Flying Solo

Well I've had the first and second graders to myself for the past two days, and it's gone surprisingly well. Yesterday I had eight kids (including one younger sibling in preschool) and today I had eleven (two preschoolers, one is a trained pickpocketer). The kids wouldn't let me in at the beginning of the day, because they were busily working on cards for my going away party tomorrow. It was actually really cute. I kept poking my head in to see how much more time they needed, and they would send someone to the door to tell me that they needed 3-5 more hours to spend working.

I've spent a lot of time reading to the kids, which they love. Today I read them a story about a little boy who wishes that his little brother were a dragon because it would be more fun to play with, and he thinks of all of the things that they could do together. Then I asked them to draw a picture of what they would do if they had a dragon, but they are so unaccostomed to having to use their imaginations that it proved to be a fairly frustrating and unproductive task. They all drew a picture of an illustration in the book, where the dragon tries to whistle, but fire comes out of his mouth.

Then I had a bit of an environmental education lesson (my new boss would be proud). The school has a little garden, but it's full of garbage at the moment, so we talked about what plants need to grow and then picked up the trash. They liked it and started competing with each other to see who could get more trash, but were confused about what was garbage and what wasn't, and kept pointing to plants and rocks and asking me which was garbage. Then they didn't know what to do with the garbage, and they all asked to keep the garbage bags to bring them home. Not exactly what I had planned on, but whatever.

I've been learning about the importance of having a "bag of tricks" in the classroom, that is full of time fillers and backup activities for when the lesson didn't last as long as I had planned or has proved to be a total flop. I don't think I've ever had to be more flexible or spontaneous as I have been in the last few weeks. Two volunteers were sick today, so one volunteer and I had to run the entire school. The cook was late yesterday, and we almost had to prepare lunch for the kids. We only have running water for about the first hour of the day, and this week, since it's technically a vacation for the kids, some kids can only come if they bring their younger siblings, so I have to think of different activities for the preschoolers that arrive. The preschooler I mentioned above, Alonso, whose uncle trained him how to pickpocket, is just another challenge, and we all have to be watchful of our things (he's technically not allowed in the classrooms because he steals so much, but I had to take him in today).

One more day with the kids and volunteers. I have a going away dinner tonight and then a party in the school tomorrow that I'll be sure to write about in my very last blog.

A Long Journey

I like to think that my relationship with the Spanish language began at the age of two, when I first appear in my family's home videos, dancing to my favorite song at the time, "La Bamba."

I began formally studying Spanish at the age of nine, and could tell that I had a knack for imitating my teacher's accent and understanding what she was saying. This same year, on a day off from school, I accompanied my mom to her volunteer job, which was assisting in an English as a Second Language course for new immigrant adults. I vividly remember teaching an Asian man how to say the word "sock," and I couldn't get over the fact that I was actually able to teach someone something, much less an adult. At the end of the class, I told my mom that that had been "the best day of my life."

Fast foward to 8th grade, where I'm now about five years into studying Spanish. My dad and I went on spring break to Puerto Rico. On the main island, there wasn't much need for my Spanish, but when we went to Vieques, a smaller island, no one spoke much English. I was terrified to say anything in Spanish, and my dad still makes fun of me to this day for how unhelpful I was throughout the trip. I remember saying two things in Spanish: "¿Dónde está la playa?" (Where is the beach--funny since we were on a small island, but my dad and I don't exactly have a sense of direction) and I remember saying the word "barato" to ask if something was cheap. Puerto Rico was crazy: the lack of road signs from a hurricane years before, driving on roads that turned into non-roads through bushes, having to wait for cattle to cross the road, etc. But there was something very intriguing about this place and different pace of life.

Spanish classes continued, and in my sophomore year of high school, I had JJ Kahle as my Spanish teacher. She would then continue to be my Spanish teacher for the remainder of high school. She spoke Spanish amazingly and was so interested in the cultural aspects of studying the language that it rubbed off on all of her students. During my junior year, she started talking about taking a group of students to Cuernavaca, Mexico to study Spanish and live with a host family over the summer. I was interested, but I didn't know anyone that was going and was fairly anxious about having to speak Spanish on a normal basis and stay with a Mexican family. My mom has never once pushed me to do anything that I don't want to do, but she pushed me to go to Mexico. I think she may have been channeling some inner nostalgia from her time in Denmark in high school, but I certainly credit her with convincing me to go. And thank God she did. In Mexico, I stayed with an amazing family and my Spanish took off. I got so much satisfaction out of communicating in another language, and I fell in love with Mexico and began planning trips and semesters abroad throughout Latin America.

