Selamat siang (good day)! This summer I spent seven weeks in Bali, Indonesia volunteering. For the first month I volunteered in a small village twenty minutes outside of Ubud teaching kindergarten and third grade.

My mornings were spent with the kindergartners exposing them to basic english. We played games, colored, and danced. There were thirty-five children to a classroom with three Indonesian teachers. Although the class structure reminded me somewhat of my own schooling as a child with morning meeting, workbooks, and craft projects, the way the classroom was conducted was very different. The children were given a lot of freedom and would come in and out of the classroom as they pleased. Bali is predominantly Hindu so a group prayer, led by a boy in the classroom, happened before snack time each day.

In the afternoon, I taught english to a class of fifteen third graders. This was different from my experience with kindergarten because there was no teacher in the classroom with my partner and I. Every day we would spend a couple hours planning activities and games for the kids to creatively expose them to english. We covered topics like transportation, the five senses, adjectives, nouns, verbs, and weather. Although I knew that the kids were improving their english, I struggled coming to volunteer each day knowing that I was only giving them the language skills to eventually be a better help to the privileged tourists, not financially independent.

Below you will find a picture of me and a few other volunteers with my third grade class. If you look closely, you can see the lei that they made me as a goodbye gift.