CENIT, 5 months later

I'm almost out of time here, so (please, draw no comparisons, please) I guess it's time to start thinking about my legacy at CENIT...

San Roque was a very young project when I started working there in January, and has changed dramatically since then. It's a volatile workplace - the roof leaks, the plumbing has its less stable moments, and various times we've arrived to find the room up to 6 inches deep in water. The room is not really rented - we don't pay for it, and therefore its real owner doesn't feel terribly many qualms about hosting meetings there during our time, kicking us out with no notice. We've had drunkards try to break in, family feuds and I personally cut off water to the entire market by mistake when the plumbing broke (quite innocent of any notion that I was doing it - I turned a lever, and the water stopped coming. I thought I'd done pretty well). And that's without taking the people into account. Mariana, our Ecuadorian coordinator in San Roque, announced one day that we would almost double our time at the market in the morning. Working with the youngest group, this shook things up for me and the other volunteer who planned every day for them - we couldn't well drag our present plans out when the longest attention span in our group was about 12 seconds. It fell, somehow, to me to rework the plan for the youngest group, which wouldn't have been too much of a task, if it wasn't for the tassles on the edge of the task. We needed a plan that would allow new volunteers to carry on their work from where we left off, without having to learn the same lessons the hard way we did. We also had a LOT of time to fill, and with three other programmes running in the same room at once to distract them, the children needed to be quite transfixed by our activities - tricky with no attention span at all.

In fact, the changes I made to the routine have reshaped the programme completely - every day is different, but every day has the same core elements with the aim of achieving the same long term objectives. Every moment is full, no more than 15 minutes is spend on anything, and everything progresses day after day, but the volunteers need only plan once a week, for about two hours, for almost 10 hours of contact time. It works, and children have learnt to speak who couldn't speak before, to draw, to use "please" and "thank you", to converse, ask questions; in some cases children have learnt, for the first time, what the answer to "what is your name" or "how old are you", all under this new programme. Not that I get to see it happening: I no longer work with that group.

When another volunteer finished her term here I moved from the youngest to the oldest group - homework help, and setting activities to help at school, and for those who don't go to school, giving them a replacement for it. This is harder - they work fast, they all do different things, and I'm the only volunteers working with them. This means planning lots - the work I'm giving them at the moment is trying to concentrate on using the imagination, but it's tough going. Most of them will take 5 minutes to name a fictional fish I've drawn and demanded that they name, and none of them could make up a story. Starting by giving them pictures with the focus missing (one person obviously giving something to another, with the 'thing' itself missing) and trying to make them think of something to put in and moving on to answering questions about the life a fish, a bear, or a duck that only exists on paper, I'm trying to work towards a simple story before I leave. It's hard - they will always try to copy their pictures from something they can see, and name the fish after the person sitting next to them, but progress is coming.

More to come on Clases de Ingles.