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This summer I’ll be taking off from most of my duties as metro news editor to teach English at a small school in rural Tobati, Paraguay. It’s not exactly a typical way to spend a summer vaction - especially since it’s not summer down here in the Southern Hemisphere. Lucky for me, temperatures have been abnormally low and in a country that doesn’t usually have much need for central heating - much less afford it. Keeping warm has been a challenge.

The students at the school I teach at, the Instituto Cultural Reinaldo Macchi, are cute enough to make me forget about the cold for a couple hours a day. These students come from some of the poorest families in the area and were hand-selected to attend this school, which is the most prestigious with some of the nicest facilities in the country since it was built and run by Americans. Unlike most schools that have classes for only three or four hours a day, the school day at Macchi runs from 6:45 a.m. to about 4:30 p.m. Quite a full day. The Macchi school also strives to be above the pressures of the public academic system, especially teacher strikes that frequently shut down public schools for weeks at a time. The school also continues to import directors from the U.S. to keep it from falling into the corruption that Paraguay and much of South America is infamous for. Currently the school has 60 students, 15 in each grade from 7th to 10th.

The students’ previous English teacher had them all create e-mail accounts and write to me before I got down here. The messages I got were so adorable that it’s necessary to attach one of them on here so you can see how these 13 and 14 year olds explain themselves with the little English they have.

alexa
hello!!! how are you?I am Romina, I am from Tobati-Paraguay.I am from Institute in Tobati.I am in 8th.
I would like to meet you.I like english class, I like to learn much.I want to speek English and I want to learn vocabulary and verbs
I hope you do well.
I hope we understand eachother
I am very smart, and funny, talkative, tall,
Your future student:
ROMINA

I have no real teaching experience but hopefully I’ll be able to live up to these kids’ expectations. Either way it will be an interesting summer.