El Centro de Muchacho Trabajador

So I suppose its worth writing a blog about the work that I have been doing down here for the past three and half weeks. After about a month of Spanish classes I was able to get a job volunteering at El Centro de Muchcho Trabajador with my cousin Stewarts help. El Centro, http://www.centromuchachotrabajador.org/ , was established in Quito over 40 years ago and their goal was to provide food and an education to the countless number of kids in Quito that have to work for a living. Spend 2 days here and you will know what I am talking about. There is a veritable army of kids who spend their days polishing shoes, or selling packs of gum. Some kids have stands with chairs, although the majority just walk around with small wooden tool boxes full of the different kinds of polish and a dirty cloth or rag. Most of these kids actually have families, but the families are so so poor that they cant even afford to house and feed the kid without the extra income earned from the child.

The kids usually spend about half of their day working in the streets, and then come in for the morning or afternoon to get two meals and classes. The genius of this program is that they incorporate the whole family, because the parents can be the biggest hindrance to the childs education. Before the center, most of the families viewed school as nothing more than wasted potentially productive hours for the kid. Well, maybe not quite that harsh, but at the very least they didn’t think they could afford to loose the money while the kid was in school. So the center brings the families in too and shows them the value of an education (the free meals help as well in this regard).

Within the center I specifically work with a group of boys that, for whatever reason, are behind the rest of the class. Many have easily recognizable learning disorders that will probably remain untreated. Everyday I work with a small group of 4 to 5 boys in a classroom and we go over basic mathematics, reading, and writing. The kids I work with are between 10 and 14 years old, and we will spend several hours every afternoon going over fundamental addition and subtraction between 0 and 20. I never truly appreciated the value of the education I received at a young age until I was working with 14 year olds who were having trouble adding 6 and 9 (that’s 15 for all you liberal arts majors). Through different exercises involving flashcards, holey cards, and math games, we also tackle a fair amount of reading. While my Spanish skills leave much to be desired, Spanish is such a phonetic language that I can read a word and pronounce it almost perfectly. Most letters only have one sound, unlike English where they can have 2 or even 3. So I read with them, and help them with parts they don’t understand. While I might not understand every word, I can pronounce it well so they can understand the meaning and incorporate the look of the word with their already existing vocabulary base.

One of the hardest parts of the job is the stories these kids come from. On the outside they can seem like happy, care-free children, but when you dig a little beneath the surface and stress them out, you see a darker history. I was sitting in class the other day and had a kid go completely comatose on me for the better part of an hour. I was asking him the answer to a question which he must not have known, and got this glazed over look on his face and wouldn’t respond to questions for about an hour. Obviously this was some kind of defense mechanism that he had learned as a child when confronted with a situation or problem he didn’t know the solution to.

Many of the kids have obvious cigarette burns on their arms, and seem to come back every week with some new scar.

The other day one of the my kids (11 or so years old) came in with gritty black mouth, and I asked him what he ate. He didn’t say anything, but halfway through the lesson I realized that he was chewing on a pencil lead. I asked him why? He liked the taste.

It took me about a week to figure out what was going on, but all of the Ecuadorian kids in my class kept talking about this ¨Agua Sucia¨ (dirty water) kid, but there was no one in my class named that of course. Then after about a week I realized that they were talking about the only black kid in my class.

I watch one of my kids (of 11 years) with a usually a nice normal demeanor, drop kick and start throwing punches at the other kids 10 year old face. I mean this kid was punching harder that I have ever seen any 20 year old ¨gentlemen¨ punch at Sewanee. When I pulled him off and took him into the office and asked him why he did it? He said the other kid wouldn’t give him a paper airplane.

I will reiterate what my cousin said in an earlier blog several weeks ago, that I have earned a true appreciation and respect for all people who work with special needs children. It takes a constant ingenuity and an ability to see the world from their eyes. You have to try understand what they are thinking, when they are going to loose interest, and find a way to keep them motivated to learn the task at hand. You have to stay one step ahead of them at all times because the moment you loose one they are gone for the rest of the day. Some days I have a hard enough time motivating myself to learn, much less 5 other kids from Quito who have never excelled in school.

It is a challenge everyday, but one that is teaching me worlds about the pains and joys of working with people much different that myself.