Profesor Kira

Ayacucho, PERU

Four of the boys who live in the shelter do not attend school because of behavioural problems or because their level of education is so low that they would have to be put in with kids who are much younger than them. So those four boys are taught in Los Cachorros. One of my roles in Los Cachorros is to teach them PE on Wednesday mornings and English on Friday mornings.

I turned to the internet to try to get ideas on how to teach PE, but most of the activites I found needed equipment like cones, balls, hoops, ropes etc. Since at my disposal I have only one football, one small sponge ball and one wooden racket, I have had to be creative. In any case all the boys want to do is play football. So my classes are generally 45 minutes of "educational activities" and 45 minutes of football.

As the boys are only now learning to read and write in Spanish, my English classes are pretty basic. Still, even with what I considered to be basic words, problems have arisen - I have learned that "girl" is a difficult word for Spanish-speaking kids to pronounce, and I must fugure out how to stop them from putting "e" in front of words that begin with "s" like they do in Spanish (e.g. escuela/school, estudiante/student, Espana/Spain). Still, I´m happy that some progress has been made.

I´m also happy that I´m called "profesor" (the kids call all the staff the Spanish word for teacher). Although they can´t quite pronounce my name, its nice to be called profesor without having had to do years of research!