Every now and then I get this feeling. I go to another volunteer's site and I see nicer stores, or parks, or well-kept gardens and friendly neighbors. I look around and get that unsavory feeling: site envy. I've been placed in a community and I've grown to love it and the people who live here. However, there are moments when I wish things could be just a little bit different. Sadly, this feeling now arises, without fail, once a month.
I have been collaborating with an English professor who works in my district capital, a larger town in the equivalent of my "county." One day back in May, I was at a Ministry of Education English Department meeting. This man approached me and asked if I could come to his classes once a month and give seminars to his students to occasionally provide them with native pronunciation and an opportunity to practice with me. This professor has pretty darn good English. Furthermore, he was willing to plan these lessons with me, and even came to my small town to do said planning. This, namely teachers who take that kind of initiative, is almost unheard of. So a part of me was sad that he doesn't work at my school. Part of me wishes I could always work with this guy, because then the possibilities would be endless.
This site envy only got worse when I visited the town where he works. My standards for what constitutes a nice town have really dropped. The first time I saw this town, I felt a tingling in my pants brought on by the following things:
-A pretty church with a priest who gives mass there every week. (My little chapel has a priest that has to rotate between the churches in the area. It's annoying, because if I want to be a good Catholic, I have to walk up to an hour to church in another village.)
-a park with benches, a little pavillion, and kids' playscape
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Chinos, or small markets with varying amounts of good, sometimes American products. I also appreciate the chinos because they're usually run by chinos, Chinese people. That would be a nice, four-person (one family) splash of diversity.
-An infoplaza, an internet cafe with free access to all. I could spend several posts about the opportunities this could open for the members of my community.
-A waterfall. I mean, who wouldn't want one of those?
During the second seminar this professor and I had last month, the school's art teacher pulled me aside and showed me an art exhibit she had organized with the School of Fine Arts in Santiago, in collaboration with the National Institute of Culture. There were works from the university students and high school kids alike: paintings, collages, and even sculptures (done by the high school art teacher herself). It was a great way to showcase the kids' talent and expose them all to art, which is seriously lacking out here in the interior. I was salivating because I could never imagine this in my school. It proves that with committed teachers, good things can happen.
(My favorite painting at the exhibit)
What is this picture supposed to be? It's just kids in a class, right? Yes, but it's also Panamanian students, normally characterized by crippling shyness (
pena), walking around and participating, doing a guided speaking activity. The implications of this seemingly mundane picture is what Teaching English volunteer high-fives are made of.
Today I had a successful English seminar by the waterfall. We took the kids out and taught some nature vocabulary. Then we taught them how to say "I see..." and "I don't see..." Then the kids got to go exploring and use their vocabulary or ask us about new words they wanted to know. Then we got back together as a group and the kids shared with each other. "I see butterflies. I don't see tigers." It doesn't seem like much, but in a culture where kids would sometimes rather take the failing grade than give an oral presentation, this is nothing short of amazing.
So some of the work I've been doing shows some visible, albeit small, success. Baby steps. Now if I could only have the same effect in the school they sent to me to work in...
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