As soon as Meridith Price had her first taste of travel, she knew she’d been struck with a bad case of wanderlust. While searching for a cure for her condition in Latin America, she found herself petting alpacas in Cusco, mountain biking in the San Pedro de Atacama desert, dining al fresco in San Telmo, eating endless empanadas in Santiago and dreaming of more South American adventures. Thus far, her most meaningful and memorable experience was as a volunteer English teacher in the Chilean Patagonia region with the Chilean Ministry of Education’s “English Opens Doors” program from 2007-2008. As a current graduate student in the Washington D.C. area, she arranged for an internship with the program headquarters in Santiago in 2010.
I’ve been in their shoes before. Looking out over 20-some faces, full of excitement, trepidation and curiosity, I feel a familiar rush. They are the first, of an estimated few-hundred volunteers for 2010, to arrive to Chile to participate in the English Opens Doors program (Programa Inglès Abre Puertas). Implemented by the Chilean Ministry of Education and supported by the United Nations Development Programme, the English Opens Doors program places English speaking teachers in public schools throughout all 15 regions of Chile.
A little more than two years ago, I was a four-month volunteer in a local community at the “ends of the earth” in Chile’s XII region of Magallanes. I taught at a rural elementary/middle school in the Chilean Patagonia — the southern-most point of South America — where I lived with a Chilean family in a peach-colored corrugated tin-roofed home amongst glaciers, mountains, penguins, pumas and vast expanses of sheep-speckled, nearly untouched terrain.
As I walked out the door every morning to a brilliant ruby red and tangerine Patagonian sunrise and a rush of brisk air off the Strait of Magellan, I would brace myself for the ensuing rush of energetic adolescents racing around the hallways at the start of another school day in Chile.
Now, a thousand-some miles north of the little town, Punta Arenas, where I was a volunteer, this group of optimistic volunteers is sitting before me. In a university classroom a few floors above the summertime bustle on the streets of the Santiago city-center below, they are asking questions about the program. Like them, when I arrived as a volunteer in 2007, I was not really sure what to expect in the months that lay ahead.
Like them, I had come looking for an adventure, a meaningful experience, an opportunity to teach English and to improve my Spanish. What I found was a unique and dynamic initiative in a country that is leading the way in development in Latin America, as well as a network of teachers, students, professional contacts and lifelong friends, with whom I still keep in touch.
I liked the program for what it provided — the opportunity to volunteer and to really integrate myself in a local community in Chile for a reasonable cost, with a program I felt I could trust.
Two years later, I’m back, but for just a short time this time around, as a graduate student completing an internship in the English Opens Doors central office in Santiago. The reality of returning home to winter in Washington D.C. to continue with grad school readings and research papers menacingly looms over my shoulder.
Just for the moment, I’ll enjoy the agreeable weather of summer in Chile and the nostalgic sense of satisfaction that the program continues to grow, succeed and bring in greater numbers of volunteers each year with the same sense of idealism, adventure and excitement.
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