I entered CC knowing that I would major in Spanish, and thinking that I would teach bilingual elementary school when I graduated. I spent a few weeks in the summer following my freshman year in Nicaragua, volunteering with an NGO called Manna Project International. This trip was a bit traumatizing for me. Not only did I have a nasty reaction to my anti-malaria medications and get a parasite, but I was also witnessing the most extreme poverty that I have since laid eyes on. One of the communities that we worked in is called La Chureca, and it is literally a town built on a garbage dump. The familes survive by digging through the trash to find recyclable items that they can exchange for a small amount of change. Their houses are made from garbage, they bathe in a lake of garbage, and they suffer from all kinds of ailments.

My junior year of college I studied abroad in Barcelona. Barcelona and I didn't click that way that I have with places in Latin America, but I enjoyed the opportunity to conduct my life in Spanish and hold a marketing internship. I made some lifelong friends, and the highlight of Spain for me was actually my fall break, when I was able to travel through Morocco during Ramadan.

I returned from Spain and looked for a volunteer opportunity where I could practice my Spanish. I began tutoring a wonderful group of bilingual Mexican children in an after school program, and it became the highlight of my week.

In my senior year, the Spanish department let me write my thesis on a topic that had long interested me: bilingual education for Hispanics in the US. I had a lot of issues with the Spanish department and the fact that my major was analyzing literature, but it allowed me to become literate in Spanish, and for that I am grateful. While for much of college I had drifted from my interest in education, it came back quite strongly once I delved into my topic, and I became a little obsessed with my research. While I'm still not quite sure where I will fit into the field of education, I think it will be somewere in the realm of Hispanic education in the US.

I couldn't really make any concrete decisions about my future post-college until I made it to South America, a place I have wanted to go to at least since Mexico, but more likely since the first time I opened a Spanish textbook and saw a photograph of Machu Picchu. I made it, and I love it more than I had expected. These last six weeks have been amazing. It has tested my patience, made me depressed, and filled me with hope. The highlight, of course, has been the children that I have been fortunate enough to get to know. While I look forward to my return to the US and things like driving my car, wandering the aisles of Target, and using a public restroom that supplies its own toilet paper, soap, paper towels, AND a toilet seat, I think I will pretty much be tearing myself away from the kids on Friday. On my first few days in the school, I remember thinking that I had a long month ahead of me. And then at the beginning of week three, I began planning my return.

For some reason I have the ability to speak Spanish better than most non-native speakers, and for some reason I am more drawn to interacting with Hispanic children than any other group of people. I have felt truly at home in Mexico and in Peru. I thought that maybe finally making it to South America would feel like something that I could check off my list, but now I am only more curious about what the rest of this continent has in store.

Towards the beginning of my trip, my host mom, Martha, had a group of her friends over, and she was explaining the work that I was doing in Peru to them. They didn't quite get it at first, and kept asking if I was getting university credit. When they eventually understood that I was just here to volunteer, one of them said, "She's come to do the work that we won't." That line has stuck with me, because in some ways, it's silly that I have traveled so far from home to work on another country's issues, when the US certainly has its fair share of problems, and many with regards to immigration from Latin America. I think I will have to strike a balance between working on issues abroad and at home. What I know for sure is that if it doesn't involve Spanish, then it just isn't for me.

End of Circus Week

That crazy week is over! On Thursday, we made the bold decision to try and do paper mache with the first and second graders. We knew that the potential for disaster was high, so we gave the kids a lot of instructions and made it very clear that the minute they started misbehaving, they wouldn't be allowed to continue the art project. It was so cute to see them so excited they were practically bursting, and they actually did quite a good job with it. I think I might be addicted to their sense of wonder and amazement for things like dipping strips of newspaper into glue.

I had a few small triumphs this week: spending a few minutes individually with kids to help them learn how to jump rope and then seeing them successfully jump for the first time in front of the class, and watching some kids who insist that they don't know how to read slowly learn how to sound out words on their own. This teaching thing might be just the thing for me after all...

