Red Leaf - Spain

In October 2009 I began a nine-week Autumn-camp teaching Spanish kids in Segovia, near Madrid. This was initially to save up some cash to make the move up to London. I was working for a company called Red Leaf: a Canadian group set up to strengthen the bond between the nations of Spain and Canada - not an obvious connection I know... So, the camp was organised by Red Leaf and the Spanish Ministry of Education and it was to have a 'nature and the environment' theme, as well as the Canadian thing.

There were eight staff at the school including Antonio, the Spanish director of studies, three English teachers (including myself) and four Canadian activity leaders. We were stuck together on a small farm in the middle of nowhere for two months. Imagine Big Brother  with fifty Spanish children thrown in...

The kids came from schools all over Spain, from Galicia down to Cadiz and quite a few from the Canary Islands as well. They were aged between nine and eleven and came in two groups at a time of twenty-five kids each. They had been awarded the stay with us at La Granja as a prize from the Ministry of Education - their teachers had entered a competition earlier in the year. Each school was accompanied by two teachers, some of whom were great company and very helpful (also bearing gifts - usually sweet, often alcoholic, and always very welcome) and others...less so.

The groups would arrive at 7pm on Sunday evenings, and leave early the following Saturday. Once they had been shown to their dormitories and made their beds we brought them into 'The Moose Room' (all the rooms were named for Canadian animals), which was the biggest room we had available to us and where all communal activities and meetings took place. We introduced ourselves to the new arrivals and then read out a list of ten golden rules such as 'only speak English' and 'don't be late' and so on. We'd each take it in turn to read out a rule, every one hoping not to be the one to read out the now infamous 'rule number seven' - 'No electronics or running'. It was almost impossible to deliver this rule to a room full of bewildered children, most of whom could not understand a word we were saying anyway (Antonio had to translate the rules), and keep a straight face. We'd all end up in stitches and the kids would become even more confused and frightened by the 'Canadians'. After dinner we took them over to the classrooms for level testing. The kids were divided into four classes: those who could speak English in one, those who couldn't in another, and all the ones between divided more or less arbitrarily into two more classes. In keeping with the Canadian theme, the classes were named respectively Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver.

The days (and weeks) were very much uniform and all activities and duties were carried out on a rota basis. We'd wake the kids up at 8am - breakfast at 8:30. Breakfast was exactly the same, every day, for nine long weeks - a piece of French bread and a selection of two different jams (strawberry or apricot) and cornflakes. I don't think I've had the same breakfast twice since!

After breakfast, the English teachers, assisted by one of the Canadians, would each take a group down to one of the classrooms for an hour of English lesson. This was invariably complete chaos and, for the first few weeks, the language barrier was quite an obstacle with some of the kids, who either couldn't, or simply wouldn't, speak English. After a few weeks, with the help of Antonio and the kitchen staff at the camp, I learned Spanish. I tried so hard only to speak English around the kids, but as soon as they worked out I could understand some Spanish it was pretty hopeless. Of course, I've forgotten most of my Spanish now but: ¡Tan facil como vino puede marcharse! ¿No?

After the morning English lesson, some of the kids went off to do Canadian activities, like volleyball and American football and, towards the end, rock painting (resources were pretty limited at our camp). The rest of the kids were taken out for the 'nature and environment' bit of the program - basically an inculcation of environmental awareness; no bad thing I suppose! After lunch we'd swap over, so every activity was done eighteen times over the two months. Monday was water day and we'd march them down along a river to an enormous hydro-electric dam. It was a beautiful walk through the mountains to get there, but there was so little rain that by the end of the camp there was almost no water left in the river at all. It was a pretty long trek too and some of the kids were just unbearably slow! Others, of course, were insanely fast and we never worked out how to control it. It got so the first students would be almost at the dam, while the slowest were trailing what seemed almost a mile behind. When we were all finally gathered at the dam, we'd take the opportunity to spit off it, or throw stones into the water below. It really was a very long way down! Then we'd have to drag them all back to the camp, where they were met with a sandwich, often consisting of a lump of bread and huge bar of horrible chocolate (like cooking chocolate) and nothing else! I always thought it was strange how the hopelessly slow kids who dragged their heels the whole damn way (pun intended) were   suddenly able to run around like crazy for an hour once they were safely on the football pitch.

At least 90% of the students were absolutely crazy about football, so we went out to play at almost every opportunity. I hadn't played in about twelve years (since I was their age!) and for the first couple of games I could run one short length of the pitch before running out of breath - shameful! By the end of the 9 weeks though, I was running about playing football for a few hours. I was even pretty good. Between that and the regular walking, I really got in shape. If you need to lose weight - go to a kids camp for a couple of months!

The football games were even more chaotic than the English classes. Especially on the first day or two of each camp. It was either twenty-five a side, or fifty kids against eight adults. Most of them had entirely no sense of tactics or strategy and so where ever the ball was, there would be six or ten kids within a square metre of it. It was completely futile but a lot fun.

Tuesday was animal day - the camp had a petting zoo with six or seven donkeys, a couple of cows (one of which had toothache), three enormous pigs, three tiny piglets, chickens, millions of sheep, a goose, a small family of pygmy pigs and a small family of cool little goats which ate everything from leaves to bus tickets (and one child's notebook - staples and all!). They had a particular appetite for acorns though, which were plentiful.

