The first day...

Hola mes amigos! I made it to Antigua! I had a long day of traveling from NYC via Miami to get here by 8:45pm on Sunday (so technically 9:45pm for those of you on the East Coast). Even though it's pretty far south, it's actually kind of chilly here, so the one thing I wish I brought more of is long pants. Oh well.

I'm staying in shared housing with a whole bunch of volunteers doing other programs, such as construction, orphanage childcare, medical clinics, coffee farms, as well as wildlife conservation. Most are from the States and Canada, but there are also a few Australians here; some are staying for just a short time like me, others are here for a few months or an undetermined amount of time.

Monday marked the first day of the program, starting with an orientation bright and early (after some home-made French toast). They gave us the rundown of the program and the basics of day-to-day life here. Shortly after, we took a walking tour of the town and then went to our placement site. I am working in a town called Pastores at a program that helps kids reinforce what they learned in school since many of them don't get homework or their parents don't have the ability to help them. The journey to the work sites consists of hopping on one of these:

And then walking up the steepest hill you could image until you reach the schoolhouse. The school is very basic: cement walls with shelves full of paper and baskets full of crayons... No lockers, no computers, just the basics. There are also family pets that run around in the school area so when the kids get excited, the dogs will bark... Which happens a lot. The kids range anywhere from 5 to 13 years old and come from the same few families.

When we got to the site, one of the volunteers introduced me and the other new volunteers. All the kids laughed when I said my name... For the second time in my life, I met another Kayla, but she spells it Keyla. For some reason, they all found it hilarious that someone shares my name. This is Keyla:

These kids know even less English than I thought they would, so it was a little bit of a challenge to get comfortable at first. But with some basic Spanish vocabulary like colors and numbers, I was able to make some new little friends and teach them a few things.   One of my favorite teaching moments was this: I was trying to think of how to say something in Spanish, so while I thought, I said the Spanish word for "and" which sounds like "eeeeee.". As I held that word, one of the kids, Henri, starts repeating the alphabet in order. He almost got the whole thing, he just skipped over the K.

I've already learned a lot of Spanish from these kids, so now that I've signed up for two hours of Spanish lessons a day that I will start today, I should be in pretty good shape! Hasta luego!