On Friday, we took about 30 of the kids to a dance competition for all of the schools in our district. The day started off with a march from the plaza to the stadium, and I had to participate in order to keep the preschoolers in line. Then it was a LONG day of waiting around in the sun until the kids finally danced, and they did an awesome job. It was fun to see them so proud of being able to represent their school and dance in front of an audience. Before GVI came into the school, they never could have afforded hiring the dance instructor or renting the costumes, and now things like this are possible for them. I couldn't help but be really frustrated with the teachers, though, who spent so much time and effort decorating the booth for our school. When it comes to everyday teaching, they're useless, but when it comes to showing off and competing with other schools, they're suddenly really enthusiastic and willing to spend the entire week preparing.

Today I went with Georgina to the Monastery of Catalina, which is an incredibly beautiful monastery from the 16th century, where cloistered nuns still live today. Last weekend, by the way, we made it to Alpaca World, and while I didn't get to ride one, I did get a kiss, which was equally enjoyable, I'm sure.

This week will be a little strange. Monday and Tuesday are national holidays, so we're going into the schools to do some cleaning and painting. The kids come back on Wednesday, and we'll run classes for them on our own, without the local teachers, for two weeks (I'll only be there for the first week). I'm really excited and up for the challenge, because my best days are certainly the ones where we aren't dealing with the teachers and have the flexibility to do what we want.

Circus

This week has been an absolute circus. A small sampling of what we've had to deal with this week:

A dance instructor has come to interrupt our classes every day for an hour to an hour and a half to prepare the kids for Friday's dance competition for all the schools in our district.

Two of the teachers were gone yesterday due to meetings, one gone tomorrow due to an injured back.

The cook had to leave early today, so on top of all of our duties, we had to serve lunch and wash the dishes (I ate lunch at 3pm. I was not a happy camper).

We lost the keys to the bathroom, so we got to choose between going without, going outside, or going in the preschooler's bathroom (for two days).

Monday is Peru Day, and the teachers are obsessed. With the little time they've been here this week, they have forced the kids to decorate their classrooms and miss our lessons or have forced us to make decorations! They tried to get us to leave school early today to rent traditional costumes and put on a dance performance on Friday, which we nixed.

I now know the meaning of "flying by the seat of your pants." We've had to be extremely flexible with our classes and duties this week.

Lastly, last week about half of the kids were told that they needed to do stool samples, because of suspected parasites. Well, we got the results. All of the children tested have one parasite, many have two. They'll all be treated, but with the water and food they are exposed to, they'll probably just get them again. At the eye doctor, we found out that 6 out of our 14 kids in 1st and 2nd grades need glasses, so we're trying to brainstorm on how to get the kids to actually take care of them, not lose them or break them, and bring them to school. This would explain, among other cognitive reasons, why they have so much trouble copying anything from the board...

Tomorrow we're without a teacher in 1 and 2, which will be really nice, because we can do whatever we want with them. Elizabeth kept going over all of this pointless material that she wanted me to do with them, and I just smiled and nodded, fully intending to ignore her instructions completely.

Pictures!

I FINALLY sat down to upload some photos. Here's the link:
http://picasaweb.google.com/mariya.connors/MariSAdventuresInPeru?authkey=-TrDUn9vXuw

Just got back from a wonderful countryside bike tour. The other girl I was supposed to go with was too hung over this morning (GVI did go out pretty hard last night...), so I had a private tour with Peru's number one mountain bike champion! There were definitely some dodgy traffic moments, or moments where I was pushed between a car and a pack of sheep or cows, but it was wonderful. It was a tour of some towns outside of Arequipa that pre-date the Incans, and they have the same irrigration systems from those times! The land is lush and green and beautiful despite Arequipa's two weeks of rain per year. We were on the road for some of the time and then it was more mountain bikey for some of the time (and I'm not ashamed to admit that I had to get off my bike a couple of times on steep, rocky downhills). We stopped at a beautiful old farm for some chicha, which is a traditional Peruvian drink made from purple corn that tastes kind of like drinking bubblegum, but I really like it! Then we made our way back into Arequipa, dodged some more traffic, and arrived without getting hit by a car, falling off, or being pushed to far into a herd of sheep.