In the morning class we'd teach animal (especially anatomical) vocabulary. It was a good opportunity to make animal noises too. After class we'd wander round to see the donkeys. This was the one time you could guarantee Antonio would show up - he loved those burros more than the kids did! After we had been around and said hello to the other animals on the farm, drawn a picture of and labelled Margarita the cow, we'd go off-site to find the wild horses. They were magnificent creatures, if a little temperamental. Some weeks we'd be able to go right up to them and pet them, while other times they'd run a mile at the mere smell of us. I suppose they had some kind of animal sixth sense for the kind of kids that were very likely to torture animals for kicks, and which ones wouldn't. The horses were allowed to go about the woods and local area pretty well as they pleased with one, tiny restriction: Their front legs were shackled, which meant they couldn't actually run. This was done for road safety purposes, I suppose, but it does make you feel a little uncomfortable if you're from Devon used to Dartmoor ponies running freely. They were beautiful animals though, and I'm grateful to have shared their space for a little while.

So to Wednesday - excursion day. Every Wednesday we took the kids on the three-kilometre trek to the local village of La Granja, and the glass museum there. At first sight of it, La Granja is a desolate little town in the middle of nowhere, but once you get into it a little way, it becomes quite magical. There is a glorious royal palace, once occupied by some eccentric aristo, who built a vast garden, as big as or bigger than the town itself. The gardens are full of gargantuan water features, depicting scenes from the classics. They needed a little attention but were still pretty impressive and the gardens were really beautiful with long, straight, tree-lined paths, and mountain peaks on the horizon at the end of them. At the top of the gardens, at the base of yet another enormous hill, there is a lake surrounded by trees and flowers and glorious views of the mountains. It was a good spot to stop for lunch actually, but by the time we'd arrived there the kids were all stuffed full of the sweets they had collected from the little sweet shop in town. Getting fifty children through that shop took upwards of an hour and was a real mission in itself.

The main purpose of the trip, apart from the obvious, rich educational sustenance it provided, was to make the kids sufficiently tired that they would get to sleep quickly in the evening and allow us the freedom to get on with drinking cheap, nasty sangria and eating bag after bag of 'pipas' (flavoured sunflower seeds, still in their shells). There's a technique to eating them that I never quite could get the hang of. You pop them in with shells still on, remove said shell with tongue and teeth, and consume the seed before discarding the shell... The other campers were hooked on them! We'd often be accompanied in these late night soirées (or whatever you call a soirée in Spain) by the camp caretaker - Nico - who would scare the girls with ghost stories about the farm. Nico also did a little show for the kids at the end of the Wednesday night talent show. He was a pretty clever juggler and a devil with a diablo. The kids loved him - and so did the teachers on account of his access to the kitchen late at night - he'd bring over tortillas and cheap wine in the middle of the night and stay up to all hours teaching us all Spanish while Antonio wrote his blog and played (incessantly) some kind of fantasy football game online.

The talent show - Wednesday evenings were all about the talent show. After we arrived back from La Granja, we'd gather the children and explain the rules. After that it was up to them. Perhaps a little coaching and extra guidance wouldn't have gone amiss, but we were all too pooped after the hike into La Granja and back. There were often some very talented kids among the group, and there would always be one or two very weird kids, whose performances would be completely hilarious and invariably entertaining at the very least. There were also the occasional duds, of course. Maybe it sounds harsh - maybe I'm expecting too much from a bunch of ten-year-olds, but when you meet a kid so completely devoid of imagination that for the 'talent show' he elects to demonstrate his uncanny ability to keep a partially inflated football in the air with his hand for up to five seconds at a time (it's not as impressive as it sounds), it can make a man grumpy! Believe it or not (and I appreciate it's difficult to envisage this curious spectacle without having seen it first hand) this performance was repeated on several occasions, by completely different children, none of which could possibly have ever met each other. Dull as dish water doesn't cover it.

There were seemingly unending dance performances to such favourite numbers as 'wikki wikki' and inane, forgetaable pieces by some fellow calling himself 'Pitbull' or 'Bulldog' or some such thing. Some of the young ladies were horribly flexible though, as you can see from the picture - and this flexibility, combined with some rudimentary choreography skills produced some engaging work. Credit where credit's due! There were always some stand-up comedy acts, but these were always delivered in Spanish or some regional dialect or other. One performance that really did stand out for me, was by a pair of kids from La Gomera in the Canaries. The natives of the Island are very proud of, and have instigated a revival of, an old whistling language called 'Siblo Gomero' whereby people communicate very detailed and precise messages to one another, across long distances. The demonstration we witnessed involved a blind-folded girl at one end of the room and boy at the other. Their teacher would go around with a hat full of instruction slips for members of the audience to select at random. The messages would be given to the boy, who would then whistle the chosen instructions to his accomplice with a hooked finger in his mouth. The girl would then carry out the instructions precisely, standing up, turning around, kicking a ball and so on, before the original message was read out. It was really quite impressive. I'm afraid you'll have to go to La Gomera to experience it yourself - but that might not be such a bad thing. (Update - I've now been to the Canary Islands and I recommend visiting at Carnival time...)

At the end of the talent show some of us teachers would play a song for them with our various instruments. I had taken my guitar and mandolin with me, and one of the other teachers, Paul, had his guitar as well. We had some really good times jamming together actually, with Steve the Canadian American-football player often joining in. At the end of the talent show, after Nico had done his bit, we would play the Macarena and have a little dance, usually followed by 'La Bamba' and finally the theme tune to Los Lunis' (a kind of Spanish muppet show with a bedtime song 'Buenos noches, hasta manana, los lunis y los ninos, nos vamos a la cama!:the kids would all make a conga line which would be cleverly channeled in the direction of the dormitories...

Finally Saturday would come and the kids would disappear. We had the weekend to ourselves to visit Segovia or even Madrid, and then Sunday evening would come (very quickly) and it would all begin again.