Each month, I’ll write a blog post describing what a day of ministry looks like in that particular country. Here’s a random day in Chile!
I woke up early and put on my slippers (something I never thought I would own on the World Race or even at home in the United States but bought very early on after deciding they are a must-have in our cold little cabin). After grabbing breakfast at home (usually consisting of a banana or the closest cereal we found to Cocoa Puffs), I walked to school with my team and climbed up the stairs to my classroom, where all 35 of my second graders were hiding behind the door with the lights off, waiting to scare me. After I opened the door and they screamed at me for maybe five minutes straight, we walked down to the cafeteria, where they have bread and warm milk every morning. Frutillar, Chile, I have learned, is a city with a huge disparity in socioeconomic status and rampant classism. In some of the older grades, they feed breakfast only to the children who they know need it while the others stay in the classroom, but my second graders all go to the cafeteria together. When breakfast ended, we went back to class and the lesson began. On days where they have English class, I am pretty helpful in the actual teaching, but on other days my assistance is mostly reserved to forcing kids to get up off the floor and actually sit in their seats and copy down what is on the board, as discipline in the classroom isn’t exactly a norm here.
After the first class, the students have a break, which is the time where they would ordinarily run around wildly, but now they come to the stations my team and I set up! Shelby plays volleyball or other games with them, Christy leads them in yoga, Riley is in charge of Zumba, and Alicia, Abby, and I teach them different origami crafts every day. After the break ends, we get our own coffee break. While they have another lesson, we prepare crafts for another break, and then do it all over again. After their second break, we help in our classes again, and then leave around 1:30 to help prepare lunch at our host home.
Lunch is the biggest meal and pretty much varies every day. My favorite thing so far has been a lentil soup, greatly enhanced by a popular spice here that I put on basically everything. At lunch, we talked to Daniel about school and prepared for the next activity since there is always a next activity. After lunch, we returned to the school to de-rust poles. It wasn’t the most glamorous task, and I was perched on top of a rather precarious ladder, using all of my limited arm strength, when it started raining. But almost as soon as it had started, the rain stopped, and I was left up in the sky with a beautiful double rainbow! It almost seemed as though God was rewarding my faithfulness with a reminder of his own.
When we finished at the school, we headed back to Daniel’s house for once (pronounced ownsay) which is dinner here, consisting of tea, bread, and jelly or manjar, a caramel spread. Then, we walked to a local church where we teach English for kids and adults in the evenings. Christy and I teach a group of girls, usually through different games. They’re quick learners so we’ve been able to go through many subjects, such as everyday conversations, weather, feelings, food, animals, and whatnot. One game they seemed to particularly like is Monos Locos (Crazy Monkeys), which is similar to Jenga, but attached to each stick that they pull is a question in English that they must answer or a command that they must do. At the end of class, we always have even more tea, along with cookies.
At the end of the night, we all gathered in the living room of our cabin to spend time together as a team. We watched a movie and then I crawled back into my bunk, preparing for a good night’s sleep so I could do it all over again tomorrow.
