Tudlo!

The past two weeks I have been at an intense English Language Camp. I was one of 6 Peace Corps facilitators teaching 4 classes a day of English activities. The program is called Tudlo Mindanao, which means Teach Mindanao. Mindanao is the southernmost area of the Philippines, and because of terrorist activity, volunteers aren't allowed there. So they bring us to Cebu, to meet with about 130 Mindanao teachers. We each had a counterpart teacher from Mindanao, too. My counterpart was Yvonne, and we had a great time. We taught sessions everyday on games, role plays, reading comprehension, and lots of speaking activities.

It was a good learning experience for me. It wasn't exactly tons of fun, mostly because we were working a lot harder than I have worked in a year. We also got bored because each session we had to teach 6 times.

In the middle of the two weeks, one of the participants went to the hospital, and a few hours later, passed away. This naturally caused numerous problems around the camp, including quite a bit of friction among the facilitators. It was a difficult week.

Some of the teachers were really fun. We had 'social time' after classes, and one lady was really into putting together this big jigsaw puzzle we had. The two of us worked on that for a few days, but she worked on it almost non-stop. Everytime I looked over, she was working on it.

We had a homeroom session everyday, and so Yvonne and I got to know some participants particularly well. Here's a picture of me with Aida and Albert, two of my homeroom people, who I really liked. In the background is our class flag and our 'Star Team' logo. Our room voted to be called Star Team.