Backtrack to yesterday, which was a fabulous day in the school. It was Liz and Dave's last day, so there was a ceremony with cards and hugs and thank yous and tears. It was the first time that I had seen the whole school in one room, and I had my two favorite little boys cuddled on my lap. The kids were happily playing and laughing and I couldn't stop thinking about their incredible resilience. They go through unimaginable, terrible things every day, but they still laugh and play and go to school and make friends and, though it isn't always apparent, are excited about learning. GVI's presence in this school is huge, and the volunteers play a huge role in giving them the love and encouragement that is absent in their homes. Leaving them will be heartbreaking, but knowing that more volunteers will come and brighten up their days a bit helps. They have a lot of potential, but they are fighting pretty fierce odds to break the cycles of poverty, abuse, and lack of education. They have amazing character and spirit and I wish the world weren't so cruel to them.

The rest of the day and tomorrow I'm doing some relaxing, meeting new volunteers, prepping for the week, and we might be going to Alpaca World, which is a weird tourist trap sort of zoo of alpacas (similar to llamas). I'm determined to ride one, even though they can't hold very much weight. We'll see...

Take that!

I realized that I forgot to tell quite a funny story from our preschool English class the other day. We are trying to teach the kids the names of animals in English, and we're teaching them the song "Old MacDonald." The kids shout out animals in Spanish, we tell them the equivalent in English, and then we sing the song. We kept getting the usual responses, pig, cow, cat, dog, etc. But one little kid next to me kept shouting "Lodo! Lodo!" Which means "Mud! Mud!" Each round I had to tell him that mud wasn't an animal, but he would shout it out each time anyway. Today when we sang it, a lot of the kids wanted to sing out a worm, but we didn't really know what noise to say that a worm made, so we just had to laugh and move on.

Today I had a small victory over the terrible first and second grade teacher. She was trying to make the kids (ages 5-8) copy pages and pages of notes from the board about the different phases of life (childhood, adolescence, etc.) Not being able to read or write very well, this was very difficult for them, so they were frustrated and kept misbehaving. Of course she left the room at this moment to go to talk to someone else, and left me and Georgina with the mass chaos. I was so frustrated by her inability to plan lessons that the kids are able to get anything out of and the fact that she always chooses moments like this to leave, so I told the kids to stop what they were doing, because I was going to read them a story. I have never seen them so well behaved. They all sat in silence (or near silence), some of them with dropped jaws and expressions of awe as I read them The Little Mermaid and some weird donkey story, only talking out of turn when they couldn't see a page. As bad as they are, they clearly are excited about learning and about reading, but nothing that their teacher does ever elicits this response. Elizabeth, the teacher, entered the room when I had just started the second book and still had the attention of all of the students. I kept going until the end of the story, just to stick it to her that the kids are capable of being well behaved and engaged in something. I finished the story and then she had them get out their notebooks again to continue copying, and for those who hadn't finished (because they can't write yet), Georgina and I had to copy the lessons for them. I'm sure they'll learn that material really well, considering they aren't capable of reading it! She didn't say anything about my diversion from the lesson, but to me it was a small victory.

Medical Woes

Hi all. Sorry it's been a while...busy busy as usual. Here's a quick update:

Sunday:
Nice relaxing day, spent going to some local markets to buy supplies for projects this week at school, going out to lunch, and wondering around with some GVI friends. I spent a LOT of time prepping for an art lesson for grades one and two, that involved sewing puppets.

Monday:
Got to school to find more construction than usual. In the past few weeks, there has been all kinds of construction to put some water pipes, with regular explosions where we have to get all the kids against the side of the school building, just in case (and the blasts always have terrible timing). Anyway, there have been so MANY blasts that there are now huge trenches, so as we carried the week's food to school, we had to walk across little planks over the trenches. Then there was a rat in the kitchen that the kids found and violently murdered. My art lesson went over really well and the kids were all excited to have little puppets to take home. I managed to find googly eyes at a market, which were a big hit, and particularly fun to put in your mouth!

Tuesday:
We set up a great obstacle course for PE, which was also a big hit with the kids. It's amazing what a group of people from all over the world can put together with so few resources. We had some cones and hula hoops and balls and yet we put together quite the obstacle course. Although I always hated gym myself, it is fun to watch the kids use up some of their energy and work together as a team.

