Voluntariado (and student protest)

I have two community service/working with children-oriented activities that I'll be doing here that I'm really excited about but haven't taken the time to let y'all know.

One is through my class called Geografía Social. Each year the class works with low-resource (not sure if that's the best word, I can't really speak English or Spanish at this point) primary schools in Valparaíso. The students are split into small groups and each group is assigned a class that they go to each week. The overall purpose of the course is to instill pride and appreciation in the children for their city because they don't have the chance to really get out and look around and also, it's not something that's actively taught, obviously. The goal is to have a culminating project at the end of the semester, such as an outing to a museum, to the beach, or do a big art project with the kids.

As a kind of pre-volunteer activity, the class went to the Museo Cielo Abierto in Cerro Bellavista, Valparaíso. There are 20 works done by really well-respected artists that are located on the buildings, walls, and sidewalks of the neighborhood and it's really cool. Unfortunately, I didn't go with the class group and tour guide because a Chilean student from the Facultad de Geografía told me that there wasn't class because of the paro (strike, boycott). However, I am planning to go with a few others who missed it sometime this week to see the works in person and take photos.

Not-so-brief side note on the strike: Starting last week students at a lot of the universities around here and I'm pretty sure in other municipalities (so not Santiago) decided to strike (boycotting classes while simultaneously organizing marches, demonstrations, making signs, etc.) because of the TNE. The TNE is a newly proposed national school-pass that students use on the micros (buses) for a lower fare. They always have one but the new one, from what I've gleaned from various tiny conversations, would make prices in the municipalities go up by a larger percentage than in Santiago, is offered by the gremio (guild, association?) of the micros instead of whoever normally runs it, and apparently normally, a part of students' tuition goes to the government who then pays the gremio to subsidize student fares but for some reason this year the government withheld that money. Whatever the combination of reasons, students are pissed.

The way it generally works is that the student association holds a vote (either every day or every few days) to decide whether or not they want to continue the boycott. But in my university, the voting takes place by departments so it's really difficult to figure out whether or not I'll have classes. Last week there was a march and the students took over a few main streets and I got to see tear gas and tanks. As far as I know, no one got hurt, it was more or a routine "get out of the road" type confrontation. But tear gas sucks...

Since then it's mellowed down. There's a national action on Thursday and no one is sure how long it'll last. Apparently it happens all the time: students get pissed, strike, and then they get at least a bit of what they want (mine workers and probably other sectors I don't know about do it too). It actually makes me a bit ashamed of the U.S. because that would never happen now. Even if the population wasn't scared shitless of the government or super apathetic, they wouldn't know how to go about demanding that the government pay attention and give them what they want because they've forgotten how...and that's aside from all the possible technical political reasons why U.S. citizens act the way they do. Anywho, I'll have plenty of time to write blogs now because I hardly ever have university class...

The other volunteering I'm doing is once a week at El Hogar Teresa Cortés Brown (a girls' home), hanging out with a bunch of girls ages 7ish to 15 ish. There are 24 of them during the hours that I'm there in two tiny classrooms doing pretty much whatever they want, supervised (kind of) by one tía (aunty). For now, I'm just hanging out and talking to and playing with them but am planning an art project and am looking into setting up a penpal type deal so that they'll have something educational, interesting, and fun that actually lasts beyond the few months that I'm here. I was told to help them out with schoolwork if they need it, but it didn't seem like they had any homework and the school workbooks I did see didn't belong to anyone in particular, they were just being passed around like all the other pens, paper, and art supplies (scarce). It's really nice to hang out with kids at least once a week and interesting to watch how they interact with each other, the tía, and me (one realized I wasn't Chilean about 30 minutes in and then had me translate My Chemical Romance lyrics the entire time :P)