¨Hello Teacher!¨

So now it´s time to tell you about the classroom I´ve been visiting at the very outskirts of Arequipa this week.

Every day Jim, Julia, Victoria, Danni, Keri and I board a cambio near Plaza Des Armes that takes us about 45 minutes outside the town. The cambio in itself marks the beginning of our passageway into another world. Comfortably seats about 25, can feasibly fit in about 50 - with enough sheer determination and the earnest effort of a ¨conductor¨who clings to the cambio´s folding door and bellows out the name of our final destination in a seeming attempt to lure people in
who might not have otherwise considered heading that way. ¨Villa Fontana! Villa Fontana!¨ So that by the time we reach our stop, the 6 of us pile out relieved to have arrived at last and begin our short walk up the dirt road to the school. It is as refreshing a beginning to the rest of the afternoon as any.

The Flora Tristan Community School where we teach is not really a school. It is a self-made compilation of 4 rooms with poured cement floors, brightly painted walls and tin roofs at the very dusty foothills of some mountains. Before previous volunteers built it, there was nothing. A handpainted sign on the blue cement wall out front says ¨Welcome to the Wonderful World of English¨above a picture of the globe and the kids who come from the nearby communities of Flora Tristan and Villa Chachani range in ages from 2 - 20. Our mission as their self-appointed teachers for 2 hours each afternoon is to ¨provide them with a marketable skill (speaking English) while keeping them off the streets and out of trouble.¨

But the kids that come to the Flora Tristan School come as much for our company as access to ¨the wonderful world of English.¨Doors open at 3:30 and those that have decided to show up that day usually greet us with an ebulliant ¨hello teacher!!!¨and kiss on the cheek. In many cases, this is the only thing they actually can say in English, and the littlest ones say nothing at all but love it when we give them crayons and stare in awe while we do the hokey pokey. Danni and I together lead Class 1 - the youngest class - and depend mostly on dances and songs to help us expose our students to English. If we are lucky, and their attention spans have not waned, we might get them in a circle to practice ¨Hello, my name is...¨

Mostly, though, all of the kids want to play. And we play our hearts out with them on the cancha - or playground (in our case a flat cement block that is more basketball court) - after an hour of having hopefully made some progress teaching English in our respective classes. ¨Vamos a la cancha!¨ are magic words for the littlest ones and we teachers all dutifully head out to play ball and jump rope. That is all but it is everything and for one hour the cancha is a frenzy of children from all the classes playing with nothing but 2 bouncing balls, 3 flat ones and 2 jump ropes, one of which is attached to some poles to constitute a swing. There are usually also about 5 dogs running around in the mix. A few mothers sit on the outskirts of the cancha watching us silently.

The afternoon at the Flora Tristan Community School ends with water. Once the assorted balls and ropes have been collected, the children follow us back to the school for the cup of water we dole out to them in red plastic cups. ¨Vamos a tener el agua!¨ There is no running water in Flora Tristan, a community of dirt roads and squat unfinished cement houses against the great wide open Peruvian sky. By the time we make our way back up the dirt road to await our cambio back to Arequipa the sun is setting in a red orange ball in the backdrop. And you can see the El Mistin and Chachani volcanos towering high in the distance.