Santiago half Marathon is for sure my biggest highlight after moving to Linares. Sharing the weekend with a huge music festival bought an amazing atmosphere to the city, on the down side, we literally had to pay the price for this by forking out $15,000 pesos, about 21 pounds for a night in a hostel. Again, proving my predeparture conceptions that Chile would be cheap to be toally wrong! The Marathon was a huge event with just under 20,000 people running, it is an amazing memory for me and was a great experience to be part of. I completed it in a time of 1:47:10, I didn't have any expectations or idea what time i would get, so for my first half marathon I'm pretty happy.

Back in Linares our time has been very interesting, I have started to develop a much better understanding and view of how the teachers and school really works. Not that I'm particulary impressed by it.

It was all going well with our host family which was great, considering how short notice it had been for them. Until half way into the second week, we were suddenly faced with an extrememly upset host who proceeded to let out her clearly bottled up feelings with us ending with her in tears. I had worried that this might be coming as after having us thrown upon them, they hadn't set any rules for us and been extrememly welcoming. Her main problem, be it quite a big one was that she couldn't affort to keep us. We started off eating lunch at their home everyday as this is what we had been told but she said she couldn't afford to keep feeding us. We wern't expecting to be eating there in the first place but had been told nothing else on the matter until this point, although this being an easy problem to solve as we immidately began to eat at the school everyday. Conveniently Samina (the Project Trust desk officer for Chile) was coming to visit the next day, having long and extremely needed discussions with both the school and our family. It turned out that Project Trust believed that Linares' council would be paying our family, when in fact they decided they didn't want to, but failed to tell Project Trust this. The result being that no body had been paying our hosts. Myself and Tim now feeling slightly bad as effectively we had been two free loaders in their house for two weeks. Samina sorted it out and agreed Project Trust would pay and paid our hosts that day, consequently they were just as nice as before . . .well minus the mother who is extremely fond of having a a good nag.

The school on the other hand, after having a big meeting when Samina visited had imidately increased our timetable which was very welcome news, along with saying we would have monthly meeting and discuss the lesson planning. There are three English teachers that we all help, some to different degrees than others. Manuel, who has good English and works with the older students, the unofficial head of department as they don't have one, although admits he has lost enthusiasm we are helping with this and he is still the best teacher. Rodrigo, probably has the best and the most . .vivid English, along with a personality to match. Finally Paqui who "teaches" the younger ones starting at the age of 10. We found out in our first few days that the younger students from four to ten don't have any English teachers. This was a great opportunity for us and we quickly suggested that we would love to start doing classes with them. We are now giving at least one lesson a week to all of these students on our own with 2 lessons a week for the youngest two years. However, our main problem being a lack or resources as they have never taught these ages before and through experience I can say that trying to keep a class of 4-5 years olds interested for 45 minutes with out any CD's, songs or without them falling asleep is not easy. Although i feel we are doing a pretty good job and have seen a great improvement in the 2 months we have been teaching them which is a great feeling. What is not so great is knowing that for most of the older students their English is at a seriously poor level and most don't have any realistic chance of learning it in the current enviroment.

In terms of discipline . . . well, there is NONE. There is no discipline system in place, if the students don't show up, nothing happens! If the students misbehave, nothing happens. One of the teachers told me that there is no point in trying to confront the students as they can't do anything, ignoring them seems to be the tactic, not that this really works. A whole row of class rooms are connected by polystyrene walls, all of these peppered in dents from the students punching fist shaped holes into the walls. Only to be shaddowed by the giant hole in every wall where you can see the students in the next classroom. The enviroment for the students to learn in is fairly appalling with some classes being around 35 pupils in size, the largest being just over 40, in class rooms that are not nearly big enough, in one we have about 1ft between the board and the front row of desks. On the plus side the students want to go to lesson more and learn just because we are there teaching which is actually interesting to them. Perhaps not for the older students, but for the younger ones we will make a huge difference to them being here. With future volunteers next year I'm pretty certain that by the time they reach ten years old and get to the other teachers their English will probably all be at a better standard that the best student in the school now. The best student being able to say a few phrases at best, the average student getting fairly stumped when i ask how old they are.

On the other side, i have now realised that the younger students at this school are more lucky than i was as they are getting to learn a language from four. This being a perfect age to learn when they are all young and soaking up information like a sponge. I seriously think that this should be compulsory in all primary schools.