Thank you Coprodeli

As Armando and I walked home from dinner, a plane flew overhead. He stopped in his tracks and looked up in awe. "It is my dream to one day fly in a plane," he said in Spanish. He spoke too quickly for me to understand, so I asked him to repeat what he said, "mas despacio." Ever patient, Armando repeated himself, and this time I understood.

But of course I had no idea what to say. Due to the sheer luck of where I was born, I've had the opportunity to fly on planes dozens of times, to exotic locations all over the world. Armando, on the other hand, has never had the opportunity to travel outside of Peru. Like so many Peruvians, he's a highly smart and motivated person, but, because of where he was born, his opportunities in life are much more limited than mine.

I've known for a long time that I was born into luckier circumstances than the majority of people in the world, but Armando's comment on our walk home from dinner still hit me hard. It's one thing to be told, or to learn in school how lucky you are, how much harder the rest of the world has it. It's quite another to witness the discrepancy first-hand; to see good, honest people stuck with the shorter end of the stick.

Armando works full-time as the only P.E. teacher at Agustin de Hipona, one of Coprodeli's fantastic schools in Callao where I volunteered teaching English earlier this year. Coprodeli schools pay their teachers well relative to other schools in the area, but it's still not much, especially from my US-skewed perspective. When Armando told me what he and his colleagues made, I was blown away. At the time I was in my third week at Agustin de Hipona, and I had seen first-hand how hard all of the teachers there worked. When they're not in the classroom teaching their hearts out, they're preparing new lessons, or researching new teaching methods, or meeting one-on-one with students to provide extra help, etc. Oftentimes on Monday mornings I would ask the teachers how their weekends were, and I always got roughly the same response: "Very busy working."

The dedication that these teachers have to their students is profound. They barely make enough money to get by, yet still they work tirelessly and go above and beyond what is required of them on a daily basis. These teachers do this because, to them, the true compensation for their work is not money, but rather the joy they derive from watching their students succeed. To me, that's inspiring.

There are a ton of people who helped make my short time with Coprodeli so special. Thank you, first and foremost, to Padre Miguel for welcoming me into the Coprodeli family and making this experience possible. Thank you to the Coprodeli administrators - especially Marissa, Olga, Marlith, Roxanna - for always being available to help me with anything I needed (even when I'm sure you had a million other things to do). Thank you Señor Blas for teaching me how to navigate Callao's tricky bus network (no small task). Thank you to my students, whose warmth and energy made me excited to come into school every day. And of course, thank you to all of the teachers and administrators at Agustin de Hipona - especially Maria, Diana, Armando, and Jack - for inspiring me to work hard, help those in need, and be grateful for everything I have.

Until next time,

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Charlie Lovering

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