Orientation

Soon to be my home for the 8 months, give or take.

Our first week in Santiago has been dedicated to orientation and training in teaching English as a second language. I am back in a classroom for the first time in two years, and after two days it has already gotten old. I'm ready to be on the other side of the desk.

We've been given a lot of information and teaching techniques, and in the next three days we will be fed more. The EOD people instructing us are all used to teaching kids, so they address us in an insultingly didactic way that has really started to grate on me. However, I keep a good attitude and try to pay attention because I have never taught professionally and probably need a good schooling on how to school.

It's interesting because I am going to be teaching my language as though it is a foreign language, and all the while trying to learn their language, which is foreign to me, better. It occurs to me that my students and I will be on the same level, just in different tongues. Tis quite a dynamic.

I found out today, which is Tuesday the 6th, that I am going to the city of Calama, which is the one place I had no desire to be assigned. The Lonely Planet travel guide for Chile says this about Calama, "How do we put this delicately...Calama is a sh*thole." God clearly wants to challenge me in some kind of serious way. I prayed that he would put me where I was needed and would best serve his kingdom...Apparently that place is a dry mining town in the desert of Northern Chile. While everybody was celebrating their placements, and looking at pictures of beaches and lush forests, me and three other poor saps tried our best to put on a brave face.

The long and short of it is: we are here as volunteers to teach and try and help make life better for a few kids and give them a leg up in the world. We are not here on vacation, so it really doesn't matter where in the country I am...but the taste of disappointment crept into my mouth a little anyway.

The seven of us going up to the Antofagasta region, where Calama is located, have to take a twenty hour bus ride up there, leaving Sunday at 2100hrs. We are set to meet our Apoyos Curriculares (regional support staff) in the city of Antofagasta (Chile's second largest, and where one guy is set to teach) and then after a day, four of us will take a three hour bus north and east to Calama...and there see what adventures await us.