I just finished my first week of work con la Fundación, and it was about as nice as a week in an office can be.
First, I was extremely lucky to have been given a fairly involved assignment (which I’ll explain later), so I didn’t have to prance around asking for work to do as could so easily have been the case in a volunteer situation. Maybe this is the benefit of being in graduate program… people assume you are somewhat competent and aren’t afraid to give you something meaningful to do. That I like.
Second, because I’m a foreigner, I have an excuse to avoid the office small talk that always stressed me out when I had my office stint in NC. You know, when you see people in the kitchen, and you have to stop and chat with them- or when you pass people in the hall, you have to greet them… and when it happens 8 or 9 times a day you have to think of different ways to greet them so things don’t get boring… switching it up from “how’s it goin’” to “what’s up” to “he-ey” to a commiserating eye roll… so it’s nice to not feel that pressure here. Also, I have my own room to work in, so I can listen to music and chat online without looking over my shoulder every 2 minutes. Bueno.
Third, since I’m working for free, I don’t have to feel bad if my lunch happens to take more than an hour.
So as far as office life goes, I can’t complain. And the truth is I am so happy to be working for this organization that I would sit in a cubicle and small talk and prance if that’s what I had to do.
And now I’ll explain what I’m doing. The Escuela Nueva Foundation has been working with rural multigrade schools in Colombia since the 70s. They have been quite successful, so in more recent years they’ve been enlisted by most Latin American countries to help improve rural, and sometimes urban schooling elsewhere. Now they’re moving beyond the continent to countries in Africa and possibly India, and that’s what I’m helping with. There is already an “internationalized” version of the EN curriculum that was created for export elsewhere in Latin America, but now it needs to be taken out of the Latin American context. So I am helping to develop an International Prototype Kit, which will be more Afro-centric than Latino-centric, but still general enough for each region to tailor the curriculum more specifically to their needs, which is the point. We’re starting with Social Studies, and this week I finished the first unit, on Community. It’s a fun project, because I get to pretend that what’s in this book is going to determine what kind of people these kids become, so I can include all the right topics in all the right phrasing so that the children who use this book are going to be tolerant, peaceful, cooperative problem-solvers. If only it were that easy… but it still makes for good inspiration.
My week has been pretty low-key- my evening activity has become reading or writing at a cafe near home, since I’m not entirely comfortable being out and about after dark by myself. Last night my friend Cindy- the American I befriended in the Miami airport who is here visiting family for the month- came down to hang out. I was excited to have some relaxed time with an English speaker, thinking maybe we would go out somewhere, and life would feel a little normal again… but she ended up hitting it off with Gloria and Leo and they chatted away in Spanish while I could do nothing but listen- between the volume of Cindy’s talking and the speed of Gloria’s and the time it takes me to compose a sentence in Spanish, I had no hope of contributing to that conversation. Oh well. We’re hanging out tomorrow and I’m not inviting any Spanish-speakers.
