Yesterday marked the beginning of my Community Service endeavors. It's time for RMal to give back to the community. This saga began a few days ago. I had signed up for the community service 'class'-it's a class because(theoretically) we get credit for it, I doubt I will ever see any of those hours on my U.S. University transcript- because it will hopefully provide some sort of learning and talking experience and give me that warm fuzzy feeling we all love so much.
It started with a phone call. First off, I hate phone calls because it's much harder when you can't see theperson's mouth or take some other verbal cues when their speaking in a foreign language. What I get from this phone call is that we have a meeting the following day at noon. This however, would be much to simple, so to make the whole thing a bit more fun they decide to send me an email saying we have a meeting at 11. That's Uruguay for you.
Punctual as always, I decide to show up at 11 which turned out to be a wise choice. We go into a quick debriefing. My project will basically entail playing with young kids at a small school on the outskirts or suburbs of town.Suburbs mean quite a different thing in South America. If you have seen Ciudad de Deus you know what I'm talking about. Much like the favelas of Sao Paolo or Rio de Janeiro, the outskirts of these South American cities seem to bethe poorest parts. No Starbucks in Kilometro 16(where I will be going).
These Uruguayans are clever, they waited until after we were locked into the project to tell us that we willhave to travel an hour by bus to get to our location. The bus ride itself is entertaining, the first time, I expect the appeal to fade quickly. Entertainment is provided by the local derelicts, who get on the bus every second or third stop. One was selling pencils. Don't scoff just yet, these pencils were apparently importedfrom Italy and could BEND. I'm still a bit perplexed as to why I need a pencil that I can form into whateverfun shape I may desire, but whatever. The next two were selling little hard candies, they had much worse salespitches, but looked a bit less like Daniel Day Lewis from There Will Be Blood and had some sort of vaguely usefulproduct and thus actually sold a little. The last guy was my favorite. He actually came on with a guitarand performed a few songs. His skill wasn't noteworthy, but the guy was trying. He actually made a little bitof money and retained a bit of his pride by not staking his fortune on moldable pencils.
As all of this was going on you could notice the scenery slowly changing. The buildings becoming a bit smaller, the paint looking a bit older-think the transition when you start getting into the West Pass Road area. The transition continued though. Eventually, I could tell we were getting close. One of the biggest things I noticed was the litter. Everywhere. The litter and debris were similar to something you would have seen after Huricane Katrina. A little less debris but more litter. The houses themselves, looked like some sort of makeshift shelter. Many of the roofs are pieces of rusted over tin, and the fences as well. There were a lot of horses too. The poor people here, or the garbage people, I'm still unsure about this but I'm not sure thereis a huge difference between the two, use horse drawn chariot/carriages. As a result, I saw more than a fewhorses tethered up by the side of the road out here, which is one of the things I still haven't become accustomed to. So eventually we get to the school and we talk a bit. The lady says something about the kids are goingto love me(the only guy in the group) because many don't have father figures or something. We really don't haveany expectations except to play with the kids and show up consistently. Then we go to see the kids. There are a lot of them. 32 I think. And they are all 4 or 5 years old. They were loud. But they were cute little kids.
- A google search gave me this bit of help:
What should you expect of children from 4 to 5 years old? Children this age... - Are active and have lots of energy.
- May be aggressive in their play.
- Can show extremes from being loud and adventurous to acting shy and dependent.
- Enjoy more group activities because they have longer attention spans. Like making faces and being silly.
- May form cliques with friends and can be bossy.
- May change friendships quickly.
- May brag and engage in name-calling during play.
- May experiment with swear words and bathroom words.
- Can be very imaginative and like to exaggerate.
- Have better control in running, jumping, and hopping but tend to be clumsy.
- Are great talkers and questioners.
- Love to use words in rhymes, nonsense, and jokes.
I am looking forward to this. I find it a bit entertaining that they speak better Spanish than me. I spellbetter at any rate though, haha. That's all for now.RJ
EDIT:I hate my computer
2 comments:
i'm glad you are doing this. i bet you do learn a lot from these little kids, and i bet they do love you. do they like to kick the ball around a bit? you could organize them into a little 4 on 4 soccer league! i think you are right too about the trash people/poor people. like jamie's mission trips to the dump in honduras. those folks whole economy is garbage. that's where they get their food, shelter, furnishings, clothing, toys, things to barter, things to sell, everything. it's a very sad reality that all that is going on while we go about our business as usual. be good, love!
2 things:
The kids will be studs, you know this. When I play soccer often times I arrive early, because there is a team of roughly 10 or 12 year olds playing in the gym. There is a younger team that is waiting to play, as well as little brothers and what not. I have a nicer ball than any of the natives, so the kids all come play, and I dribble around the courtyard while they yell for the ball (tocá! tocá!). It´s the only word they know, and when they don´t have the ball they want it. The best part is when they score a goal they look like mini-men, and go nuts, or, the best I have seen, lay on the ground and spread out their arms and legs, as if struck by a lightning bolt of happiness/exhaustion.
There are the same sorts of trash buggies here. Oddly enough, on trash day a lot of them go to the financial district. What I gather from this is that they dig through all the discarded paper and find empty boxes. This cardboard becomes their homes. We watched a video on it and tin is also valuable, because they trade it in for money, or use it for their roofs. Really sad ... there is immense poverty in some parts of the city here, although to be honest I haven´t seen much of it, which is probably for the best. You´re community service is surely the safest way to be in that kind of environment.
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