Summary March

Hi Friends! 

I hope you are ready for some more updates! Well good things and bad things happened in March. Let’s start with the bad things. Everyone on our team and lots of students caught the flu. So we were sick and had to stay in bed for a while but luckily we could count on one of our substitute teachers: Kell (who lives here in Medellín) for the classes to go on. Yes you must be thinking the flu, in a country with a warm climate like Colombia how’s that possible. Well if you ask the locals here they will tell you that’s because of the “winter”. But winter? Everyone always told me there is just the dry and the wet season here. Well people here use winter and summer for cold and hot weeks/weather. They could say this week is winter, today is winter, tomorrow is summer,.. It’s funny to hear and totally different from how we use those terms. So yeah in March we had two very cold weeks and when it’s winter here everyone gets sick.

The good news is: Valentin is doing a great job. One of our goals was to make the classes more interactive. Well for sure he’s doing that! We often work outside of the classroom on the football field, we use lots of objects, we walk around, Valentin uses lots of hand gestures and body language,... The kids like it and the classes are becoming very popular. The word spreads around and more and more students are joining. 

I’m starting to feel comfortable leaving the project to Valentin and the coming volunteers and coordinating from a distance. I’ll miss the children just like Elias, but no worries we found a way to keep the connection. From May on we will start with online classes, in this way we can follow up the level of the kids and keep the connection we constructed during the last 6 months. It’s a way to keep their trust and keep motivating them to come to the classes.

Cu guys!

Alex