21st May

How best to make a difference?

I've now been in Lima a week and a half. It's a big city with as many people as London. Complicated in comparison to Quito, where I had been learning Spanish, it took me a few days to get my bearings. It's winter here, which means that you might need a jumper if the sun isn't out. It never rains, but some days the sky is filled with coastal haze.

I'm staying with a very hospitable Peruvian family and will be doing some volunteer work for the next 8 weeks. My volunteer programme has placed me at an under-resourced state school in a poor area of Lima. The school has children from the ages of 7 to 16; I have been working with the secondary classes. Conditions in the neighbourhood aren't quite as bad as in Nairobi slum I once visited, but it is poor.

Last week I quickly found that I could be most useful in the English and Mathematics lessons and so opted for those - my Spanish is not yet good enough to help effectively in other subjects. People have told me that I am patient when teaching and I do feel it is worthwhile. Maybe when my academic career is over, I will see if they are still crying out for maths or physics teachers.

The English classes suffer from the same fundamental problems as foreign languages in the UK: the students don't have a reason to learn English, because they don't see how it can impact their life. And, just as in the UK, a couple of hours a week is not enough to make real progress.

I had in an expectation that the school would be similar to my mind's picture of a poor African school, where all the children are well behaved - because they appreciate the value of education. I'm not sure why I had this expectation, but it was wrong - the discipline in the school could be a lot better. Having said this, I think the teachers are generally good, despite the low wages they receive.

All the children I have worked with so far seem to be able to read and write, and I was thus awakened to one way in which South America and Africa are a world apart - in South American countries the literacy rate is generally 85% or higher, whilst in many African countries it is 30% or lower.

But I think if I carry on helping in the way I have been so far, I will be dissatisfied with myself when I leave. I have high standards about doing something worthwhile, perhaps unrealistically high. I want to do more: I might run some additional English classes after school for those that are keen or perhaps something else to make a more permanent difference.

There are no computers in the school for the pupils to use, but they have lessons about computers in which they draw pictures of the various components and describe what they are used for. So one idea that came to mind was procuring some computers for the school. However, once I started to think about the practicalities of doing this a number of problems come to mind - there needs to be a secure place to keep them, a teacher that can maintain them, time in the timetable, subject matter to teach, etc. It's still an early stage idea, and I need to think through the problems, but I'm aware that my time here will be over before I know it.