Kyle Berg

This morning, I left the house at 7:15 a.m. and arrived in Barracas at 8:30. That wasn’t too bad for going from the extreme north side to the extreme south side of the city via train and bus. I arrived 30 minutes early because I had no idea how long the trip would take. This time gave me a chance to chat with some of the other volunteers. Of the 7 of us, 5 were Argentines. The other foreigner was a stereotypically not so warm and friendly German girl.

We made the short walk to the learning center, dodging puddles created by the overnight thunderstorms. The building and neighborhood were definitely third world. It wasn’t surprising for me because it maintained a similar appearance to some of the places I had visited in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. While living there would be a whole different reality, visiting isn’t a big deal any more.

The goal of Uniendo Caminos is to offer scholastic support for students in the hopes of helping them better educate themselves. Naturally, I volunteered and was assigned to teach English. Upon arrival, everyone scattered to their respective tables without any instruction. So, I wandered around the room for a while trying to figure out what to do. After about 10 minutes, 1 of the 3 students who was supposed to be there showed up. I guess the other two didn’t come out because of the rain. (I was told they had a policy of mandatory notification in the case of absence, but we’ll see if that’s true in practice).

I was paired with a girl who was in year 4 of 5 in high school. She went immediately to her English homework, avoiding any personal introductions or niceties. Understandably, she was scared of me and unsure of what to think at first, but loosened up ever so slightly as our session continued. Again, supposedly we were to do the lesson in English, but that wasn’t going to happen and didn’t with the other teachers either. The students’ understanding is extremely basic as they only have 2 hours of English once a week. After working through the brief assignment, it was obvious we needed to cover some basics. I took her through the alphabet one letter at a time, helping with the English pronunciation. Of the 26 letters, she knew 14. So, we repeated the other 12 for several minutes and she wrote down the phonetic sounds in Spanish. We’ll see if she remembers, but it was fun to watch the lights go on for a brief moment.

Students in the Argentine public schools only have class four hours a day, and it definitely shows. Fortunately for many, private schools are not too expensive and generally have decent to very high educational standards. The kids we worked with go to public schools and have much lower standards. In 2 1/2 hours, I’m not going to convert anyone to a native speaker. But hopefully I can at least inspire them to continue studying English. Because English is the language of the world, anyone who learns it well sets himself or herself apart and opens up many doors to success.