One of the volunteers here, Georgina, from England, also has a blog, and one day asked anyone interested who was reading her blog to donate 4 pounds so that we could buy sweaters for each of the kids (it gets COLD here at night and the kids have no warm clothes). Well she ended up with over 600 pounds, or about 1200 dollars. Not only did she buy all the kids sweaters, but we are now able to bring all of the kids, with or without insurance, to a doctor, dentist, and optician (for the first time in their lives, likely). The first car loads of kids have been going, and they are coming back with awful news. Few have less than 10 teeth that they need filled (one girl needs 18 fillings), many need to have teeth pulled, many are underweight and some may have parasites that are causing them to lose their appetites, so even when they are provided with food, they may not feel like eating it. All of this from kids that rarely cry and have never ONCE complained about the pain and discomfort they must be feeling every day.

Today was TOUGH. The first and second graders were out of control during the homework hour, and I don't think I've ever yelled so much in my life. I always hate it when there's so much chaos that I don't have a normal amount of patience to help the kids that actually are motivated and working. I had to yell at them SO much just to sit down and stop from escaping the classroom.

Tonight we're getting a much needed mid-week break: pizza, poker, and ice cream for the volunteers, and then to bed!

Speaking Spanglish

I had two funny miscommunication problems in the last 24 hours. In the first, I was in a store pointing to some cookies that I wanted to buy (naturally). The cookies I wanted were with chocolate and a fruit called lucuma, which tastes like caramel, but instead I said that I wanted the cookies with chocolate and vicuña, which is an animal related to the llama. Luckily the woman got what I meant by what I was pointing to, but I didn't realize my mistake until minutes later, when I felt like an idiot. However, I felt more stupid when I zoned out while walking to school and fell into a hole in the sidewalk. Ah the dangers of daily life in Peru.

This morning, I thought that Martha asked me if I wanted to go with her to walk around a nice plaza nearby, which I agreed to. But then we got in a cab and ended up going to Plaza Vea, which is the Peruvian equivalent of a Wal-mart. Not exactly the nice Saturday morning walk I was expecting, but whatever. Apparently Martha meets up with two of her sisters there on Saturdays, and they sit in the bakery and catch up.

Some of the funniest miscommunications that I have had so far have actually been with other English speaking volunteers. It's the Americans and Canadians vs. the Australians and the British on a lot of words. I couldn't stop laughing when I heard someone call a popsicle an "iced lolly." Jenna, the other American and I, tried to convince the group that "Shiver me timbers" was the American way to say "oh my gosh," and we convinced a few people until I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe, at which point they got rather skeptical.

Today I went to see Juanita, the mummy of a 12 year old girl sacrificed by the Incans after a volcano erupted and destroyed much of Peru. The Incans didn't make a whole lot of human sacrifices, but when they did, it was adolescent children who had known since birth that they would be sacrificed, and it was seen as a huge honor. They walked from Cusco to Arequipa, 160 miles, which took them about 3 months (this was in the 1440s). They walked to the top of a volcano and had very elaborate ceremonies and offerings to the gods. The remains were buried under ice until the 1990s when the volcano erupted and opened the graves for the first time since the sacrifices. In total, there were two burial sites, one with six children and one with three.

It's nice to be able to relax a bit this weekend after the Colca trek and a very hectic week, what with the strike and the earthquake, and all. Tomorrow I have some lesson planning and shopping for supplies for the week. At the moment, this coming week looks less hectic than this one, but you never know...

Getting the routine down

Hi, all. Sorry that I haven't written in a while. GVI is certainly keeping me busy!

Here's my schedule on a typical day:

6:20 wakeup, breakfast, and thirty minute walk to the Casa de Avila, where we all meet. Then a busride (20-25 minutes) to Triunfo.

School with teachers: 8:30-1:15. Teachers take off at 1:15. We are responsible for designing and teaching art, PE, and English during the day. Once the teachers leave, we supervise lunch (which we provide), force them to brush their teeth (which they hate), and then spend an hour with them on their homework.
3:00 kids go home
3-4 lesson planning for the next day
4:30 arrive back at the Casa, absolutely dead. From here it depends on the day. Sometimes there is more lesson planning or shopping for supplies, sometimes a meeting, sometimes I'll briefly go home and then return if we're having dinner together. It gets dark super early here, like 5:45 or 6:00, and I prefer walking home to taking cabs.

