program_coordinator's blog

After a weekend of colorful celebration here in Xela,  students and volunteers alike headed back to school this week.  I was lucky enough to tag along and have my first experience in the classroom. Having done so, I have to say that I have a new found respect for teachers everywhere, and specifically for our fabulous volunteers here at Manos de Colores!! It was such a treat to watch as their fun and engaging lesson plans led to students competitively forming teams and shouting out the approriate color, number, or pronoun with great enthusiasm and even laughter!

This week began with Palm Sunday, which marks the beginning of Semana Santa. Excitement is in the air, processions are in the streets, and flowers and palms are everywhere! As most of the local schools are closed this week, our teaching volunteers are enjoying a change of pace as they break ground in our new garden! They´ve been busy leveling the field behind our school, while others have been planting, watering and painting to complete the landscaping inside the community center.

This is our first week of hosting Manos de Colores at our new Community Center! Our wonderful volunteers helped move the last of the items over last week and now the new classrooms are nearing completion. Many of our activities have already been held here, such as salsa lessons, and amazing cooking lessons from Pati. Now we have completed the transition as we hosted our first Saturday school here over the weekend, and Manos de Colores was held here yesterday! What a great start to the week!

@ Pala Life Klish (4ta calle 15 Ave)

(Under the stairs across from VRISA bookstore)

Here comes summer time!

Trade in those long tops for flip flops

Q10  with clothes to exchange

Q15 without

Take what you like

I´m very pleased to be typing this from our BRAND NEW OFFICE, full of sunlight, books, and the smell of fresh paint (maybe that´s what´s making me delirious...). Yes, it´s true. We have finally moved into our new community center! Volunteers stayed after lunch on Friday to help lug over boxes of books, tables, chairs, and the stove and refrigerator from the old school to our new location at 28 Avenida. This week we´re finishing up some work on the classrooms and by next week all the kiddos will be over here for Manos de Colores as well. 

This week marks the last that we´ll be working at the construction site of the new community center! Well, we think so, at least. J The construction hombres came over for lunch today, whipped up by Chef Pati, and went away stuffed. This weekend we´re going to haul our books, papers, computadoras, desks, chairs, you name it, over to the new location. Update your address books! As of March 8 we´ll be at 28 Avenida 0-64 interior, Zona 1, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.

This week we said goodbye to our International Coordinator, Rachel Wakling, who has been with us since the beginning of November 2009. Rachel has done a fantastic job at El Nahual and her energy, sense of humor, and Project Management spreadsheets will be sorely missed. Thanks for all your hard work, all the good times, and the commitment to El Nahual, Rx!

Today is the last day of the evaluation! All the schools have done it, even the adults at the Saturday primary school. It’s been a week of colouring in, marking and inputing the results – Annah is sporting a nice callous on her right hand! Overall we will have evaluated over 300 students of differing ages. It will all be so worth it when we redo the evaluation after Unit 4 and find that everyone scores 100%!!

The Quetzaltenango public schools are back in session, and this week we´ve returned to our regularly scheduled programming along with a few new schools!

The roll-out of the new curriculum is on at El Nahual! We´ve divided the kids into three groups and have been raining knowledge upon them in the form of numbers, new vocabulary, and different grammar objectives for each week. A group of excellent volunteers has been designing lesson plans each week during our Tuesday Taller de Planificacion. Hopefully by the time Unit 4 rolls around (test time!) the kids will have learned something.