On Thursday April 3, I went with the SI
education site leader
Anna Parker and my fellow Education site LIFTers down to the lower school in San Miguel. Now, it’s not called the lower school because it’s for the lower grades. Instead, it has to do with the fact that it is actually lower on the mountainside. To get anywhere in San Miguel, you have to either go up or down. We arrive at the school, entering through the community gymnasium to enter through the gate into a small courtyard surrounded by two levels of classrooms. We set up a tutoring station in a supply closet with a table, chairs, and some materials brought by Anna. The first hour, I’m helping a fourth-grade boy work on putting simple syllables together to form words for the pictures on the worksheet Anna gave us. To save paper, she uses clear dry-erase sleeves and markers to write over but not on the worksheets so she can use them for other students. Teaching a child how to read in Spanish isn’t that hard as long as they know the word for the picture. Spanish phonics are much more reliable than English. We spend time putting together simple two-letter syllables into sight words, rolling dice with word starters to write more known words, and reading a pre-K to Kindergarten level book together. This young man is several years behind in reading level for his grade. His teachers work to differentiate instruction and work for him, but extra support is needed.
Anna has been working with the teachers, parents, and community to be able to help guide thirteen students who with ADHD, social-emotional issues, or who are simply not where their grade level dictates them to be. Anna would love to help more students, but she recognizes that the quality of education she can provide requires that she keep her class sizes small. On Tuesday and Thursday, she has the older kids and has the littles on Wednesday and Friday. The elementary school day for San Miguel runs from 7:30 to 12:30, and her after-school program runs from 1:15 to 3:30. The Education ministry site is on the second floor of a yellow and white building above a tienda and a small hardware store. It’s decorated very much like classrooms in the US except all the posters are in Spanish. The posters are educational for both the students and us LIFTers who are still trying to comprehend the language. Before class we spend time playing Jenga and Sorry, building with blocks and magnets, and coloring.
Anna leads a small devotional for the children going through a kid’s curriculum for Tozer’s Attributes of God. Anna’s foremost desire is that the children can grow a deeper understanding of who God is both in Himself and in relation to them. Her practical applications continually focus on how the children pray to God, worshipping Him, giving thanks, and asking for help. The students’ prayer requests are continually focused on their families and their studies. Looking back on my life, I don’t think I ever prayed to pass a grade in school. I never thought I was going to fail, and how much did I care about my performance in school other than competition and comparison with my classmates anyway?
After the devotional, we do regular classroom activities like going over the calendar, story time,singing a kids worship song in Spanish full of hand motions, shouting, and laughing. For time spent on specific school content, Anna splits the class in two, half with her and one LIFTer and the other half with the other two LIFTers to play, color, etc.. I’ve been learning to use the little Spanish I have in order to most effectively teach things like borrowing in subtraction, multiplication, and calculating perimeter. Anna is very helpful giving a word or two that I need to get my point across. I forget the words often, but she is happy to remind me again. When I heard I was going to be in the education site, I expected to be a minimally helpful teacher’s aide, just running to grab what the teacher needs, helping in administrative tasks, or just being a slightly awkward presence in the classroom, just smiling and waving. My expectations were wonderfully subverted through Anna’s leadership and guidance. While my teaching may not have been as easy to comprehend as Anna’s, I got to see improvement in not only the kids I worked with, but also in Christian, Peter MP, and myself in our confidence as teachers and Spanish speakers.
A final thing I would like to note about the work of Anna in the education site is her intentionality in making education a community effort. When traveling anywhere in San Miguel, we have to stop for five or so minutes for Anna to chat with someone in town whether it be a kid she knows from the school, a parent of one of her students, or someone selling avocados or mangoes (which we have eaten plenty of both over this trip). One impactful occasion over this time was a home visit to Ruth, the mother of one of Anna’s students. We sat and listened as she and Anna talked for almost two hours about her life, her family, and her involvement in her daughter’s education. Very little of this time was actually spent talking about education, but that’s okay. This trip has been teaching me about how missions isn’t about productivity. I spent just as much time watching people talk as I was being “helpful.” Anna is focused on prioritizing her relationships with the members of the community to open more doors for the Gospel. Her ministry is so much more than helping kids pass their grade. Her ministry is to see a community transformed into the image of Christ, and education is how God has blessed her with the opportunity to be a worker in His plan for the people of San Miguel and the surrounding areas.
Back to that Thursday. After the first session of tutoring, it’s recess for the kids. Anna goes to talk with one of the teachers, leaving Christian, Peter and I to stand in the courtyard while around a hundred kids are running around, eating snacks, playing games, and waving at us. For a while, we just awkwardly wave back. We give the usual, “Hola,” “Buenos dias,” or “como estas.” We’re kind of awkward standing there, just a couple tall white guys who don’t know how to really connect with all these kids we barely know or even understand (these kids talk really fast).As we sheepishly walk around, we see two kids making a bridge with their arms for a circle of some other kids to run through and around. Christian and I look at each other with a look that says, “Hey, we can do that too,” and put our arms in the air. It starts with the excited shout of one little girl, and within the next 10 to 15 seconds, there’s a mass of thirty children running and laughing around us. Next thing you know, the bridge is me and a little boy with Christian running with the group. Peter starts playing with some boys who got a marble, swatting it to the concrete to bounce it around. He teaches them how to launch a plastic bottle cap out of their hand across the courtyard. Christian and I start playing futbol with a ball of crumpled paper that has been tied into a plastic lunch bag, and then we and 10 kids start throwing it up to some kids on the second level balcony who throw it back down. Those moments were filled with so much joy. We may not have been sharing the Gospel with our words. We may never interact with these kids again. We probably didn’t change their lives that day. But we had an opportunity to show and share love in that moment. And afterwards, we learned that Anna was able to have a very impactful and encouraging conversation with the teacher she left us to go see.
Anna’s work is powerful and is made possible through the Holy Spirit, the prayers of the people who care for her and her work, and the support of those who go to work with her and those who give to make her work possible. Please pray for her and the other SI sites you’ve been reading about. Pray for the community of San Miguel, that they will as a community be transformed through the power of Jesus Christ. Please pray for the kids, that they will be filled with love for learning and not despair when they’re told they can’t succeed. Pray for the parents, that they will value the education of their children and provide the support they need in concert with the teachers. Please pray that God continues to move and work in the lives of every person Anna interacts with. And she interacts with everyone, because everyone says “Hola!” in San Miguel.
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