Escuelas y Fiestas

After a full week of language and community tourism classes, I am exhausted! Today we visited a secondary school about 20 minutes away to sit in a class and see the differences in educational settings between the States and Bolivia. A big part of our primary and secondary projects will be working directly/indirectly with young adults, and this was a great way to see how we could best suit the learning needs in a classroom setting. The school was centered around a rather large courtyard, and despite having large student-to-teacher ratios (about 30-1) the classes seemed well organized. There was a very different method in teaching, which for the most part is jjust lecture, with little room in the school day for analytical thinking and hands on activities. In the campo (suburban countryside) there are little resources and these students didn’t have any books. I attended an English class where they were learning names and colors of clothing. My friend Ashley and I were an interesting commodity in the classroom- after being asked every question from whether we liked Bolivian men to why we were in the Cochabamba region of all places in Bolivia, they wanted our autographs, phone numbers, and email addresses. Our session was meant as a brainstorming activity to which we later applied a hypothetical lesson plan based on our Tourism or Microenterprise sector.
I made the 30-minute walk home as dusk was falling, content to go home and ready for the weekend! Tonight we played cards with Romina, Theresa, and Wilhe. I taught them the delightful game of Gin, and they taught me a couple of Bolivian games. The wind at night gets pretty fierce and it cools off quite a bit; my family seems to take advantage of this and is always early to bed, early to rise. I almost feel as if I have been a part of this family for more than a week. They are in my thoughts when I am away from them, and today for the first time, they have conceded in letting me help in the kitchen! Tomorrow a fellow PCT's host family is throwing him a birthday party- this requires dressing up and going into town beforehand and buying a cake. It will undoubtedly be a rite of passage in my Bolivian culture, drinking chicha, eating more delicacies, and dancing to a new kind of rhythm.
Here are some pictures, there are few for now, but promise to put more up soon!