Saturday Senderos

Buenos dias familias,

As we are beginning our last full day in Galicia (a trip to the sacred city of Santiago de Compostela), we wanted to take a few minutes to talk about our day yesterday before the time escapes us. The title of this post is "Saturday Senderos." Sendero is the word for path/trail. It's a fitting title both literally and figuratively.

We began yesterday with a trip to Fragas do Eume, a nature preserve here in Galicia. We met wonderful guides Juan and Rocio, who hiked with us through the preserve and told us about the river system and the animals in the preserve. We talked in great detail about the local "lobos" or wolves in the area because the boys actually saw one when driving to their house a few nights ago. Because of the abundance of food in the area, these wolves are not dangerous to people, so don't worry parents! The hike in the forest was gorgeous and filled with eucalyptus trees. It was really amazing to see the forest so green even though it was a cold, January day. We will risk sounding cheesy, but this is how we feel about our program: in the dead of winter when it's cold and everyone is tired, a program like this brings life to education, and we are so grateful for this opportunity.

After the hike, we headed to a town called Betanzos to "tapear" (hop from bar to bar to try tapas) and to formally begin our individual projects: street interviews and street portraits of Spaniards. Students have chosen a question they would like to ask Spaniards from different generations and different regions, and they are going to compare/contrast their interviewees through photography and bilingual quotes and present them during Fine Arts Night in March (mark your calendars!). Think "Humans of New York" but in Spain. During the tapas experience, I (Sra. Rocamora) truly enjoyed watching Liora smile from ear to ear as she finally got to experience the "Spain bar experience" with May, Sydney, and Rachel--fifteen to twenty people crowded in a tiny bar, mostly standing, huddling together and eating great food. The patatas never tasted so good.

Confession: we weren't sure how the project part was going to go. It takes a lot of courage to walk up to someone and start a conversation in English, let alone Spanish. But these kids are rock stars, and on the first day of this project, the majority of the students got their first interviews and had a wonderful experience. Daniel Livnat had two very funny interviews about soccer: one from a man who said he lives for the sport (and as he is saying this there are people in the bar screaming at the soccer game on tv and shouting all kinds of expletives that I of course did not translate to the kids) and a man who said every Sunday he takes his bookbag, rain or shine, and leaves town during the games because he would rather walk on a dangerously narrow "sendero" with thorny bushes on one side and a steep cliff on the other side then have to suffer through Spaniards acting like barbarians during the game.

The one experience we wanted to most highlight in detail was Sta. Bowers and a group of students (Noa, Eli, Lindsey, Tiffany, Chloe, Paul, Rosa, Shira) who met a wonderful man in a bar named Jaime. Noa asked Jaime about his parents and what they have taught him, and the man started crying as he thought of his father. Jaime is one of twelve children, and he took over his father's shoe repair business, and it was obvious his relationship with his father was strong. Jaime insisted the group go next door to his shoe repair shop and see the business he is so proud to own.

This is why we came to Spain. This is why we are here. Language, however broken and incorrectly conjugated, opens the doors to connections with people that "cambia el chip"--change and open our minds. We are so immensely proud of these kids.

We finished the evening with a private tour of an abandoned monastery from the 1100s. This was mostly held in the dark so that students could empathize with monks and experience what it was like to live in the dark when the sun goes down. The tour was very eerie--our voices echoed, it was raining outside, and we were haunted by old architecture and Spanish history. As we alluded to in the previous post, Gallegos were persecuted along with the Jews for not being Catholic, and we learned about the extent of this persecution in ways that are too dark to describe on this blog. We were all reminded of the dark, shameful years of Spain's history, perhaps also making the connection that our country too has had its shameful years, and it's our job not to repeat them.

It was a very tiring day (my Fitbit read 18,000 steps by the time I went to bed), but it was the best kind of tired. We learned that we need more time in nature, we learned that students in Spanish 2 and  3 can lead their peers just as well as Spanish 4 and AP, and we learned of the importance to combat darkness with light.