Orientation ... and all that jazz

Hello!

It has been a few days, but we want to make sure that we only post when it would be worth your time to read said posting. Camp doesn't start until Monday, so we've been getting oriented here, meeting the other volunteers, and doing some set-up work. All of that has been awesome, but we won't detail all of it. Instead, we'll just give a brief summary.

There are 5 other women down here volunteering for Mariposa. Joy is a Spanish teacher from Nashville TN who is in her mid 20's. Colleen is an ESL teacher from Boston who is the closest to our age... she graduated from college a year ago. Nelly and Aurora are both Latina. They live in California and both work with special needs teenagers and adults. Tehka is also a teacher in the Boston Public School System, and she's a little older than the rest of us, but she seems really sweet. She just came in today, so we don't know her too well yet.

There are also 5 staff members of Mariposa who are down here on a more permanent basis. To keep this entry to a somewhat reasonable length, I'll just list their names and positions in the Mariposa DR Foundation:

Tricia: Executive Director

Jessica: Associate Director (running the whole summer camp)

Julia: Office and Logistics Manager

Ria: Program Coordinator

Alexandra: Psychologist (she's actually Dominican)

Lee: Development

So as you can see, we have an amazing group of American women here -- an incredibly strong staff, all with different backgrounds and areas of expertise -- but certainly a common goal to work as closely with these girls as possible and build strong relationships with each one of them.

We learned more about the daily schedule today as well. To give you an idea, the campers (about 52 girls) have been divided into four groups -- sports, eco-education, dance/art, and theatre. Tehka, Joy, and two Dominican teachers (Paulina and Greicy) will be working with each group three times a week on the academic portion of the program. We are of course running the theatre group. Colleen (who does not speak Spanish), Julia, and Lee will be working with the sports group, all the younger girls. Ria and Alexandra will be doing the eco-education group with the girls aged maybe 12 - 14ish? And then Nelly and Aurora are running the dance program with the help of Coco, a local art teacher. The dance and theatre groups are both much smaller than the other two groups, and we also have the older girls.

As it turns out, in our individual group, Kelly and I will be responsible for teaching not only theatre, but also English, arts and crafts, reading time, and swimming lessons. Let me just harp on that for one second -- we are running swimming lessons, with girls who don't know how to swim. Sound alarming? Yes, we were RATHER alarmed.

Everything except the swimming lessons we hope to incorporate into our theatre curriculum, because of course there are many facets to the work we're doing. I'll list them here and try to show the connections.

- Theatre Games (to be conducted in English -- many involve repetition of certain phrases, which we believe will be great for the girls to pick up some English words and gain confidence in their speaking)

- Movement

- More traditional director/ actor scenarios

- An art project involving collages that the girls will make using cutouts from magazines, detailing what it means to each of them to be a "Mariposa" (a butterfly), a key theme of our show

- Readings each Friday that directly correspond to the themes of our show ... For instance, an article in Spanish about a particular issue that we are exploring.

- Creation (of course, an opportunity for the girls to break off and generate material... sometimes based off of specific parameters from us, other times more open-ended)

- Reflection in journals at the end of each day for each of the girls to record their experience... Perhaps write more on a topic, question, or idea that we worked on during the day. A good memory, we hope.

- Discussion (an opportunity to speak in English and Spanish, analyze the work, and keep the project focused on the needs of each girl.)

So those are our general aims for our theatre program, in no particular order, of course. We plan to schedule a meeting with Jessica, the program director, tomorrow, because we have some ideas that we want to go over with her. Some of these ideas include providing opportunities for the many girls who, for various reasons, could not participate in the typical camp day, to be creating some work with us at 2:00 pm once the camp ends. This camp is extremely popular with the girls here, and there is actually a waiting list. Some girls could also not participate due to pregnancy, caring for a child, excessive work during the day, and many other reasons. We want to work with as many girls as possible while we're here, so ideally we can work something out with that. We also want to arrange a performance for the community here. We'd love for as much of the Cabarete population as possible to see this show.

This is a long post, but hopefully it makes up for our lack of blogging over the past few days. We will be back tomorrow for you with our planning for the first week, and hopefully a profile of the girls we will be working with.

Best,

Anna and Kelly