Estancia Santa Gertrudis

Field Based Training is when we get to go out to the field and practice everything we’ve learned over the past two months. It is a lot less about theory and a lot more about doing. We’ve done a lot of really fun, interesting stuff, and stuff that wasn’t as exciting. One of the things I’ve enjoyed the most has been visiting “Estancia Santa Gertrudis”.

The “Estancia”, as we all call it, is a school organized by a Peace Corps Volunteer (Tara) and a local social worker (Berta Marìa). It has been open for about a year and it is aimed at children in social risk…street kids. The kids that go to this school are either orphans or they work begging or selling on the streets – none of them was attending school before. There are two teachers in the school for a group of about 30 kids ranging between 5 and 12ish. They are learning math, reading, and all the other subjects any kid would learn in school plus personal hygiene, nutrition, and other similar topics.

Since these kids work in the streets, they are a source of income for their families. This has been a problem for some, since their families think sending them to school means a loss of income. As an incentive to the parents, and to help improve the nutrition of some, the school provides meals and snacks to the kids. The hope is that not needing to invest in feeding their child will be an incentive to the families to send them to school everyday. Still, Tara and Berta Maria spend a lot of their time going to the kids’ houses in the mornings to talk the families into letting their child go to school that day. They also spend a lot of their time trying to find funds to keep the school open, since it is not funded by the local government.

We had the opportunity to visit the “estancia” in the second week of FBT to spend an afternoon playing with the kids. We divided the group in two, and a few of us played with each group. In my group we played our home-made version of Pictionary… giving the kids words that they would have to draw on the board for the rest of the group to guess. Like any normal group of kids, some were really extroverted and wanted to participate a lot, while others were shy and did not want to do the drawings. A lot of them would say they couldn’t draw a house or a tree or a flower or whatever the word assigned was, and we would cover them in a corner of the board to practice their drawing before doing it in front of the whole group. In the end, all the kids drew and all the drawings were guessed by the group.

After the end of the game we joined the other group, where Max was playing. A lot of the kids were waiting around him to be lifted up and turned upside down. They all loved his sun glasses and wanted to borrow them. We have a few cute photos of some of the kids wearing Max’s sun glasses.

The amount of energy and enthusiasm the kids had around us was amazing. At the end of the day they did not want to leave (Tara said that had never happened before). We were all in love with each other. The kids, in love with the crazy gringos that played with them, and us, in love with these wonderful little people that deserve so much better in life.