The last couple of days have been awesome. On Saturday I explored the food market and miscellaneous markets –love the enterprising folks selling little of this and a little of that out of tiny spaces. Even found an olive guy in a small hallway! Found a couple of movies and watched “Gran Torino” with Clint Eastwood. It’s been awhile since I’ve just sat back and watched a movie! As we were walking down the street, a parade went by! It is the start of carnival celebrations even though Ash Wednesday is more than a week away. The dancers looked like they were dying from the heat and dancing for so long, but they looked good. We saw the parade two times - the second time all the men had beers in their hands and the women had bottles of water! On Saturday night I went with 6 other volunteers to dinner at a really nice restaurant called Zig Zag. There specialty is Peruvian meats and Andean foods. Janine and I started with their Pisco Sour sampler. Pisco Sours are made from pisco grape brandy among other things.
The three that I got were fruits, blueberry and coca and they were served on a tray with the sprinkles of dried fruits, blueberries and coca leaves. For dinner I had the 3 meats served sizzling on a hot stone. Not sure if I want to tell you what two of the meats were, but one was beef. Ok, the other two were alpaca and ostrich and I liked the ostrich better of the two! We had bibs put on us since the meat was still sizzling on the hot stone and after you could see the grease splatters, so I was real happy they put those on us. Since this was not only my birthday dinner, but also another volunteer’s, we splurged on dessert. We both had a dessert with vanilla ice cream, fresh raspberry sauce – flambéed with gran marnier – delicious of course, and everyone else tried other things! Sunday then was my first day officially back with GVI. In the morning we had an orientation to the project here in Peru. It ended up taking 3 hours! I quit asking questions early on when I realized how long it was going to take to get through all the material! There were three of us for the orientation: myself, Janine, and another gal who will be here 3 or 4 weeks, and was here last summer as well. After the orientation we went out to lunch with the interns and other intern trainees. We then headed back to the market for supplies for the lunch at my school.
After a bit of lesson planning, our host families picked us up at 5pm. I was pretty nervous about this; all I was told was that it was maybe a 5 minute walk from my homestay to Casa de Avilla – the GVI headquarters. My family is Cesar and Isabelle and their almost two year old, Diego (or Diegito for a nickname). Cesar speaks English and Isabelle is learning. Cesar is a closer in age to me, while Isabelle I would guess to be in her late 20’s or early 30’s. He is an “economist” (I think this means accountant or comptroller) for a health clinic and Isabelle is a full-time mom. My room is plenty large and I am supposed to have wi-fi right here! Oh, I hope so! It is such a great deal to have it right in my room and be able to do lesson planning or lesson exploring and skype at whatever time I would like! Diegito seems to be a pretty tranquil little boy, so I am not too worried about him screaming and carrying on! There is something about limited hours of hot water, but I didn’t fully understand it, so will try to figure that out tonight.
Ok, so, about my school. First, it is about a 20 minute ride from Casa de Avilla. It is summer here, so we are putting on a summer school. Last week was the first week GVI was at the school, so the program is brand new and is being adjusted. Regular school will start at the beginning of March. There is no kitchen there, so we bring up fruit for a morning snack and then give out jam sandwiches at the end of the day. The name of the place is Chiguata and is on the mountain side, to the east I think, of Arequipa. The land here is definitely desert. It’s all just plain grey. The buildings are made of cement blocks, the rocks have been gathered and built into walls and it’s all the same color. The only thing with color is the school which is painted the regulation blue!
I worked with the “initials” – kindergartens, first, second and third grades with two other volunteers. Between these four levels we had close to 30 students! It’s quite a spread in age and ability, so we are working on splitting them out, but we are still not sure how to split them. They have a pretty good routine going: the volunteers start the day by reading aloud - each one reading one book. Then free reading time for the kids – or picture-looking as the case may be. On to one more activity before fruit break and then an hour and a half for the 2nd half of the day. We finish by about 12:45 and clean up and then the van comes to pick us up. We are going to change it up just a little this week, with an art activity following the story time – and hopefully the art activity will be related to one of the books! This is really nice to have other people to work with – definitely different than Ecuador. Also, the kids here are more advanced – their ability is more closely aligned to their grade level. I fell in love today with “Freddie”. He is one of the youngest kids, probably 3, cute as a button, and very independent.
Following school today, a number of us went to celebrate at a cake shop. I can’t believe how many there are here! It was the first day of school for 4 of us, so we had a lot of notes to compare. I'm looking forward to the new challenge here and seeing the differences between the schools and the kids.
Oh, and a huge THANK YOU to all for the wonderful birthday wishes.
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