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Guillaume about his internship:
Hi there,
I am Guillaume. I just want to share with you a wonderful volunteer experience I had at a small school in Chile in 2005. I was looking for quite some time for such a volunteer job dealing with kids in South America. Then, I finally found "ContactChile". There are so many organizations out there. It's pretty hard to know which one suits you the best. I have to admit that ContactChile is the only one that has pleased all my expectations (even exceeding them.).
"ContactChile" didn't promise me anything at the beginning. I gave them a good description about the kind of volunteer job I was looking for. They spent a few weeks to find out if it was possible to meet something similar to my expectations. And, they found me this little teaching job at this small school, next to Santiago, in Chile, for a period of 4 and a half months.
My main job, at this school, was to help out the local teacher in Mathematics for all grades (from 7 years old to 16 years). At the beginning, it was a little bit hard, specially, when you have almost 40 kids per classroom. Plus, they were making fun of my Spanish accent I picked up from living in Spain a while ago.
After a few weeks, I already felt very comfortable. I wanted to do more things with kids, so I've created a lot of "workshops" for the afternoons with a limited number of kids, such as: French courses, volley-ball, Science movies, French cooking, Notions of computer and Internet,.
The French workshop was very exciting to them. We set up a goal with them. The objective was to get into contact with kids from France (from my mother's school in France) through e-mails. For that, we had to get some basic notions about French for the first two months, and later communicate through emails. That's what we did. They loved it! At the end, they did pretty well, and were exchanging photos of each group.
I really had an amazing interaction with those kids from the school.
After that, I was even inspired by them, and I created my own website called www.tiomemo.com (because they always called me "tio Memo" (Uncle Memo) so, they could easily follow "Uncle Memo's" adventures around the world.
I really want to thank, first, "ContactChile" for everything they've done; otherwise I would not have had this great experience in Chile.
Then, I'd also like to thank all the people (Teachers, administrators, managers, directors) from the school. They've been great to me from the beginning of my stay. They were always supporting me. They allowed me to create many workshops, so I could be in interaction with those lovely kids.
That was my story about the school in Chile. From now, I will always have a piece of Chile and the school in my heart.
If you need some more information, I will be glad to help you out. Just check out my website and send me a message.
Take care,
Guillaume, alias "Tio Memo"
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