Today my group and I spent the day at an organization called Operation Exodus. During the school year it functions as a tutoring/afterschool program for kindergarten through 8th grade and during the summer it's a tutoring/daycamp/VBS program...located in Washington Heights, which is in Manhattan above Harlem...in case you were wondering...
It is mostly all Dominican, all sass, all organized chaos, all Spanglish...
Washington Heights is a mostly Dominican neighborhood, the kids at the program are all bilingual so the whole day was a mix of Spanish and English and I wished I'd paid more attention in Spanish class/continued on in my Spanish education...the first part of the day is spent on academics, then we herd the kids to lunch at a near by school, then its off to recess at the park where there are different activity stations but basically the kids just run wild for a good two hours and harass the poor chupe man (chupes are popsicle like snacks that a vendor with a cart sells for $1 and the "e" is pronounced as an "a").
"I want a chupe!" "Did you bring money for a chupe?" "...No..." "Well, then no chupe..." (child runs off to try to convince chupe man to give them a free one....
I was constantly, desperately surveying the park looking for my kindergarten class. Honestly, I have no idea how we successfully got all of the kids across the street to the park and then the school and back again without losing anyone, but somehow in all the chaos we managed to make it happen.
After recess is snack, which is once again noisy and you're constantly counting heads as kids try to wander
and refilling juice demands and telling kids to stay in their seats. Then was craft time and an attempt to teach about Pablo Picasso and finally telling a group of uninterested kindergarteners to just draw silly looking faces because that's about as close to grasping Picasso as they're going to get. Lastly comes praise time where the whole program comes together and worships and hears a Bible story. And once again it was loud as the kids took it upon themselves to scream out the lyrics to the songs...Did I mention a lot of us were left with our own classes since some of the teachers had a half day of work? Yep, I spent the day with 12 kindergarteners who I'm sure were discussing my incompetence in Spanish because they for sure knew I didn't understand...I even carried one girl from the bathroom to snack Behaven style when she refused to join the rest of the class...
Ok, so it was exhausting and crazy and you feel frazzled for a majority of the time but really at the end of the day when they insist on showing you the picture they drew and hugging you goodbye it makes for a pretty good day...
