Easy as A, B, C....

This week has seen the closing of the amphibian pitfall traps for another few weeks and the start of the dung beetle collection. However, my personal highlight was teaching English at the local school in Puerto Rico. Hannah and I took the younger group of 11 children, whilst Leeron and Kristin took an elder group of children with Chris standing by to help.

We started with recapping their earlier lessons of numbers and the alphabet. Amid lots of running about to various letters spread across the room, I think they understood us. For the bulk of the lesson we introduced them to classroom objects. With another running session to various pictures (drawn the night before), spread across the room they eventually understood us. All this was followed by a colouring in session of pictures of the classroom objects, drawn by Hannah the night before (except one which Chris hurriedly drew for the extra student we had). In the last few minutes we got our cameras out at which point all the kids jumped on us to look at the photos and have some taken of themselves. So apart from the kids hiding behind the cupboard and an accidental game of tag it was a success. On the way back to camp we stopped at the local shop and discovered a new stock of chocolate bars – always exciting as GVI Amazon base camp is so far away from commercial shops. After a celebratory drink from a fresh coconut we continued on to camp to report on the good morning.

Ben Bagshaw GVI Amazon volunteer, Oct-Dec 2009

Easy as A, B, C....