Volunteer Site Visit in Santa Marta

Last week I visited Marcy, one of the Peace Corps response volunteers who has been living and working in Santa Marta for 10 months. Santa Marta is only 1.5 hours from Barranquilla and is gorgeous: right on the coast so that the beach is never more than a 15 minute walk away and next to the Sierra Nevada mountain range. It’s a tourist destination, and so I even saw some sunburned gringos along with many Colombians on vacation. It was great to see another city in Colombia and to better understand what I’m up against these next 2 years. I find out my site placement (or where I will live and work for the next 2 years) on Thanksgiving but will continue training in Barranquilla until mid-January.

Marcy works in the secondary school at Leseo del Norte. Much unlike the US, everyone is given a number, or strata, indicating their socioeconomic status. Stratum primarily depends on neighborhood and the quality of houses, safety and cleanliness. Generally, 0-2 are lower class, 3-4 middle class, and 5-6 upper class. It all seems very exposed to me. People in 5 and 6 neighborhoods pay considerably in taxes whereas those in 0, 1 and 2 areas pay none or very little. Schools are scattered throughout; however, anyone can go to any public school (although there are restrictions due to transportation and materials costs). Therefore, although Marcy’s school is in her strata 3 neighborhood, most of the students come from 0-2 areas.

Public school teachers and students go to school either from 6:30am-noon or from 1-5:30pm. At Leseo del Norte the bathrooms have been broken and unusable for 3 months, so consequently both morning and afternoon school days have been shortened by an hour… an innovative solution. Like many Colombian schools, if students are late they are not allowed into the fenced-off campus, meaning that there were a couple stranded outside waiting-out the day by selling things or playing soccer. This is all very curious because once inside punctuality is nonexistent. There were about 70% of students inside classrooms and 30% outside/on-time. The noise level was booming; comparable to my school in Turkey, which I thought was next to impossible to achieve. The students’ English ability was very low but all were super excited to have us and eagerly said “hello” in the halls. A lot to work with for sure. Like all Colombians I’ve met, the teachers were extremely welcoming and happy to have a Peace Corps volunteer at their school. Unlike primary school, secondary English teachers are required to have passed a specific English level in university, so most spoke the language well. I observed a wide spectrum of teaching proficiency, so again, a lot to work with. Supposedly once at site, my job will only consist of 16 hours per week co-teaching with Colombian English teachers in their classrooms. The majority of my job will be educating these teachers on effective TESL methods, specifically experience-based leaning (versus lecture based). I will also have secondary projects in the community, but I won’t decide on those until I get there.