Pécs and doughnut peaches

Daniel and I arrived back from teaching our second Summer camp last night. Boy were we glad to get home. The camp took place in a gorgeous town called Pécs in southern Hungary, about 40 minutes from the border with Croatia. Pécs is full of small, windy streets, old buildings and its centre is surrounded by the remains of a medieval stone wall. Our accommodation was located in the hilly part of town - some roads were so steep that I was convinced on several occasions that our car wasn't up to the challenge and that we were about to start rolling backwards down the mountain. Fortunately, I was wrong :)

Monday morning started out well enough. We'd found the building the day before, so we arrived early and set ourselves up. I was a bit put off by the building's exterior - a drab puke green box surrounded by overgrown grass and weeds - but the inside was really quite impressive. It was purpose-built as a children's centre so there were lots of classrooms, an awesome theatre and a large, open plan foyer where kids could watch Scooby Doo cartoons before classes started. It seemed that many other Summer camps were also being offered in the building, so the place was crawling with kids. Excellent.

Soon enough all ten of our students had arrived. There were six girls aged between 7 and 14 years of age and four 11 year old boys. In hindsight, this mixture of kids should have raised some red flags, but at the time we were just really eager to get started so we didn't dwell on things too much. The first day passed by reasonably quickly - we played lots of simple games and revised basic vocabulary. Throughout the day, Daniel and I tried to chat with each of the kids to get a feel for their language level. It soon became obvious that some of the students were very, very, very good and were already speaking in sentences and able to express their opinions and thoughts quite clearly, while others knew a lot of vocab, but nothing really beyond that. We tried to accommodate the different language levels as best as we could, but it was difficult. Clearly, we would need to rethink our strategy for Day 2.

Unfortunately, on Monday night we received a phonecall from our employer to tell us that three of our students (two siblings and their cousin) had dropped out of the camp because they felt that the program was too easy. It was a real shame as Daniel and I were in the midst of discussing how to better assist those very students when we got the bad news. Oh well.

Tuesday went a little better. We separated our remaining students into two groups and took them through a series of games and activities that were more at their level. I think it worked pretty well. Since there were only seven kids left, we all came together to play outside games and sports. We were lucky enough to have another teacher named Jodi with us, and she was awesome at organising the outside activities, plus she showed the kids some cool origami during craft time. What a lifesaver! 

The only real issue we encountered on Tuesday was during the drama session. The two older girls who had dropped out of the camp had been the major characters and the main developers of the plot for the end-of-week drama performance. Their sudden departure left some pretty big holes in the storyline and it took the entire drama session on Tuesday to get things back on track. Of course, this meant that we now had one less day to actually rehearse the play before Friday's show. Aaargh!

Anyway, in spite of things going relatively well on Tuesday - no more dropouts, hooray! - we really weren't feeling the vibe in Pécs. These seven kids were much harder work than the eight kids I'd taught the week before and from Wednesday there would be no more Jodi to assist us :( In addition, we were running low on classroom supplies and we were both feeling pretty darn exhausted overall. Not a good state to be in with seven kids looking to us to keep them entertained and happy for another three days.

Fortunately, Wednesday passed without any major incidents. One of the kids seemed pretty subdued, but when I asked her if everything was okay, she assured me that she was fine. I assumed that she was just a little lonely because Jodi was gone, and because she was now the oldest girl by several years. I tried to spend a bit more time with her and came away really impressed by her English language skills. She seemed a little happier by the end of the day, but I still had a terrible feeling that we wouldn't be seeing her again....

Sure enough, on Thursday morning we received a call saying that the girl had dropped out of the camp. Apparently some of the boys in the class had been bullying her and she had been up half the night vomiting at the thought of coming back for another day (although her mother went out of her way to assure us that she had enjoyed the camp otherwise). I was utterly devastated and really, really angry with myself for failing to notice something that was obviously occurring right under my nose. Generally I'm a big advocate of English teachers who don't speak the local language because it forces them and their students to speak English to communicate, but in some cases (such as this one) it was a real disadvantage not to speak Hungarian because we couldn't understand the bullying that was going on.

By now we were down to only six students (three 11 year old boys, an 8 year old girl and two 7 seven year old girls). I was utterly paranoid that the boys would choose another victim to bully, so every time they said something in Hungarian to the younger girls, I would quickly tell them to be quiet and obsessively ask the girls if everything was okay. It wasn't a particularly fun environment for anyone and the last two days of the camp seemed to crawl by in super sloooooooooooooooooow motion.

Finally, it was Friday afternoon and all the parents had arrived to see their kids perform in the end-of-week play. It was a bit of a disaster. The plot didn't make a lot of sense, some of the kids refused to dress up, and it was all over in about 5 seconds. Still, I think they did a really good job - everyone remembered their lines and seemed to be having fun. In summary, the play was about an emo who was allergic to his teacher's cat. To fix this problem, the emo bought a dog (for $2000) from a normal boy in the hope that it would kill the cat, but the dog didn't want to commit such an act so the cat encouraged it to run away. The emo, now dogless and out of pocket $2000, then hired an assassin to steal back his money. At this point, no one had what they wanted and everything was all confused so the assassin came up with the only possible solution - dancing! The end.

The play was scheduled to start at 3:45pm. By 3:47pm it was all over and we were waving goodbye to the students and their confused parents (many of whom seemed to still be waiting for the real play to begin). By 4:03pm we had cleaned out the classroom and were climbing into our car, very glad to be seeing the puke green building for the last time. It was such a tough week and I'm so, so glad that it's over and that we're now officially on holiday until September.

Oh, in other completely unrelated news here is a picture of some doughnut peaches that I bought at the supermarket today.

- Amanda