Hi. My name is Laura Pennington and I have been volunteering with Proyecto Horizonte for three months. It has been a good experience and I have really enjoyed getting to know the students in the school. I have been teaching the computer classes for grades one through six. It has been a huge challenge to teach in Spanish, but it did get easier with time. The children are more responsive to my directions and I have made a lot of progress in understanding their questions. I have nine years experience teaching elementary school in the U.S., so I am accustomed to teaching. However, this is my first time teaching in another language.

I chose to come to Proyecto Horizonte for a few reasons. I had heard good things about Cochabamba. I needed somewhere I could come with a low level of Spanish. I also wanted somewhere I could volunteer for free. I have been delighted with the support of the volunteer coordinator, Eliza. She helped my boyfriend and I find an apartment in the city, loaned us dishes for our Thanksgiving feast, texts us to organize social events and just generally helps with everything.

My Spanish was pretty decent 10 years ago when I did my university study abroad in Ecuador. However, I have not maintained it and was in for a shock my first few weeks. Thank goodness I have an excellent Spanish teacher named Carla. She is patient, organized and hardworking. I was worried I might be bored here, but I find it difficult to even find time to study. There is always plenty to do.

It has pretty been challenging integrating into the school. I have not found the teachers nor the administration to be open or accepting of volunteers. Of course I understand the difficulty of working with beginning and intermediate Spanish speakers. My classes are in the regular school schedule and sometimes (or often, it felt like) classes would be cancelled for a meeting and no one would tell me. However, the students have loved having computer classes again. Each day they beg for me to take their class and I wish I could take them more than once a week. So, it has been wonderful getting to know them.

If you would like to see one of the projects we did, here is a link to a blog I worked on with during extra classes with some of the sixth graders. (You can also click on Children´s blog on the column to the right.)

http://proyecto-horizonte.blogspot.com/

It is in Spanish, of course, and includes stories of their weekends and their thoughts on music and the importance of family.

If you have any questions, please email me. Right now there are 13 working computers in the classroom. Since most classes have close to 40 kids, I split the class in half for the 80 minute period. The computers have a curriculum designed by the NGO Save the Children, which I used most of the time. The children are really excited to have computer classes, and I encourage any future volunteer with interest in this area to come to this project.