Working hard for the money

By Alisha & Micah

This is our friend Claudio, an Afghan hound
who prances around Chota. He is by far the best
looking dog in town.

It has been a while since our last post and we are finding ourselves content and busy with work. To give you an idea of what a Youth Development Volunteer in Chota does, here are some of the projects that we are currently working on:

Health Facilatators with the University of Cajamarca-Chota
For the past two months we have been meeting with a group of nursing students in order to train them in a variety of health-related topics so that they can develop a series of presentations aimed at educating high school students, whose current health education is lacking.

Youth Groups with a local NGO
One of our community partners runs a program aimed at combating child labor. We are collaborating with him on four different youth groups in three communities for kids involved
in child labor. We have been doing a variety of activities related to healthy lifestyle
development and vocational planning.

Self-Esteem Workshop with Kindergarten class
We live down the street from a kindergarten and we thought it would be fun to do some
self-esteem activities with the 5 year-old class. So far, so good.

English Club
When we arrived in Chota, our host family expressed interest in us teaching their two children English, and we thought that it was a great idea to work with them on some English skills. Well, word of our English Club is spreading like wild fire and has become the bane of our existence. Literally every single time we meet (twice a week) new parents show up begging us to make their kids fluent in English. It is really hard to turn people down on the spot and we feel like there is an expectation that there is the expectation that we will continue to teach English for the remainder of our service. The problem is 1) we are not English teachers and 2) there is a big gap between the parents' desire for their children to learn English and the children's motivation to do so. We really don't have a problem teaching some English, but we are going to have to make some changes in order to have some control over the number of participants. Hopefully, English Club will be a very short term project.

Environment Club
At the end of last school year, we were approached by a highly motivated student from one of the high schools in town. She was very interested in collaborating with us on some environmental projects, especially instituting recycling at her school. We are now working with her and a group of high school seniors to plan some Earth Day activities (Earth Day is completely new to Chota) and try to impliment environmental education and a recycling program at their high school. This is a really fun project because everything has been the ideas of the students who are really positive and motivated.

Baby English Club (thanks to Micah)
The mother of one of the students in our environment club runs a "bilingual" daycare. Problem being that neither she nor any of the staff speaks English. At all. So, she asked us to help them out by coming and exposing the babies and toddlers that attend her daycare to English. Since Micah happily agreed, we are now spending an hour a week speaking English to children who hardly speak Spanish due to the fact that they are 10 months old.

PTA Meetings with Early Intervention Program
We are bringing the fun back to monthly parent meetings at an early intervention program for children with disabilities. We are not sure how much fun is really being had, but hopefully the parents are learning new approaches to incoorporate their children into daily activities and into the community.

The Children's Shelter
Work continues with the children at the Albergue. We have done lots of self-esteem activities, sports, nutrition, arts and crafts and...English! This is still one of our favorite places to work.

Addionally, we are planning to start a few more things within the next month, including a Friday night movie club to give young people a positive social activity and a program for university students studying to be English teachers.

For the Easter holiday we get a few free vacation days and are planning to go to Chachapoyas. Stay tuned for pictures...