My name is Denis Ahern, I’m Irish and currently taking a gap year. So I decided to come to South America to do volunteer work. An organization called Education International Learning, organized this trip for me and placed me in Santa Fe in Escuela San Francisco. For many years now I’ve worked with children in summer camps in Ireland, the Canary Islands and Australia. So now I’m spending five months here in Santa Fe learning the language, culture and helping out in Escuela San Francisco.
I arrived here with a very basic knowledge of the Spanish Language, so at the beginning teaching in the school was quite a challenge. But the other teachers in the school really made this challenge a lot easier through their warm and friendly approach to me. The children in the school have also been amazing at helping me feel at home and helping me feel not like a stranger. My accent for them must be a little strange and the way I speak Spanish must be totally bizarre for them, but to my amazement their curiosity never stops. That’s one of the reasons I find it great to work here with these kids because their always positive, always full of energy always interested, always fun and always happy.
The children in the First Class I’ve had the pleasure of taking for a class, in which we just play games and have lots of fun. The first class I had with them, the children looked at me with quite confused faces, not understanding a word I was saying! It must have taken at least ten minutes to explain every game. Yet they showed wonderful patience, in listening to me and they really enjoyed playing the new games. I’ve really had a great time taking that class as we always have lots of fun which is so important.

My experience of life in Escuela San Francisco has been quite a different type of challenge for me. Normally I can express myself in English when I work with children but here, I have to get my point across in a mixture of actions and broken Spanish but for the children here it makes no difference how I speak or where I’m from as long as I’m wiling to laugh and have fun!