Volunteering In Spain
by Barbara Clark

Two weeks in a lovely seaside town in southern Spain, interacting with the townspeople and inaugurating friendships ­ what a dream vacation! Global Volunteers emphasized that this was to be a service project. Like the Peace Corps, they go into communities only when requested and to perform specifically designated services. In this instance, we were there to encourage the citizens to improve their speaking and understanding of English, and especially to demonstrate how this language is spoken by North Americans. We would not be teaching per se ­ that was the function of designated teachers in the schools. We supplemented their prescribed lessons. Teaching skills, and literacy in Spanish, were not necessary.

Rota was the name of the town. It was located on the Atlantic coast, near the city of Cadiz, and served by the airport of Jerez de la Frontera. Jerez is the Spanish word for sherry, and this town prided itself on being the sherry capital of the world. Naturally being in such close proximity, we felt it incumbent on us to become a bit more knowledgeable about sherry. Our preconception had been that sherry was a mild, sweet wine but we were quickly disabused of this notion. The best sherries, we learned, were not the sweet ones, but the dry, sec brands. While we can’t claim to be experts, we did expand our horizons and had several sampling sessions of this local product.

Rota is a town of about 25,000 inhabitants, and though there were modern buses, we never learned to use them, but walked wherever we went in town. Twice I did take taxis, and two of our team struck up an arrangement with one of their teachers to meet at a certain corner and ride with her to school.

We were a team, it was emphasized at our regular meetings. There were eight of us, from different locations in the U.S., and under the guidance of the Global Volunteers team leader, we listed the qualities that would be helpful in our endeavors. Flexibility was chief among these qualities, and this was brought home to us the first night in our headquarters. The lovely seaside cottage we were to call home for two weeks was obviously a summer cottage, for it had no heat, and even in southern Spain, it was COLD in the morning and evening. We had a portable butane heater, which took the chill off the immediate surroundings, but was hardly adequate to warm the upstairs and especially the bathroom. The plumbing was erratic and unpredictable, and we kept reminding ourselves that Global Volunteers had not promised us luxurious quarters, and that we must be flexible in adjusting to varying situations.

We were assigned to two elementary schools and one high school. At our first sessions, we introduced ourselves and gave a bit of personal background. Sometimes the teacher would write on the blackboard certain key words we had used and ask the students to repeat the words. It was difficult for us to be tactful about the pronunciations some of the teachers used, e.g. pronouncing the word “book” as if it rhymed with “duke.” Often the class was divided into smaller groups so we could interact more personally with the students.

In one such group, the students were assigned the task of interviewing us so they could introduce us to the whole group at the end. Among the questions my students asked me was how I like the Spanish food. To this I replied enthusiastically that I certainly enjoyed it, especially since it was invariably accompanied by wine. At their introduction to the whole class, my students commented, “She likes wine!” which caused considerable merriment. I asked the students if they enjoyed wine (Americans have the idea that youngsters in France, Spain and Italy grow up drinking wine as a matter of course). They replied indignantly that they didn’t drink wine, they drank Coke.

Most of the time, we ate at a nearby restaurant, which had a long table reserved for us, on which, aside from pitchers of water, there were always bottles of red wine. This tickled us, for in the material that Global Volunteers sent us in preparation, it was emphasized again and again that we were not to have alcoholic beverages and that any drinking we did, was to be strictly outside headquarters. Well of course, the restaurant was not our headquarters, strictly speaking.

We never quite became accustomed to the rhythm of life in Spain. The main meal of the day, dinner, at 3:00 was followed by siesta. At first we felt the time after school ended (2:30) and before our evening tutees arrived (5:00) would be our chance for personal shopping and exploration, but it became quickly apparent that during this period most of the businesses were closed. The evening meal, at 9:00, didn’t leave much time to be bright and chipper for school the next morning.

The hour between 5:00 and 6:00 was dedicating to tutoring adults in the community who came to our cottage for conversation. In our case, these were all women in their early twenties who were eager to improve their English for better job opportunities. One time when there were more tutees than tutors, I snagged several of these women and introduced them to a word card game I had made and found successful in my previous stint in Indonesia. This was a variation on the game, Steal the Pack, using rhyming English words instead of the traditional card suits. Once these young women caught on, our game became uproarious with much good-natured competition and bantering.

We had the second weekend free. Two of our group spent the weekend in Seville. Two spent Saturday in Cadiz, and two others took a trip to Gibraltar. On Sunday, six of us rented a van and driver and had a tour through the mountains and several picturesque towns, including Ronda, which claimed to be the original site of Spanish bullfighting. Since it was not bullfighting season, we were able to walk in the bull ring and visit the museum, where we saw costumes and accoutrements of bullfighters, who obviously enjoyed a status similar to professional sports figures in the U.S.

On this trip, we had the opportunity to order a meal in a restaurant and pay for it. We also visited a bar and found ourselves the center of enthusiasts eager to try out their limited English on us. (We never did figure out how they immediately knew we were Americans; we didn’t feel visibly different from those around us.)

The bar proved the viability of a point our team leader had explained to us about the volubility of the Spanish. She warned us that the noise level in schools was much louder than we were accustomed to at home. The Spaniards, she explained, were accustomed to speaking loudly and volubly, and children naturally picked up this habit. We found in the bar, that patrons didn’t so much converse, as yell at each other. In school, a moment of silence was rare indeed. Students were constantly talking to each other, exchanging (or grabbing) each other’s supplies. Many of the students had wheeled backpacks. We told ourselves that it was a difference in cultures, and that we were there to expand out horizons, not to judge.

It is difficult to assess what, if any, impact we made on this two-week sojourn. We did establish rapport with the teachers and with some of the students. We enjoyed camaraderie with the proprietor and waiters in “our” restaurant. It was emphasized that we were only one of a long continuum of teams, and that the full impact of our presence was hard to attribute to specific teams. Probably the best indication was the enthusiasm generated whenever we mentioned that we were Global Volunteers. It is undeniable that we expanded our horizons and got a taste of another culture. We encountered friendliness and eagerness to be helpful from nearly everyone whose paths we crossed.

It was an experience to be remembered and, all in all, we felt we contributed to better understanding, the goal of international goodwill that is so important to all inhabitants of this fragile globe.

Global Volunteers, a private nonprofit organization based in St. Paul, Minnesota, sends teams of volunteers to Rota and communities in 18 other countries and 20 within the U.S. year round. Global Volunteers work at the invitation and under the direction of a host organization. Projects are locally determined and vary from providing English conversation to assisting with health care, basic construction and maintenance to sharing computer skills. Interested individuals can call Global Volunteers at 800-487-1074 for a free catalog, or visit the web site at www.globalvolunteers.org.

You can email Sarah Barker from Global Volunteers at sbarker@globalvolunteers.org