I followed the others onto the “micro” bus in the thin morning light, trying to look like I knew what I was doing.
The driver turned to me. “Achupallas, por favor,” I said in my best Spanish.
He squinted at me. “Cómo?”
I stammered the name of the neighborhood again. After an interminable pause, he said, “Ahhhh! Achupalla!” and gave me change for the fare.
As I headed down the aisle, the micro pulled back into traffic. I stumbled and slid into the next seat available.
Viña del Mar, Chile cityscape
A series of unlikely events had landed me here in Viña del Mar, a coastal city in Chile, for a couple of months after my first year in college. I’d studied the list of options for my work placement and signed up to work in recreation or microlending. When I opened my placement notice, I stared at it for a moment. It turned out I’d be teaching at an art school.
After a pause, I decided that sometimes in life, it’s best to just roll with things. I’d taken painting in high school, after all. I’d figure it out.
Now I watched out the window as the micro trundled up into the hills above Viña, kicking up dust as it swerved to pick up passengers who flagged it down. I wondered if there were official stops or if one could simply wave it down, like a real-world Knight Bus from Harry Potter.
I settled into the seat and closed my eyes, satisfied to have caught the right bus for my first day on the job.
“Achupalla!” the driver called. I gave a start and hurried off the micro.
I found myself on a dusty street. The art school stood out easily—a bright yellow, cubical structure hovering over a neighborhood of low-slung houses.
Before the school was a chain-link fence with a gate. I checked my watch. It was still fifteen minutes to nine. I breathed a sigh of satisfaction as I looked up at the school. Always good to arrive early on the first day. Tomàs had told me to be there at 9:00.
I’d not been at all confident about this yesterday.
“Where is the bus schedule posted?” I’d asked.
“No schedule,” Tomàs shrugged. “The micros come pretty often.”
When he’d left, I waited on the sidewalk. Sure enough, a “micro” soon rumbled up. When it had trundled away in a belch of exhaust, a second one materialized, seemingly instantly. Ten minutes later, a third micro pulled up to the curb.
The intervals seemed random, but frequent. I’d decided to double the worst case and leave twenty minutes to wait for one, just in case.
Now having successfully arrived, I felt a shiver of nerves as I stared up at the boxy building through the gate. I felt like Maria from the Sound of Music arriving for her first day with the Von Trapp family. There was even a gate in the movie.
Back in the real world, I noticed a padlock clasped around the gate. Well, I thought. I was a little early.
The minutes ticked by. 9:00 came and went.
A few minutes after the hour, a couple of women arrived. I approached them eagerly and introduced myself in my halting Spanish. “Ah,” one of them said. “You need to meet with Jaime.”
“Okay,” I said. “When does Jaime get here?”
“Around eleven.”
Interesting, I thought.
When at last Jaime arrived, I had an unexpected interview.
“What do you know about social issues in Chile?” came the first question, in rapid Spanish.
I blinked. My mind did a quick search on that one, and came up blank. Wasn’t this an art school? Could I have gotten that wrong? I’d anticipated questions about the color wheel perhaps, or perspective drawing.
In the end, I was sent up the street to the jardín infantil: the preschool. I’d be teaching art after all…to preschoolers, in Spanish!
As the youngest in my family, I hadn’t interacted with preschoolers since being that age myself. I wondered vaguely what kind of art they might be able to do.
Me with the preschool students
I soon fell into a semblance of a routine at the jardín infantil, though the children kept me constantly on point. I was “Tía Holly” to them. The day began with a couple of blissful minutes in which they set about tackling the project I’d assigned. Then it would begin to devolve. A general buzz of, “Tía! Tía!” would begin. A few of them might turn up with paint containers, asking me to refill the red container with the blue paint, or showing me how they’d dunked a hand in the paint but were able to clean it with…hand sanitizer.
Glue sticks were a particular fascination, and maybe a food. I’d look up to see a child licking a glue stick like a popsicle, only to put it down for the next child to pick up and lick, too.
Crayons were ever a source of contention. Certain kids hoarded them as soon as I’d set them on the table.
“You can’t use all the colors at once,” I tried to reason with one boy. “So, you can take just the crayon you’re using, and Abigaíl can work on her picture with one of the other crayons.”
“No!” came the reply.
A new Spanish vocabulary came to me slowly, as I struggled to explain that glue wasn’t food and that crayons could be shared—things I’d never tried to express in high school Spanish class.
One morning, it started to rain. Not a light drizzle, but a persistent downpour. The canal in town, dry until that day, became a fast-moving mud river.
When I arrived at the preschool, slightly disheveled and a little cold, I found only seven kids. Usually there were four classes of 10-12. In the afternoon, only one student came. Classes were canceled.
On the micro back down the hill to Viña that day, I smiled and reflected that, like schedules and time in general, rain was yet another totally different experience here than in my former life.
I’d never imagined I’d find myself teaching preschool here in Chile. I’d arrived from a world entrenched in schedules and deadlines and clearly outlined expectations. The sheer spontaneity of the experience threw me off balance. Here was a place where time was less important, where I couldn’t prepare ahead for everything, and where unexpected situations materialized every day.
Yet if I could come to terms with making mistakes, and not always being prepared, and stretching myself beyond the ordinary, this was an opportunity to really grow. Although I was assigned to teach the children art, they taught me so many things in return.
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