We're bringing joy to students!

Sort of. Carly and I have started volunteering at an English-language school. This school has been around for decades and is in the middle of downtown here in Valpo. So far we're having a great time! We've given a couple PowerPoint presentations on Seattle with pictures and amusing anecdotes. We also went in Wednesday to talk with the senior citizen group. Their English level is still very low, so it was a very basic conversation. But they were all pretty nice old ladies.

Carly and I were supposed to go in last Saturday to help out with the younger students. Since kids go to school until late afternoon on weekdays, they can't squeeze in additional English classes except on Saturdays. There was like 120 students from 5 years old all the way up to high school seniors.

However, Carly woke up at like 4 a.m. on Saturday and had a HUGE lip. It was enormous! Just the top lip though. I joked that she made Angelina Jolie look like she had bird lips. Carly looked a lot like the girl in this article. It's kind of gross! It went away in less than 36 hours. We're guessing it was some allergy to this weird bread stuff with garlic and who knows what else we ate on Friday night.

So, Carly missed the volunteer day on Saturday! I had lots of fun though. First, I spent nearly two hours helping 13 and 14 year old students put together a TV news broadcast in English about global climate change since Earth Day was this week. The teacher filmed it to make a real video. There were two news anchors (shown in picture), a weather girl, several student journalists who interviewed other English teachers, and I played an expert scientist who was interviewed on camera. It was fun.

We were also going to have a little chat session with students about recycling, but I was on my own. It turned out to be an entire auditorium of people. Parents of students came. All the teachers were there. It was crazy! So, for 20 minutes I was talking to this huge crowd of people and educating them about the three R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. I think I did pretty well. Everyone seemed to enjoy it too, but then again many probably didn't understand everything I said. Here's a photo from the speech.
This week, Carly and I ate at Pizza Hut TWICE because it was so delicious! Most pizza crust here is thin and hand-tossed. We wanted some pan pizza and it turned out to be better than at home. We also got salad on Tuesday; a good, basic salad is something we haven't experienced in Chile yet, so it was nice to have.

We also just bought our plane tickets to visit the Atacama Desert. It's way up in the north of Chile. We had originally planned on taking a bus, but the ride is well over 20 hours each way from Santiago. The 8-hour ride to Argentina was so unenjoyable that we paid a bit extra and got plane tickets. The flight is about 2 hours each way.

The Atacama Desert is the driest place on Earth! Check it out. We're going from June 9 to June 14! Carly's going crazy to see alpacas and/or vicuñas and/or guanacos.