yo tambien te (ll)amo

Well nothing too crazy has been going on. We won our first basketball game by 26 points (1-2), our team is getting better with every practice. I hung out in a social setting with the team and we had a lot of fun. I still have a hard time understanding them, especially if I get sidetracked and try to rejoin a conversation. It's kind of frustrating not to be able to speak/understand everything, but it takes a while to fully learn a language and I still have two more months so we'll see.

I started my community service at a highschool about a half hour away. The kids are great, a lot different than I was as a highschool freshman. My freshman year was full of cliques, "being cool", fitting in, expensive clothing, and doing anything to be accepted by my peers. In Chile, the solidarity is much more evident in the classroom. Kids came up in front of the class to sing songs in English, embarrass themselves, and then all laugh together. They are genuinely good kids and I look forward to every week. I have gone three times, all of the kids know my name, and they reach out to me inside and outside of the classroom. We have been learning a song "That's what friends are for" and also the significance of "can" and "can't". I came up with a side activity where I drew a crude map of the USA, had the students call out cities/states that they knew from the states, marked them on the map, and taught them nicknames for all the cities (brotherly love, big apple, windy city...surprisingly almost every city has a nickname when you think about it)

I have been busy with my daily activities, and on weekends I have been getting together with friends and practicing my Spanish. My camera broke just in time for me to leave for Peru tomorrow, so I will have to figure something out for that in the next few hours. The camera won't focus by itself anymore, and I have to manually assist it with my fingers, so the pictures that I listed are some random ones as I was practicing my finger zooming. One is the view from my bedroom window, one is the street I walk down to get home, and the other is the school where I do community service.

I promise to update with some actual interesting stuff in a week when I get back from Peru!

Chao!