Chillán

Por fin estoy en Chillán, my home for the next 8 months. Yesterday, I arrived with 4 other WorldTeach volunteers by bus from Santiago, which took about 6 hours. right when we got to the bus terminal, we were met by 3 nice ladies, one who was the school directora of one of my group member´s school. they told us that they were going to take us straight to la escuela república italia, an escuela básica (kinder-8th grades), where they were going to hold a ceremony for us! we were stunned and in no mood to meet a ton of people because we were so tired. the ministry of education warned us that this might happen.

we got to the school, put away all our heavy luggage in the office, and waited for about a half an hour for the ceremony to begin. meanwhile, i started to realize what an event this was going to be. for one, there was a journalist in the office with us, talking to us for a bit. she was going to write an article about us in the local paper. we also met some of our directores of our school, which translates to school principals. some head honchos also came, like el jefe of all the schools and la directora of the department of education here in chillán. not to mention, everyone seemed to be wearing their finest attire. meanwhile, i was wearing black sweatbants and a tshirt with robots on it. i came to my senses and decided that i should at least change into jeans.

then it was finally time to enter the auditorium. we ended up walking down the aisle to the tune of that sting song that goes "on the fields of..." (i was never quite sure how he finished that lyric). and there were photographers galore! i´ve never had so many photos taken of me, save for my sorority days. they sat us right in the front row, treating us as the honored guests as we were. it was so amusing! there were speeches welcoming us, and some of the students of the school danced the cueca, a traditional chilean dance, for us and even invited a couple of us to join them on stage. thank goodness i was saved from the embarrassment. it looked really fun though.

then there was this formal meeting of our host families and coteachers, in which us 5 were individually called onto the stage and were then joined by them. luckily for me, my host mom/sister is also my coteacher (she prefers being my sister bc she´d feel old if i called her my mom, although she´s in her mid 40s). of course, more pictures were then taken. after the ceremony, i was met by a throng of students who i soon realized were some of my future students! they were so cute and so excited to meet me! i took some pictures with them, which i´ll hopefully post soon. one asked me how to say 5000 in english and then another asked how to say it in japanese, easily fooled by this asian face. i feel like this won´t be the only time.

my family is sooo nice btw. i pretty much hung out with my 70+ host dad (host sister´s dad) all day today, whose birthday coincidentally falls the day after mine. i foresee a joint birthday party coming up. i had to take care of some important tramites (errands), ie. register my visa and apply for an id card, and he accompanied me and showed me where to do all that. fortunately, vivo cerca del centro de chillán, where all the important buildings are and the fruit market. and omg fruit´s so cheap here! we bought 2 kilos of grapes for like 2 bucks! unheard of in the states! there´s no surprise though of course since they´re so plentiful here. and chillán is such a cool city! it has all the luxuries of a big city but also has that small town feel. i don´t know my way around just yet, but i don´t think it´s hard, even for directionally challenged me.

i start school on monday, which i´m really excited about! next week, i´ll just be observing classes, helping out my coteacher in the same classroom, but the following week i´ll be on my own. i´ll be in charge of like 12 classes a week! though it´s more like 24 classes bc we´re dividing each class for 45 minutes at a time. i´ll be teaching grades 5th-8th, which has 3 classes per grade, about 40 students per class.