Around the Cancha

First Day of School

Date: Jan 10, 2011

The fist day I stepped through the chained gate into the cement play area, called the cancha, I immediately became the focus of a hundred gawking, brown eyes. The children ages 7-12 were everywhere, uniformed by blue bottoms, white shirts, tan skin and dark hair. I tried to respond to their unblinking stares in a confident smile, but underneath I was trembling with nerves. This was my first time teaching, and it was going to be in this whole new world.

I remember elementary school as a 3-story brick building, resting on an expansive lawn. Inside would always be cool and quiet; the walls covered with learning posters, and the doors closed to passersby.

This school, “Guayas,” one of the elementary schools of Puerto Cayo, was one story, with a simple rectangular row of 6 classrooms around the dirty cement patio (the cancha). The walls were incomplete fixtures that allowed the hot humid outside air to move in and out of the room freely, much like the steady diffusion of students that would step into my room, stare for a while, and then prance out, maybe belonging to my classroom, maybe to another?

I could still hear the dogs, pigs, chickens, old trucks, and old women from across the dirt road, as I introduced myself to the teacher of the classroom I would temporarily be a part of. She was eager to meet me, then seat herself in the back corner of the room with a coffee and magazine.

“Buenos dias!” I yelled.

“Buenos dias.” Some responded with a mumble, and some with an enthusiastic bellow. In any case, it was a start. My partner Allison and I frolicked through the lesson plan, saying our strange English words, acting as a talking whale and an uninformed youth in a skit, pulling out dirty beach objects from a plastic rainbow bag and finally giving a homework assignment with the promise of reward! It was exhilarating.

At the end, the children asked us if we’d return. They asked us about the mystery prize. They followed us to the doorway of their class, pleading us to stay! What an amazing sensation-- to be so desired by a group of little strangers. And yet I felt the same magnetic pull towards them. Their eyes were now smiling rather than gawking, and I felt less like an alien and more like a friend, or maybe just a friendly alien.

It was the best first day of school I had ever had. Alas, this semester would only last for three more days.