My First Week at Tuloy

My first week at Tuloy was great! During our orientation on the first day, we met some of the volunteers and staff. We got a tour of the facility, which includes classrooms, a beautiful chapel where Catholic mass is held every morning, a gym with basketball courts and a stage, multiple gardens, an aquaponics system to generate organic lettuce and fish for food, a football field, and dormitories where the children sleep. They have plans to build a performing arts building on campus in the future where the children's dance, choir, and other performances can be held…how cool is that?!

We were also able to learn the details of Tuloy's education system. When students first enter Tuloy's school, they take a test that places them into one of five levels where they learn English, values, basic math and science skills, and some computer skills. After the students are ready, they begin Vocational Technical (Voc-Tech) training in either baking, culinary arts, computer science, air conditioning repair, automotive repair, or dressmaking. When students are ready to get hands-on experience in their particular field, they become OJT ("on the job training") students who interview for unpaid internships with different companies in the area. These OJT programs can sometimes become job opportunities for them later on. Regardless, they are great opportunities for them to gain experience.

I began working with Dylan, another intern from Duke University, on our first couple projects. Dylan and I worked on an interview form that OJT students and graduates could fill out. We wanted to see how Tuloy helped prepare them for their OJT experience, as well as how Tuloy could better prepare current Voc-Tech students. We developed questions that would give us details about the level of technical difficulty in their job-interviews, actual work, home life, and relationships with their coworkers. We then facilitated these interviews on Sunday, June 1 so that they could be processed and analyzed during our second week at Tuloy. From these interviews, we hope to develop workshops and programs that can better prepare current students for their future careers.

For our second project, we developed a guideline for future volunteers on constructing and implementing a sports or arts clinic. Dylan will be leading a five-week basketball clinic while I will be leading a five-week dance clinic beginning June 9. We developed a way to plan a daily and weekly schedule for a clinic and provided our own frameworks for dance and basketball as examples. This guideline will help future volunteers teach not only basic fundamentals in a particular sport/art form, but also values such as respect, teamwork, and perseverance that the children can apply to all areas of their life.

For the last two hours of each day, we played with the children during their free time. This first week was a chance for me to introduce myself to a lot of the kids. I am the worst with memorizing names, so I had the kids quiz me by running up to me each day and saying "What's my name???" Although I got many of them wrong the first few times, this definitely helped me. We all got a lot of laughs out of it, too! I was also able to play soccer, basketball, volleyball, and badminton with a lot of the kids. This was so much fun because even with the language barrier (although many of them can speak English fairly well), we could connect, laugh, and just have fun playing these sports.

What I found the most interesting about this first week was the level of respect these children give me. They are so well-behaved. They always address me as "Ate Kylie" which literally translates to "Big Sister Kylie," but is more like "Miss Kylie." They often grab my hand and place it on their forehead when they greet me, which is also a major sign of respect. Although I am so proud of them for being so polite, I worry that this level respect translates into something more. Unfortunately, Americans are seen as more wealthy, more fortunate, and just "better" overall in the eyes of most of these kids. Many of their first questions were, "Have you been to Hollywood?" and "Do you know any celebrities?" They also think that having light skin and blue/green eyes is miraculous. I know that in order to connect with them, I need to erase that stereotype from their minds and remind them that we are all children of God, defined by His love and grace…not by where we are from, the material things we own, the shade of our skin, or the color of our eyes.