First day of school!

Monday was the first official day of school at the Simon Bolivar government school. The principal of the school was very excited that we will be teaching at the school and gave a long official speech about the importance of the English language in the globalized world, she also thanked us for volunteering to teach and give the children the chance to learn English. The school is in El Milagro, one of the impoverished areas of Trujillo, however it has a pretty good infrastructure thanks to donations by private people and companies. The school even has a computer lab that has never been used, due to the fact that none of the teachers knew how to teach the kids how to use a PC. This year they fortunately have someone that will teach computer skills.

In our first class we introduced ourselves, explained the rules and proceeded to teach the children how to greet and introduce themselves: "Hello. Hello, what's your name? My name is Jean Franco, what's your name? My name is Joselita." We tried to make our classes as fun and dynamic as possible and it seems that the children really enjoyed them. After teaching the summer school classes we decided to start off with strict discipline and have developed a pretty hilarious yellow card and red card punishment system to maintain order in the class room.

On Thursday we went to the USDA school in Alto Trujillo and helped prepare the class rooms for the upcoming Monday, when the classes will officially start. Ruwan and I spent three hours cutting out, hammering and stapling screens to put on the windows of one of the class rooms. It was fun. The USDA school is set in the middle of some pretty awesome sand dunes. I will try to take pictures in the upcoming weeks.

Friday morning Anjana and I headed out to Simon Bolivar to teach our last class of the week. It was a difficult class, with 30 hyperactive 8 year olds, but I enjoyed it and I think the kids did too.


In the free time I managed to get two great "purifying" surfs, play basketball with Ruwan, play soccer with Sally, Ruw, David and Sally's boyfriend Patrick and have some interesting philosophical conversations with Ruw and Anjana over a jar of fresh lemonade and delicious stuffed wan tans at our new favorite Chifa (Chifas are Peruvian Chinese restaurants).

We started playing basketball in a park that is one block away from home and we played against one local kid that was really good. His name is David and it turns out that he is the brother of Carolina, one of the USDA volunteers that we often hang out with!

The whole of Trujillo woke up in shock in the aftermath of the Japanese quake. My thoughts are with the Japanese people. Everyone here was afraid that the tsunami would hit the coast of Peru, but in the end the wave turned out to be 35 cms high... a big sigh of relief for everyone.

I leave you with a typical Huanchaco sunset picture that Billy took of me prior to my sunset surf session on Tuesday.

Sunset surf session