Buenas! So, after weeks of ''intense training and rigorous preparation'' I finally have my class schedule and my learning materials. The only catch: I only JUST found out who I'll actually be teaching and I'm not quite yet sure as to where I'll be teaching them. Did I mention that it's 11 a.m. Monday morning? Did I ALSO mention that I'm supposed to star t every morning at 8 a.m. sharp??? All of this is just a microcosm of how things work here. Schedules are taken about as seriously as deadlines, meaning they aren't taken very seriously at all. The 'due' date is the 'do' date and you more or less just roll with it. I allegedly have about 65 students between two classes. I figure I'll be teaching at some point this week...I think. To make you feel better though, allow me to explain what actually happens here at the SENA center.
SENA stands for the Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje (National Service Learning) and it is essentially an apprenticeship academy that has been doing it's thing here for the better part of the last 60 years. The idea is to establish a self-sustaining economy in which each sector of the Economy has an academy which will groom aprendices for professional work in various fields. In the Department of Santander, there are four sedes (campuses), all located in or around Bucaramanga. They focus on Tourism, Fashion, Agroproduction and Maintenance Systems, respectively and each center is pretty impressive to say the least. Each sede has an average of 1,000 students, who matriculate between morning, afternoon and evening.
I 'work' at the center for Mantenimiento Integral (system maintenance) where students learn to build, operate and maintain everything from Biomedical equipment to Formula style race cars. I've seen millions of dollars worth of equipment in the last few weeks and the work ethic that some of the aprendices (students) have is impressive. A group of them have taken it upon themselves to create their own journalism project in which they do interviews and write their own articles-in English.
Working here is definitely going to be a blast...ya know, once it starts.
