First Day Nerves

Oh wow!!!
What a day!
I loved every single second of it and have definitely found my calling but it was chaos, total and utter CHAOS!

I was nervous at first and felt a bit out of my depth but there was no time for that so I reminded myself of why I was there and just got on with it!

Firstly Im there because the school is under threat of closure.
It’s the central public school and is owned and run by the parents of the town. It’s located right in front of the only market in San Pedro which is very small, dirty and not undercover.
So the local Mayor took it upon himself (without consulting anyone) to start demolishing part of it in order to extend the market to an indoor market to attract more tourist. The parents quite rightly didn’t want that, so they organised a sit in demonstration at the school which is still ongoing and with the help of the project I am working for “Down to Earth’ they managed to get an injunction for the time being, on any further demolishment. This was on the grounds that it is an historic building.

Its 300 Years Old and you can tell, it has no glass in the windows (something we are trying to get fixed this month) and some of the roof is missing. This means that the sound travels through out the school so the teachers have to shout their lessons, which is not ideal.
The school is not just a school, at night it’s also a meeting place and an important part of the social infrastructure of the town. It has a Television for those who want to watch and it’s also somewhere for them to go and meet and sing and play instruments until the early hours of the night to keep me awake, but that’s another story.

Anyway, the mayor kindly built another school for them but it’s much further away, a bus ride in fact and there are joining fees which mean most of the Mayans can’t afford to send their kids there.

We were introduced this morning to the director of the school he is wonderful, hes in his 70’s but has come back out of retirement as he is concerned about the future of his school. He is very enthusiastic about our project even though he doesn’t really understand it fully and wants to do all he can to help us.

So this morning at 7am he marched us through the school, past the quietly protesting parents and round all 20 classrooms and introduced us as ‘the Gringo’s who are going to teach you some stuff about the planet and get you 25 computers’ so they all had to clap!!!! Most embarrassing and not sure where he got 25 from but it’s something to aim for I suppose.

Then we were split up to one per class and left! ´
Ahhhhhh! The class was chaos and consisted of me demanding silence as the teacher struggled to keep there attention. Whenever pupils passed outside in the corridor they stuck their heads through the empty window frames and disrupted our lesson which just added to the general mayhem.

Today I made quite a few friends though and they are keen for me to go back tomorrow which is a bonus.
I even managed to make friends with the boys who sat quizzing me as to which footballers I had worked with. See everything happens for a reason and those times I went trotting around the country to various stadiums bored and cold, filming Lampard, Campbell and Ronaldinho to name but a few kick a ball around a soggy pitch, have all been worth it now. It’s true it’s not what you know it’s who you know!

I also got 3 lovely messages from kid saying that they wanted me to be their friend or that I was nice and I got one paper aeroplane thrown at my head with a heart on it from a boy who wants me to go to his house tomorrow at 8pm to watch the wrestling, cant wait!

Anyway, I’m back again at 7am tomorrow morning so more news from Senorita Lucia to follow: