Mark, a past pupil (and employee!) from the Salesian School in Battersea is currently volunteering in Ciudad de los niños (city of children) in El Salvador. Read all about it below...

Hola y buenos dias, hello everyone. Hope to find you all well.

This is just a note to keep you up-dated with how it is going in Santa Ana, El Salvador at the end of my third week.

It has been really awesome start to my volunteer experience with a lot of cultural learning and I have made a good start to life here. I am learning Spanish of the Americas. It is a bit different to Spanish Castellano so I am trying my best to understand. The muchachos (kids) are testing my comprehension skills all the time.

I´ve got a big room in the school grounds where there are a few rooms at the foot of a hill. It has a spare bed so if anyone wants to stay over when they visit they can.

I am living as part of the Salesian community. I am the only volunteer here now as the last couple of volunteers from Spain left recently. The school employs lots of staff like cooks, laundry service, security etc. They help the place to run smoothly, and look after the children and university students who live here during school term plus of course the Priests, Brothers and volunteers who all need feeding but really everyone pulls together to make it work. So I get 3 cooked meals a day including weekends. A normal meal consists of Frijoles (black Beans purified) tortillas, steaks, rice and fruit. As always I like the food and am eating healthy portions!

The muchachos share 4-5 in a room, they clean their own things and look after their accommadation which is simple but effective. I am on duty in the evening to make sure that lights are out by 9pm. The boys who live here are resilient and I believe that there are so many important lessons being learned living here.

I have been teaching English in the mornings from 7:20am to 12. We, as a community, are woken up at 5.30  by a cock-a-doodle-do over the loudspeaker and the beginning of the national anthem with the slogan "mucho buenos dias muchachos" translating to 'very good morning children'. It is good practice for me to help wake up.

I have been up in the mountains and volcanoes a few times with class groups and with colleagues. I stayed in log cabin in the Volcan de Santa Ana last weekend and we cooked our dinner and grilled steaks on an outdoor open wood fire and then sat through a tropical rain storm. I swam in Coatepeque lake, which you can see in one of the attached pictures, and am generally just getting on with every day life.

Good bye and god bless you
Mark Cioni

Mark is now back in the UK. You can see a presentation he made about his experience on the Continued Involvement page.