Do, a deer, a female deer, Re, a drop of golden sun...

I've finished my first week of work at the juvenile detention center, and I decided to postpone writing this entry until now because I have a terrible habit of viewing everything through rose-colored lenses and wanted to make sure I had a somewhat accurate impression of this place before writing about it. It's still only been a week, and my impression is still open to change, but so far I feel very blessed to have been placed here.

This center is miles away, both literally and figuratively, from juvenile detention centers in the U.S. Security consists of one guard at the main gate and some barbed wire on top of the walls. There are no cells here. The boys have high school classes in the mornings, and in the afternoons, they take elective courses or work in workshops where they learn skills like carpentry, pottery, shoemaking, and cooking (and they work they turn out is incredible). There is a big soccer field in the middle of the center, and the boys compete in local city leagues with churches and schools. We're even allowed to hug them in greeting and farewell, or when they do especially well in class. Sometimes, it's hard to remember that these boys are here because they did, in fact, commit crimes.

I work in the afternoons as a teacher of music (piano mostly, though we'll probably include some vocal work too) and poetry. The boys call me "Profesora Lorena" because they like the Spanish version of my name better. I have four in my class, and they're all very sweet and eager to learn. Because we only have one keyboard, we made to-scale diagrams that they can all follow along on when somebody else is playing, and they crack me up the way they all try to offer each other advice while practicing. Occasionally there's a bit of boasting and one-up-manship, but I've made it very clear that this is one thing I will not tolerate in my classroom, and generally they're very good about helping each other instead of competing.

After our class, my friend Ali and I combine our two classes to work on "periodismo," or journalism. The boys in each of our classes who are the best writers are working on putting out a newsletter about life at the center, and they're in the middle of working on stories about everything from the soccer championship league at the center to who received the holy sacraments on Christmas Eve. So far, they haven't done much, but it's only been a few days and we had a lot of logistical things to work out first. I'm excited to see what they turn out.

So in other words, this may just be the best job they could have found for me here. I get to combine my love of music and words with my raging idealism and my teaching skills, and I get to have fun in the process. Not half bad.