An intercultural experience

Anna’s visit left me a concrete and real idea of how schools work in Great Britain.
Their customs are greatly different from ours. So more than once, I found myself gaping at her. Let me tell you a little about British Boarding Schools and Anna’s experience in those schools.
There are over 700 boarding schools in U.K. The majority of them are private but some state schools offer boarding facilities. These schools are located on campus, like universities and they preserve the Norman architecture. Fascinating! Teenagers study in castles. Strict, high achieving and traditional are some of the characteristics to describe these places. Each school has 7 boarding houses and each house is a separate community which accommodates 50 pupils. There exists a family-type atmosphere since students are away from their homes. This really caught my attention. Imagine Argentine students living miles away from their families in order to study in secondary school. This is almost unthinkable in our culture.
However, they also apply punishments for those students who misbehave, such as detention, suspension or physical punishment: students run in the rain. That comment made think about military service.
Though girls and boys live in different houses, lessons are mixed. Housemasters or mistress, called House Parents, are in charge of the boarding houses. Anna’s father himself is headmaster so she didn’t feel the absence of her family like the rest. The House Parents fulfill different roles at the same time: academic, parental and a disciplinary roles.They are models for the students, thus they have a great responsibility with them. Anna is really happy with her academic experience. She believes that living away from your family is an advantage because this experience prepares student to face life differently, taking into account that most of them complete their studies abroad. So they are not attached to their families. She is also very proud with the academic level of these schools. I agree with her. Anna is 19 years old if I’m not wrong and she looks like a free spirit. She travels from one country to another learning and experiencing and this is invaluable.
We wanted to give Anna a suitcase full of pictures and gifts but that was not possible so we decided to give her a Power Point Presentation with cultural pictures, the most significant for us, those which describe us as Argentines.
Meeting Anna was a nice experience. I hope to see her again. Maybe next year… Who knows?

Human Cruelty.Animal Suffering

Abandoned animals

Vicente. A victim of human cruelty.
Vicente on his way to full recovery






In our country there are thousands of animals living in the streets without shelter, food or water. Many of these animals are ill-treated or injured by their old owners and they are condemned to a tragic end, they are run over by a car or starve to death. Dogs and cats are domestic animals and they are not used to hunt, they need to be fed and a home to live in.
In summer, they suffer from dehydration and in winter from hypothermia.The situation is even worse for female animals, most of them are abandoned when they are pregnant andthe female animal is left wandering in the streets looking for a place to give birth. People do not care how much they suffer the human cruelty. In our country there is a law to protect them, if someone kills or abuses of an animal, he/she must be arrested.The condemn goes from 15 days to 1 year, but as many laws in this country, this law is not applied. Nowadays, in some provinces, they are discussing a law to exterminate abandoned animals.
Don’t you think that this situation could be completely different if we were aware of our responsibility? If we had our animals neutered to avoid unwanted reproduction?
If each of us adopted an animal and took care of it, if each of us taught our children, neighbors, friends, relatives etc that animals, like human beings, have rights and must be respected and loved.I’m sure the situation would be different.

This, more or less, was my speech.I almost began to cry when I was speaking. I am so involved in this issue that I can hardly speak without feeling a lump in my throat. Maybe it was not the best option but I wanted my classmates to know about the situation that many animals are going through. I strongly believe that the first step to change this is "awareness" and to make people aware we need to spread their stories.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKWISMx0_Gw

My Biodata

Anahi R. Druetta is a third -year student at JVG Teacher Training College. She has been an English primary teacher for four years. Her main interest areas are Methodology and Linguistics.