Ex-pats, Teaching and Volunteering

The Santiago ex-pat scene is a very small world. Last night, I went to a party at my friend Zachs place. Zach and I teach at the Instituto Norteamericano Chileno, an enormous English language school that caters to the citys upper middle class professionals and their children. Zach is my age and graduated from college at the same time as I did. He went to the same high school in LA as a bunch of my friends from college, and we have a similar analysis of social justice issues, gender, hipsters and the pros and cons of the Bay area vs. LA, to name just a few crucial points of intersection.

He lives nearby in a big apartment with Chilean, Spanish, French and Dutch roommates. He also has an American roommate, James, who completely by coincidence is one of the guys from my volunteer program. James also graduated from college in 2006 and knows a bunch of the kids I know who went to Harvard. Ridiculous. Anyways, the party was a lot of fun. I made friends with Javiera, a Chilean-Venezuelan social psychologist, who just moved to Chile from Switzerland and also lives in my nieghborhood, which as you might guess by now, is pretty cosmopolitan.

I started work the week before last and its going well. I have four group classes: a Tuesday and Thursday afternoon basic English class at an all girls Catholic elementary school in Barrio Basil; a Friday afternoon class in the La Florida neighborhood with just three students; a Saturday morning teenager class near La Moneda; and a Wednesday evening adult class. I also have several private classes with adults. I enjoy teaching, especially the kids, who are a lot of fun.

And speaking of kids, I started my volunteer work at the hogar, which has also been a lot of fun. The hogar is in the quiet, very beautiful tree-lined neighborhood of Nunoa. The house is spacious and well-equipped. Currently, there are seven kids living there (there can be up to twelve). Theyre all between three and eleven years old. They are children who have been mistreated, neglected or abandoned by their parents. The social workers from the hogar work with the parents to improve their relationships with their children, with the goal of reuniting the family. If this is not possible, the kids are placed with a relative, or if a relative is not availbable, they can stay in the hogar. As in the US, its very difficult to find families to adopt older chilren.

Most of the kids in the hogar have a sister or brother there as well. The director is fabulous, and there are four women who work there full time, in addition to numerous volunteers, mentors, social workers and a psychologist who come through every week. The kids (like my little students) refer to all the adults that work there as tia or tio (aunt-uncle), which I think is very sweet.

Volunteering at the hogar is pretty low key. The idea is for the kids to see that there are adults that care about them and to help impart the values of self-respect, respect for others, etc. that all kids are meant to learn. In practice, this means that I show up and draw with the kids, or play soccer or basketball, or read books or give little English lessons or pick them up from school or whatever happens to be going on. Im glad I decided to get involved.

As you can probably imagine, between work and volunteering, Im now quite busy. On top of that, my laptop charger broke and I had a cold for a couple weeks, so Ive been somewhat remiss with blogging, which I hope to remedy in the near future. This cold, by the the way, was quite a phenomenon. Apparently, its common for just about every other person in the city to get sick when the seasons change (its now cold in the mornings and evenings, though still very hot during the day). Most everyone I know got sick, so I took to calling it the plague, though of course it really wasnt that bad.