Imagine this. On Sunday morning, you arrive at a non-descript office building in a business district of Madrid. There are people there from Spain and a variety of English-speaking countries. You may have met some of the English speakers at a tapas reception the night before, but you don’t really know them. You haven’t seen or spoken to any of the Spaniards until that moment. You’re all about to get on a bus to spend 6 very intensive days together.
Thus begins a week at VaughanTown. Vaughan Systems is a large English language school in Madrid and runs these immersion courses to help Spaniards improve their conversational abilities.
Everyone is wary as we board the bus. Some of the volunteers (or “Anglos” as we are called) have done this before and know what to expect. Others are apprehensive. The Spaniards look terrified. We Anglos are instructed to sit next to a Spaniard so their immersion experience can begin immediately. (In my particular group this was a bit tricky because we had 14 Anglos and only 6 Spaniards but the groups are typically more balanced.)
I was seated next to Antonio, a young man from Madrid. I expected to have the usual “getting to know you” cocktail party type of conversation, and we did start with a bit of that, but it quickly moved to a deeper level and before I knew it, we were discussing the philosophy of Stoicism. I realized that I’d be learning as much these next few days as I’d be teaching.
After a coffee/rest stop, and a shifting of seats, we arrived about 3 ½ hours later at the Izán Puerta de Gredos hotel, near the small town of Barco de Ávila, in the foothills of the Gredos mountain in the region of Castile and León. The hotel is lovely and the setting remote.
We arrived in time for an ice-breaker activity to get to know each other, lunch, and in true Spanish fashion, siesta.
At 6 PM that first day, there was an orientation for all, followed by 2 50-minute one-on-one sessions. These are the backbone of the VaughanTown program. For each session we were provided with an idiom and a phrasal verb (or compound verb, such as “to cut down on”) to help get the conversation started and then we were on our own. It was suggested that we stay away from politics, but that was impossible for this group of British and American volunteers. Spanish isn’t allowed to be spoken for the entire time we are away.
The 6 days progressed with one-on-one sessions, in addition to more scripted activities to help the Spaniards master additional skills on the telephone and in conference calls. We also had group activities, skits, performances, and presentations, most of which were pretty silly, but I saw how these activities help everyone to become more open and vulnerable. It was amazing to see the Spaniards’ fluency and comfort with English explode throughout the program.
Included in the program is a large comfortable private room (unless you request to share), and 3 meals a day with wine flowing freely at lunch and dinner. Breakfast was at 9 AM, lunch at 2 PM and dinner at 9 PM. Dinner was too early for the Spaniards and too late for everyone else. There was a break for everyone from 3-5 PM every day, and because of the unbalanced ratio of my particular group, quite a bit of additional free time for the volunteers. The hotels that VaughanTown chooses are generally quite isolated with not many distractions, so the groups do become very cohesive very fast. We were able to do our one-on-one sessions indoors, outdoors or walking around. There wasn’t really anywhere to go, but on our walks, we often encountered horses, cows, and goats along the road.
All of a sudden it became Thursday evening, when the Spaniards had to give a 5 minute presentation about a randomly chosen topic. They spent many of their sessions that day preparing for this and were visibly anxious about it. As I watched them deliver their uniformly excellent presentations, I felt such a sense of pride and was surprised at how emotional I became. After dinner that night there was a dance party which apparently ended around 3 or 4 AM. People needed to decompress but I needed to go to sleep a bit earlier than that.
Friday morning we boarded the bus back to Madrid, as friends and maybe even as something deeper. I’m not going to lie, there were tears. This time we were able to sit next to whomever we wanted to, and for the first time, Spanish was allowed to be spoken. I sat with Maria, the youngest and shyest of the Spaniards. We decided to speak Spanish and all of a sudden I became the shy one.
For information on volunteering at VaughanTown: https://volunteers.grupovaughan.com/
Fierce Sunflower 