English Clubs and Sightseeing

Continuing my review of last week, we'll start with Thursday.  On the way to Unversidad Alberto Hurtado (UAH), we stopped at a bakery with an espresso machine as I continued my quest for a drinkable cup of coffee.  The one I got wasn't great, but better than the instant coffee at our hostel.  There was an English Club at UAH, so we spent our morning there handing out flyers to advertise in the cafeteria.

English club went really well.  It seemed like there wouldn't be many people there, because only one person was on time, but many people came late.  I helped with the basic lesson, where people were matching pictures of foods with the English word and working on their pronunciation.  Especially fun words were juice and soup, which they pronounced as "hus" and "soap".

Afterward, we had a salsa class, where our friend Pato led.  We learned the basic step and two turns.  It was a lot of fun, but I wish we had been able to learn more.

That night, several of us went to our first nice restaurant of the trip.  It's a resto bar because it's a restaurant and a bar.  It had a Lord of the Rings theme that was a little weird, with giant paintings of elves and dwarves on the walls.  The food was really good.  We had fried empanadas with various fillings and sandwiches.

Friday, we all went to Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH), but there weren't as many students there as there usually are because of a combination of protests by the students and strikes by the university staff, both of which could go on for several weeks or a month.  The protests are about the government talking about taking away student loans, so the students would have to get loans from the bank with much higher interest rates, while the strikes are going on because the staff feel they don't get paid enough.  The staff strike was called to be nationwide, so we were worried that we wouldn't be able to keep working with the university students, but it seems to be okay so far.  The schools I work at are all private schools, which don't protest as much as the state schools.  Even with the lower number of students on campus, we were still able to talk to several girls and share the gospel with them.  Almost everyone I've talked to says they're Catholic, so they know all the answers I'm listening for when I ask about the gospel, so I don't really know what to do after that, but it's been going really well nonetheless.

At USACH, we also helped with a booth for Vida Estudiantil at a conference on campus for youth ministers from around the continent.  Apparently, in Chile, youth groups are for students from about 12 to marriage.  We mostly promoted the English Clubs and talked to the Chileans we know about the protests and what was going on.  I saw Sergio, one of the students we work with at Universidad Andrés Bello.

The current plan for the blog is to get caught up by this weekend, so there will be a couple of posts coming in the next few days that might be a little long, but I'll try to keep them from being overly dull.