Adventures in South America

Eager Students of English

Friday was a fun day of helping various Argentines improve their english skills. During the afternoon, as a favor to Desiree (my friend who is the head of Brainwave) I conducted a few more english classes at a company called Mercado Libre. Mercado Libre is the Latin American subsidiary of Ebay and provides the exact same online auctioning services to customers in Central and South America. Teaching these classes was more challenging than the other classes earlier this week because Desiree had prior plans and I was on my OWN!! But I enjoyed meeting Martin, Ramiro, Cecilia, Andrea and Diego during the course of the two hours I was there. The class with Cecilia, Andrea and Diego was much more challenging as their english level is Pre Intermediate and we had to go slower to make sure that they understood all of the words.

That evening we attended another English class session. Our friend Patricia, who we know through the Buenos Aires English language group that meets every Friday, has her own English Language school in a suburb of the Capital of Buenos Aires. She invited Seth and I out to her home (where the school is) to meet with her students so they could practice their english. Patricia had informed us about how excited the students were to meet us and how they had been preparing questions in varying levels of english. When we arrived at her place we were surprised to see a poster up on the wall that said "Welcome Seth and Kathy". As the students started to file in we were impressed by how sweet they were and how excited they seemed to have us there. The majority of the students were between the ages of 9-16, with one or two adults there - about 14 people in all. Some of the younger kids were soo cute. One boy by the name of Marcelo who was 9 years old asked if we have email addresses and if we are on chat/IM. Patricia informed me that he has apparently met some "girlfriends" over IM :-). There was also Micaela, 9, who spoke very little english but was smiling the whole time and really trying to understand. The kids asked us questions such as "Where do you live?" "What is your favorite color?" "What are some of the customs where you live?" "What do people like to eat in America?" and our favorite, boldest question came from Pablo,9, who asked us if we have Bidets in the US (they are very common here). Some of the students gave us special cards they had made and everyone had at least one question. We really had a great time. The only thing I regret is that I forgot to bring my camera... I was so disappointed. Oh well, Patricia took some pictures with her traditional (non-digital) camera. Hopefully when she develops them I will be able to scan them and upload them to the site.

posted by Kathy T @ 10:07 AM