Friday, July 13, 2012

Jovenes Forjadores del Bilinguismo



I slept in today, which normally in the states it means I wake up at midday but in Colombia it means 8am. Since I’ve been here I have not been able to sleep past 9 am and I think it mainly has to do with the wonderful heat creeping in through your windows, doors and walls. So needless to say, I was ready for the meeting way ahead of time.

We all met in the school library, which has AC by the way. Lovely. There were about 15 kids or so plus the English professor Steven. Like I mentioned before, this group of kids are all in a club named Jovenes Forjadores and they all learned and are still learning the English language. I didn’t know what to expect but wow, I was amazed at how well they spoke the language. The majority of them were fluent and they had so much fun speaking it. Usually kids get shy speaking to someone that knows English very well but they were just going at it! I felt proud of them and I didn’t even know them.

Basically the meeting was done to gather some thoughts and ideas for the next few weeks for some projects that they have in mind. One of them, and the one they are most excited about, is forming a rock band. Some of them play instruments but they were missing a drummer so they were discussing that and which songs to play, most of them were English songs. They also discussed budget and equipment because the school can only give them so much so they were thinking of talking to several universities to see if they can borrow equipment just for the concert.

Another project they want to run is going out to the community and teaching people some English. It would only be basic words that they would be using on a daily basis. Some were thinking of going to restaurants and maybe adjusting their menu from Spanish to English and at the same time teaching them how to say it. We were thinking it would be nice to have a camera to record the whole thing, which I totally volunteered for. After much talking we all went our separate ways back home with very exciting ideas to look forward to.    

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