When I'm home, sometimes I'll play with Melanie and Geraldine, the grandkids, and I have dinner with Martha, who has an endless curiosity for my life in the US. I've been reading a lot, and am currently reading Three Cups of Tea, which I highly recommend. It's about a guy who is building schools in Pakistan, and after this first week, I hope that he put a lot of thought into the teachers and materials for a school. A school has to be much more than a building...

Today I was so frustrated with my teacher, Elizabeth. Clearly, it's hard to manage two grades at once (1st and 2nd), but she does an impressively bad job at it. She clearly isn't preparing anything ahead of time and today gave the kids an exercise where they were supposed to write down their home addresses and phone numbers. The kids live on PILES OF DUST AND ROCKS. They don't have street names, house numbers, electricity, or even toilets. For much of the time the kids are just goofing off while she puruses the government-issued curriculum (that teaches the kids about how a woman's place is in the house and other important lessons). I can tell them to sit down and stop hitting each other, but if they don't have anything to occupy themselves, they'll just start up again. The kids absolutely love anything of the lessons that GVI gives. The other day the first and seconds knew they had PE first, so when we walked in they started chanting "fisica! fisica!" Anything that takes them away from copying from the board is exciting. Yesterday the third grader's homework was to write out all the numbers between 3000 and 4000. What a great learning opportunity!

Although much of the day is frustrating with Elizabeth there, we also have a lot of fun with the kids. Yesterday in PE we were jump roping and practicing relay races. Everything we do with the preschoolers is bound to be hilarious, because they are constantly falling off their chairs or getting into paints or other dangerous things. One of my favorite things is when kids come up to us to show us the English words they know. One of my favs, Jose Antonio, will come up to me a couple of times a day to point to his mouth and say, "Mouf, señorita, mouf!"

With my first week down, I feel like I know the routine pretty well and am going to take a more active role in the lesson planning in the next few weeks. I've also become the interpreter for the other GVI members who don't speak a lot of Spanish.

This weekend I'm going to lie low and recover. The strike only lasted Wednesday, and I stayed in for much of the day. I did see some people shouting and throwing a banana at a bus that had decided to run, and apparently there were nails and glass in the street to punish anyone who decided to drive. 1,000 people were arrested in Lima, and apparently one woman died (not unusal for Lima, where it's normal to murder someone after the results of a soccer game).

That's all for now!

Quake update

6.0 earthquake, according to CNN.com. It lasted for 25 seconds and the epicenter was in Chivay, which is where I was on Sunday in the hot springs...

A First time for everything...

I woke up at 4:30 this morning to a real earthquake, not just the power generator. Apparently it's being refered to as a "strong tremor." Everything and everyone is fine here, it just gave us all a bit of a scare. Not sure that it will even make the news. It was certainly hard to fall back asleep after that, though. When I have more time I can recap it a little better. In retrospect it's kind of funny how much of a zombie I was, and my host family thought I slept through it because I was in my doorway and not where they were, and they couldn't believe how tired I must have been! Anyway, all is fine here, just a little shaken.

Colca Canyon Trek

I got back last night from an amazing three days. I'll do my best to recap:

Friday:
5 am wakeup, transfer to bus station. Then we had a 6 hour busride throuh the mountains (thank God for prescription motion sickness meds) to a town called Cabanconde at the top of the canyon. The bus ride was an adventure in and of itself: it's for locals and for tourists, so there were many stops in small pueblos in the middle of nowhere. The locals would wrap up their sheep and hens in bags and put them under the bus with the luggage! At one point there was a debate about whether or not we would put an enormous pig under the bus, as well, but it was finally not allowed. Apparently one woman had some baby llamas with her on the bus, as well.

The group: four GVI people: me, Thomas (France), Karen (Australia) and Georgina (England), plus a German couple and a weird Spanish guy whose short shorts and tight long underwear left little to the imagination. We had a great guide named Marco (or Marcos, it was kind of unclear). On day one, we descended into the canyon (the second largest in the world) for about three hours. It was a KILLER on the knees. We spent the night at a funny little place in the bottom of the canyon that only had electricity in the kitchen. I debated taking a shower, but the shower was in the middle of the lawn, near where people were eating dinner, and the shower curtain didn't quite cover the entire opening. We had dinner and were in bed by 8:30, after a hilarious evening due to our exhaustion and severe lack of oxygen.

