Bolivia4WARD
Bolivia4WARD is a tutoring program that originally was created for the children of the many artisans/employees at AHABolivia. However, word spread, and this tutoring program has now expanded to work with different schools and orphanages across Cochabamba. For two weeks, we would have class every day in the morning and afternoon. The structure was that students would come either Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Tuesday and Thursday. Students come to class and have individualized math lessons on KhanAcademy in order to take away the traditional class room setting where students get left behind. Classes are two hours, we split half the students to go outside and the other half on the computers.
Having taught several subjects in different countries in the past, I thought I would be ready for Bolivia4WARD. I quickly realized I had to throw away what I thought I knew about teaching and adapt to the needs of each student. In addition to the fact that working with children can be hard, the language barrier made it even more difficult. The first day was a little stressful and overwhelming. We had to go through the process of creating accounts and logging in each student. After we had each student set up, they were busy working away. Many of the students came from orphanages and apparently no foreigners can adopt and the state makes it extremely difficult for even Bolivians to adopt. This creates a terrible system where these orphans are stuck with an underfunded state. It was pretty obvious, which students were from orphanages because of the lack of affection and attention in their lives. Furthermore, Bolivia’s public school system has 4–5 hour days from K-12. This is an obvious flaw in the educations system from a western perspective. Throughout the teaching process, I took note of some of my most memorable interactions.
Liam: Extremely musically talented student, who was also gifted at math. During our breaks, he would want to go on YouTube to listen to classical music and play songs on an online keyboard. This really made me think about how I took so many opportunities I had as a kid for granted… (sorry mom). You don’t really realize it until you see it from another perspective.
Daniel: A student who was added to the program last minute. His dad is American so he spoke pretty good English. Apparently he was really scared and didn’t like math so he didn’t want to come. But his dad made him come try it out and said he could quit if he didn’t like it. At the end of the first day, he happily ran back to his dad after class and exclaimed that he had so much fun and wanted to come back. This was an awesome feeling.
Marlen: One of the younger girls from the orphanage, and like the others she was extremely behind on their math’s. I spent 10 minutes explaining 1+1 to her and she still didn’t get it. I believe I tried every combination of 1+1 on I could think of… in Spanish, with my fingers, drawing etc. Nothing worked until her friend explained it to her. This made me think about how there’s not always one correct way of doing things. Need to be more perceptive in my own thinking. During our last day we heard Marlen say, “I don’t want to leave, I want to be adopted here.” Heart breaking.
Erick: An 14-year-old boy, who has more facial hair then me (not much to compete with). On one of the days, he showed Danny and I the cut marks on his harms which was really sad. He told us that he was depressed and we didn’t know what to do. Although Danny speaks pretty good Spanish, it was still hard to properly talk to him about the marks. Erick also informed us that Bolivian math tests require you to do everything mentally. This meant students were trying to do long division with three digits in their head… no wonder many students weren’t “good” at math.
Ana Paola: Dropped quite the large package in the toilet causing it to break. Eladhio said, “How can someone so little cause so much damage?!?”
Angelina: The most adorable 7-year-old girl. One day we came back to the office and the kids from Nuevo Conocer (Private School) were already there and she was on the balcony and said, “Profe Onno!”
Lucas: Carolina’s (employee of AHABolivia) 7-year-old boy. He was always had so much energy and was great to work with. He asked me to teach him how to count to 20 in Chinese. It seemed like he managed to retain it.
Nelvi: On the last day, she made me a book mark out of an origami rabbit
Every student: “Profe…. No entiendo”
When we sent the kids outside, our most popular games were multiplication bingo, Uno and the memory game. They also loved it when we had background music on, especially if it was a Spanish hit. During the last session of each class, we brought in some sort of food (saltena’s, empanadas or tucumán’s) as a surprise! The kids seemed to love it and they also have an obsession with covering their food in mayonnaise. We also noticed that Bolivian children had weird infatuation with watching ghost videos, Korean pop music, Bollywood music, and an Egyptian TV show (Moses).
For me, I saw this as an opportunity for mutual learning. I was helping students with their math, while they were teaching me different words in Spanish. It was so exciting to see the students to understand and grasp new concepts. Overall Bolivia4WARD was an extremely rewarding experience, especially when we can see the students actively engaged and enjoying their learning.
