while I’m here/probably end up leading most of the lessons and using her help for the more in-depth Spanish explanations. So it’ll be working with the little ones in Spanish from 8 or 9 till around 1, wander around the city during the afternoons, and then teach English in the evenings. This weekend I’ll just stay in the city and see some of the museums, but I may do a trek or trip to nearby villages next weekend. After all my explorations of the city today, by the time I finally headed home at 8pm, I actually knew where to go, even in the dark with the hills and winding streets. It was about a 15 minute walk to the house where I’m staying, which is in a residential area on the edge of the city. It would be nice to have a little shop across the road to easily get water or bread if I run out, but I’ll be going into the center daily and Sucre is a really safe area to walk around, known to be one of the safest cities in Bolivia. There are even lots of streetlights - I’m having a hard time looking to see if the light is red or not rather than just darting in front of cars when I get the chance like I’ve had to do elsewhere!

5/27 – I went over to Fox for the Spanish lesson today intending to just do today’s lesson and then stop, but my teacher didn’t show because her son was sick. I talked to Jorge, one of the director’s and the dad at my house, and he is going to set up an “intercambio” for me with one of the people who has graduated from their English classes. I’ll meet for an hour every once in a while with this person and we’ll talk half an hour in Spanish and half an hour in English, which will be good for both of us to practice, and it won’t cost anything.