The volunteer challenge: 25 young girls, wards of the state either taken from abusive homes or found abandoned in the street. They live in a local convent that is also a convalescent home for older women who have also been abandoned by their families.The setting: Large, cold, slightly run down complex located in downtown Cuenca and run by the fully robed and usually very nasty ‘Sisters of (no) Mercy’ aka the Catholic Church.
Our volunteer goals: 1. Practice our Spanish skills.
2. Bring some joy and smiles to these young girls’ lives by giving them a fun creative experience resulting in some artwork that they could be proud of and own. We decided to start with making puppets with paper mache heads and simple fabric bodies. Good intentions!
The reality: Hurricane Niñas: Stage 5
As you all know, neither of us have kids, plus we’ve never taught a class in our lives and the truth be known our Spanish is, well….’no suficiente!’ to teach art to 25 girls from ages 5-14. In reality our Spanish is great when we are in our relaxed class with our Spanish teacher Gloria, but under pressure it dissolves into the ‘doe in headlights’ affect. Kids speak even faster than adults.
In the nick of time we came to our senses and recruited two young Ecuadorian friends Estephanía and Andrea (Gloria’s daughter and niece) to join us and they agreed to work with nine of the really young niñas. Like us they also have no children and have never taught before but…unlike us they are bilingual! Great, if we got stuck they could come to our rescue. Anyone see the flaw in this equation? Yep, having experience teaching children trumps even the best language skills....all four of us were at ground zero with experience and just about to enter the eye of the hurricane with glue, scissors, toilet paper, and magic markers in hand to make paper mache puppets. We had all gotten together the weekend before and had made samples so we were very confident with our planned project.
Okay, so we made a few basic errors with our ‘good intentions’. First we overestimated the social emotional maturity of the girls as well as their basic fine motor skills and attention span, then add our collective inexperience with children and finally throw in Janet and my stumbling Spanish and it was a stage 5 hurricane. Estephanía and Andrea had their hands full trying to herd the smallest niñas, so never mind our bilingual coaches as our ‘ace in the hole’; we were all flying to keep our feet on the ground as the hurricane raged on.
Imagine Janet standing there reading from her well-rehearsed notes “Hola chicas, mi nombre es Janet y ésta es mi amiga Patti. Vivimos en una pequeña isla muy lejos de aquí en…” a small island in the pacific? Needless to say these girls have never been out of this town. Before Janet got to the second line the glue and toilet paper were flying everywhere covering every surface including their faces and their little white papered hands. Turns out that glue is their favorite media! Who would have guessed? Certainly not us!
Janet glanced up from her notes and immediately threw them over her head. Never mind the sweet volunteer fantasy. The J/P Swat Team went into action. Unfortunately, even though we brought the camera no photos were taken while this hurricane was in full force. Somehow we all managed to survive the first class without any major injuries to ourselves or the girls and returned home at 6 pm exhausted, collapsed into bed and wondered what in the hell did we get ourselves into!?
Strategy Change: 1. Control the amount of glue put out on the table. 2. Learn the Spanish command tense ‘imediamente’!!! ‘Sit down! Listen! Don’t put the glue there! Don’t hit! Be nice!….’ So back to Gloria to learn the ‘imperitivos’. It was obvious that trying to speak Spanish with our newly learned nice explanations while we were in a state of emergency was impossible.
Happily each successive class got easier, our Spanish improved and the girls clearly liked us and had lots of fun with our art projects.
The next hurdle: or the Tipping point of J/P
Clearly the daily routine of girls at the convent was highly regulated and we were just part of their scheduled summer afternoon activity. The problems started when our scheduled 2 hour class began to be reduced each week because the teachers informed us that ‘they’ said the niñas ‘had’ to go to daily afternoon Mass. Who is ‘they’ we asked? We never got a clear answer..... very irritating but we went with the flow and let it be.
Next, we found out that the teachers had taken the smaller niñas finished art projects away and were planning to do the same with our older niñas. What?!! All this effort, and the teachers were going to confiscate everything the niñas made! This was not right! We had reached our Tipping Point! Time for the J/P Swat Team to cut to the chase, go to the top MamaNun and advocate for the niñas to have their full 2 hours of class time and to keep any projects we made with them! Gloria accompanied us as our interpreter to explain our ‘concerns’ and to our surprise MamaNun agreed, all was well within 5 minutes. It was an amazing victory!
Now each of the older niñas ended up with a VERY colorful and unique puppet which lived in her own personally decorated ‘casita’ (little house) made from a shoe box. Oh, the bliss of more glue, magazines, and scissors! This time we had the ‘imperativos’ at the tip of our tongues!
Our final project was making teddy bears so that every niña would have a friend to cuddle up with at night.
All the niñas liked this project the best, and it didn’t even involve glue!
Fiesta Finale: What better way to end the program than with some face paints and cake! The ultimate color and sugar high! Hurricane Niñas strikes again only this time WE were the force behind it! I’m sure the nuns loved it.... since the girls were required to go to mass right after we left.
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| The Team: Janet, Estephanía, Patti, Andrea |
