Bolivia

This is my last blog about my experience teaching ESL to LIFE in the Bolivian jungle. This is a typical kitchen outside a house in the community. 

In the jungle, everything is damp. In addition to being limp from the humidity, paper of any sort is somewhat scarce. So I used home-made whiteboards.

Today I am going to share about what school looks like in the Bolivian Amazon. When I am told that a learner attended school for a few years, I now have a clearer picture of what that school might have looked like.

In terms of school supplies and physical space, the school in rural Bolivia where I lived for a month was very different than schools here in Canada. The school in San Miguel consisted of four small buildings, each one being a classroom.

In April, I taught ESL to a group of LIFE (Learners with Interrupted Formal Education) who were tour guides in the Amazon jungle. The curriculum, a wonderful progression of activities aimed at teaching the vocabulary and grammar that tour guides would need, was far too academic for most of my learners.

In April, I volunteered in the Amazon jungle in Bolivia where I taught a small group of tour guides ESL. The indigionous community, San Miguel, runs a co-operative eco-lodge offfering tours of their community and the jungle. Both the eco-lodge and San Miguel are a forty to forty-five minute boat ride from the nearest town. The next few blogs will descibe some of my adventures teaching English in the jungle to eight learners with interupted formal education.