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Another week has passed. Now it’s officially starting to feel like my time here is passing really quick. It only feels like a day or two ago that I was writing my previous post by the pool.  I don’t go there as often as the first two weeks. My days are a little fuller now that I started volunteering. But when I have some spare time after work, that’s probably where you’ll find me.    

I really like working at Education+. It’s run by an American social worker who started doing this with one little room and 20 kids. Now it’s just like a school with 4 big classrooms and a big playing area. About 250 kids come here now. I work 4 hours a day, starting at 11am in the “puppies” class. These are the youngest kids, that are 2 or 3 years old. They are currently learning about colors and coloring inside the lines of a picture. After practicing this there is time for them to play with different games and toys.                                                                         

After the puppies, I start with the “baby bears”. These are also young kids, mostly 4 or 5 years old. They are now learning to write the letters A, E, I, O and U. This is a very cute group to work with, but they are not easy. They are distracted before the pencil even touches the paper. Imagine when half of the kids already finished the exercise and are playing next to the kids that still have to finish it... When they’re all finished and playing, that’s when they start to get wild. They love volunteers, but there’s only 2 in one class of 12 kids. You can probably imagine what that is like (one on each of my arms, one or two on each leg and one on my back...) but they are so adorable.   

After all that madness I go to a class with kids that are a little older. They are between 6 and 10 years old. The teacher is a really great guy who always makes sure the kids have fun. It already starts before they enter the room. He either judges the “pointy-ness” of their pencil before they enter the classroom until it’s the sharpest you’ve ever seen it, or he plays a game like “Annemaria koek koek” of which I don’t know the name in English (and yes, I have to compete as well, no volunteer privileges there). In class we start with another game like for example Pictionary. We divide into team Mo (Mowena, the other volunteer) and team iek (my team). It’s so great to see the kids’ faces glow up when you pick them for your team.    

After the game the kids get math problems to solve. There’s one group that works with low numbers, or other problems that don’t require major math skills yet. The second group (the group that I mostly help out) works mostly with adding, subtracting and multiplying high numbers (yes, sadly, I sometimes need my calculator, which the kids of course find extremely funny). There is one boy that needs a little more time and attention to finish everything. He is super sweet and tries really hard. So I make sure I sit with him until he finishes and understands every problem.    
Spanish is going alright! The little kids’ classes are great for my Spanish development because what they are learning really expands my vocabulary (colors, animals, body parts, other objects). And then in the other class it’s really doable as well, as long as you know the numbers and how to say +, - and x.    

The protests are still very much happening unfortunately. Granada itself is very peaceful. There are marches but they are not big and easy to avoid. This weekend we decided to go to Ometepe, a big volcanic island in Lake Nicaragua. When we got there we heard that this whole weekend the main road would be blocked (the only way to move around the island). I was going to go horse riding on the other side of the island, so I wasn’t sure I could. The guy from the horse riding place arranged a taxi for me that knew the way around the protests. So he picked me up at 8 am and we got there easily through a bumpy dirt road that he knew (he drives a big 4x4 truck so he did this before). After the beach ride with the horses (which was great by the way!) we had quite the adventure ahead of us. The dirt road was blocked this time as well. But my taxi driver did not give up that easily. He tried every possible way, but the protesters had blocked everything with trees. When he almost gave up because of another road block, we found a little opening into a piece of land. We had to go through another gate but when we got down we saw that the tree was behind us, so we finally found a way through. It took us 5 hours total, while the way over was only one hour. After this day I slept for I think ten hours.   

I am writing this from the ferry back to the mainland. We wanted to go zip-lining today but there will be many protests on the mainland this afternoon. We have to be back in Granada before 3pm otherwise we won’t be able to get there at all because of more road blocks.  Tomorrow we start a new workweek. We now have to start doing research for our school project about nutrition and physical activity. Should be interesting because the kids mostly eat rice and beans 3 times a day, every day...