First Week- May 23-29

I spent most of my first week getting acclimated with the Hogar and Chile in general. The
biggest adjustments were the temperature and language. It has been awhile since I have
spoken Spanish. While knowing Spanish is important here, it is almost equally important
to know the "Chilenismos." There are times when I get funny looks for saying something and
then I am corrected and told the "chilean way" of saying it. For example, the word boyfriend
is not "novio" it is "pololo." Unfortunately there are a million Chilenismos and I don't think
I will pick up all of them before I leave.

As for the weather...I knew it is winter in Chile, but I didn't think it would be that cold.
60s during the day and 40s at night. That's not too bad when you have central heat. My frist
weekend in Chile one of the Canadians at my hostel told me that there is no central heat in
Chile. This entire week I slept under 4 blankets and I wore just about everything
I brought with me. Thank God for the German volunteer, Anika, who has lived here for 9
months. All of these adjustments would have been much more difficult without her. She was
able to show me around the Hogar, the town and Santiago. It also helps that
she knows English because when I don't know a word in Spanish I can always ask her.

Each day I worked with a few students and helped tutor another volunteer's students (she was
on vacation). I consider myself to be a rather patient person, but the first few days here
were definitely a test of my patience. I had kids that would get bored and not want to work
anymore. Sometimes that meant that they moped and other times they would be bouncing off
the walls. I first realized that I needed to be more patient and adjust my expectations when
working with Jairo, a 5 year old. He needed to work on his numbers (1-10). I thought that this
task could not be too hard. We did activities where he circled a certain number of objects and
then we moved on to a page in his notebook where he was supposed to identify the number that was
written. Little did I realize that he could not identify or write a single number. Then Anika
told me that it took a month for one of her 4 year old students to identify and write 2 vowels.

It took several days but finally I was able to adjust my expectations and be more patient with
the kids. Then, to end the week, I got sick. I was ordered to stay in my bed all day and missed
the carnival that Met Life hosted for the kids here. Hopefully I am finished adjusting and the following week will go more smoothly.