Day to day - Blogabond

A typical day volunteering for La Esperanza Granada is as follows. Everybody in our house, Libertad as it´s known, gets up around 7:30 has some breakfast and leaves around 8:20 or 8:30 for our various schools. (We work in six different schools on the rural outskirts of Granada with around 4-6 volunteers per school.) We walk about 10 minutes to the bus depot and take a 15 or 20 minute ride to directly outside of the school that I work at, La Epifania. We start our day at 9 by planning whatever activities we are going to do that day. At 9:30, the kids have recess and they are free to come into the volunteer office and draw or read or whatever or go outside and play. My Swedish roommate Calle and I usually stay outside playing basketball or soccer in the dusty courtyard. Then at 10, the kids scramble back to class and then the volunteers work one on one with as many students as is reasonable for the remaining two hours. (School for the kids starts at 7 and ends at noon.)

Then, our ayudante, a college student named Vanessa who pays for her education by working with our program, walks us over a few blocks to her house where her mother cooks all the volunteers a delicious lunch. As always, the staples are rice and beans, the cabbage based concoction that they call salad and then a surprise, potatoes or eggs, that changes from day to day.

At one o´clock, the volunteers split up and either go into the houses in the community and read and play with the kids or do deportes, or sports. I do sports every afternoon, spefically basketball Monday and Wednesday and baseball Tuesday and Thursday. The kids are too crazed on Friday morning to be expected to do anything in the afternoon, so we don´t do anything then and our week work ends at noon on Friday. We have a baseball game today against Juan Diego, another one of the schools we work with, and La Epifania Tiburones (Sharks) are set to crush the other guys. Or at least complete a few innings.

I guess that´s it for the logistics and I´ll save my impressions of the educational system and my experience so far for another post.

written by

mls12 on April 13, 2010 from Granada, Nicaragua

from the travel blog: Volunteering with La Esperanza Granada in Granada, Nicaragua

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written by Ronald Ortman on April 20, 2010

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