Finally some time off

For the past two weeks, we have had a break from training to celebrate Christmas and New Year's. There was an optional program offered to us during this break for us to occupy our time. It was presented to us as if we were going to help out in a program that helps people who want to work at American call centers to hone their English. It was supposed to be held in a school called Pies Descalzos, which was built by Shakira's charity foundation, who, if I'm not mistaken, is from Barranquilla. We arrived there on the first day. We were waiting outside the locked school for an hour until we were told that the principal was sick and not going to come to let us in and we were going to have to find a new location. Luckily a Colombian teacher counterpart was able to find a very small school about a few hundred feet away that we could use.

After sitting through the first day's orientation, we found out that this program was aimed more as a general English course for people of all levels and may not necessarily have a goal, or to put it in a more cruelly honest way, a shot of working in a call center. Initially, we were told that everyone in this program has taken a diagnostic English exam and we would be able to use it to place them in groups by skill level. However, those results were in Pies Descalzos, so we would not be able to access them. By this point, this kind of news just seemed par for the course. So we told everyone to fill out a brief questionnaire that asked their name, why they want to learn English, and what they already knew. After reading over all the papers, we figured that anyone who even attempted to answer in English, which were only about 6 or 7 people out of 40ish, should go into the advanced group. The rest were put into groups by a selection process that might of well have been blindly throwing darts at them. My favorite response to "Why do want to learn English?" was "yes." Mind you, we wrote the questions in English and Spanish.

The classes overall went pretty smoothly. Luckily I had a fellow volunteer to teach with, so the classes were a bit less stressful for me. I had the advanced class and I was actually impressed by the English level of one student. Most of the rest were about what I expected, except for one. It was obvious that he had little to no English experience. After a while of clearly struggling and obviously understanding very little at best, I tried to convince him to move down to an easier class. He told me he was OK here, which made me wonder if he even understood me speaking Spanish to him. One funny story with him: we were doing a lesson about the market, so we taught everyone phrases and vocabulary related with market interactions and haggling. The day before, we had told everyone to bring in three things that they would practice "selling" and bargaining. I decided to help out the struggling student the whole time. In his first interaction, he was selling his cell phone. Another student asked him how much. He thought for a bit and I told him to tell her how much it cost, and he said "One Peso," which would be worth about 1/20 of one U.S. cent. She said she'll buy it and he turned to me with a big smile, very proud of completing the "transaction." He clearly was not getting the point of the exercise.

One day during the break, several of us went watch the local baseball team, the Barranquilla Caimanes (Alligators), play a game. Tickets cost 5,000 Colombian pesos, about $2.50 US, and we were able to sit anywhere in the stadium. Food and beers in the stadium were only slightly more expensive than usual. But we could walk out anytime, buy some street food, and bring it back inside. The gate security was so lax, at one point I noticed stray dogs walking in and out of the front gate. I'm waiting for the day when the game is delayed due to a pack of stray dogs occupying the outfield. Since you don't ever see several gringos at any of the baseball games, we attracted the attention of a local news reporter. She interviewed two of us, myself not included. From what I heard, the interviews never made the news, but a shot of us doing the wave did, which is just fine with me.