Reports from Ecuador

Today, Melody and I made our first trip to a local daycare to give our charlitas about hand washing and throwing trash away.  The daycare was about 40 minutes away, mostly on a dirt road through the mountains, and looks after kids who are up to 5 years old.  We spent most of yesterday looking over the resources that the clinic had on these topics, coming up with activities to do with the kids and writing down what we wanted to say to make sure we knew all of the necessary Spanish.

Despite all of our preparation, actually giving the talk was probably one of the most challenging things I’ve done so far in Ecuador.  We were having trouble getting responses out of the children, and it didn’t seem like they were understanding very much of what we were saying.  Thankfully, one of the women there with us was a huge help in getting the kids involved, but I could tell that what we had planned just wasn’t working on its own.

Reflecting on my experience, I think there were a few main factors that contributed to this:

• I overestimated how much information we could teach the children.  I didn’t have a clear concept of the attention span of 3-5 year olds, and also didn’t realize that these kids have not gone through any formal education yet.  We were probably trying to teach them too much in too short of an amount of time.
• My Spanish was difficult for them to understand.  While I don’t have too many problems talking with adults, who can interpret what I’m saying even with all of my strange wording and incorrect grammar, I may not have been making much sense to these young children.
• Melody and I were distracting from the lesson.  Even before we started the kids were extremely shy in coming up to meet us, and would just stare at us when we asked them questions.  In such a small community, anyone who isn’t there every day stands out, and the children didn’t seem very comfortable around us because we weren’t familiar.

Even though today was difficult, there are certain changes that we can make to our plan to improve it for the next school we visit.  I’d like to include more games in the plan, even if they don’t have much to do with what we’re teaching, just so we can keep the children engaged.  It also seems like a good idea to go over what we’re going to say with one of the staff members here, just to make sure we’re using kid-friendly language and not talking over their heads.  Finally, spending time to play with the kids and make them comfortable around us before we start the lesson would make it a lot easier to get them involved once we start the actual educational aspect.

I know that these changes won’t make things run absolutely smoothly at the next daycare we visit, but I do hope they’ll help us move in the right direction.  Personally, I want to focus on making sure the kids are having fun with us; it’s a little more nerve-wracking for me because I can’t make a ‘script’ or a concrete plan for having fun, but I know that it’ll help them learn the lesson better and we’ll end up having a better time too.  I’m sure Melody and I will be doing a lot of brainstorming for specific activities we can do before Monday, when we’ll visit the next daycare center, but if anyone has any suggestions for us I’d love to hear them!  As always, I can be reached at rjz2@rice.edu.