Saturday:
5:30 am wakeup from the heehawing of donkeys outside. Quick breakfast and a three hour hike to an"oasis" on the other side of the canyon, which was a nice pool. We relaxed for a while, but were all dreading the steep switchbacks that we faced ahead of us to climb back out of the canyon. We felt like we were about to go into battle. Eventually, only three of us hiked the whole way out (myself included) and the other four took mules up. I felt like I was crawling the whole time, but I tried to maintain a really steady, slow pace and not take too many breaks, a system that KR (Swiss Semester director) had taught me on tough hikes, and I did it in 3 hours and 5 minutes, which is the predicted time for "very experienced trekkers." The scenery throughout the trek was breathtaking and it was neat to see the villages along the way. At one point while I was struggling along, two guys carrying lumber on their shoulders were RUNNING down the path. The people that live there make this trek weekly, and it is the only way into the canyon. The trek was followed by dinner and an early bedtime once again, but none of us slept well because we could hardly get any air in our lungs at such a high altitude (can't remember what it was, as it was in meters, but it was HIGH). We were all sort of gasping for breath for most of the night.

Sunday:
5:30 wakeup AGAIN because we were supposed to see some condors flying in the canyon, but by this point, all we wanted to do was sleep, and we kept cursing the birds that had gotten us up so early. As it turned out, by the time we had to leave, we didn't even see any! Luckily we had seen one on Friday, so it wasn't so disapointing. We boarded the bus again to some hot springs to soak our aching bodies and then made it back to Arequipa. In bed at 8:00. I woke up once to some really loud explosions around midnight. It was so loud and sounded like a train, which I've been told is the sound that earthquakes can make, so although at the time I thought it was an earthquake, I was too tired to move and just went back to bed! Sort of like when I fell off the bunk bed and Ju just went back to sleep...Anyway, Martha thinks it might have been some sort of generator turning on.

Today was my first full day in school, without teachers , of course, because YESTERDAY was a day to celebrate teachers. I basically had to walk in and wing a lesson on the Day of the Teacher and on adjectives. I had the first graders' attention for about 90 seconds, and by then they were hitting each other, placing the blame, eating glue, etc. These next four weeks will be an enormous test of patience for me. It's so hard for me to be strict with them when I think of all that they go through each day, but they only really respond to a really harsh and loud voice, and apparently, they tend to respond well to strictness because at least it shows that we care, as opposed to their home lives where they are ignored, put to work in the fields, or beaten. They have their sweet moments, as well, of course, but it's so hard to do anything when they have the attention spans of goldfish and are CONSTANTLY picking on each other and overall just being bad.

Tomorrow the teachers will be back, and then Wednesday we won't have school for the strike. We're going to lay low and probably just have a BBQ or something (and hopefully NOT wake up in the 5 am range). The strike could last for a lot longer than one day, but for now, we're hoping that it will only affect our transportation to school for one day. If we don't go, the kids will likely have to work in the fields and won't get anything to eat.

Well that's about all I have the energy for. I need to rest up for another long day! Thanks so much for your comments and emails. It's great to hear from you!

So Much to Report, So Little Time

Alright I have about ten minutes to write before returning to Spanish class and then going to Triunfo.

Let's see...my host family continues to be wonderful. I met the two grandchildren, Melanie and Geraldine (ages 4 and 7) and they are adorable. Melanie is the hardest person to understand that I have come across on this trip, so I smile and nod a lot around her. Martha makes great food for me and I am constantly in awe of how well she keeps up with current events, often putting me to shame.

Spanish class is going pretty well, but again, frustrating that I tend to make the same mistakes over and over. The great thing about one on one classes is that they can really target your specific weaknesses, and we can use material that I'm interested in (I've been reading up on rural education in Peru, surprisingly only slightly more horrifying than education in the US).

Yesterday afternoon I made it to Triunfo for the first time. I arrived during lunchtime (GVI provides lunch and toothbrushes) and within minutes of my arrival, the entire class of first and second graders poked their heads out of the doorway, and one by one came up to give me hugs and ask me to spin them around. The teachers take off at 1:00, which is the end of the offical school day, so GVI takes over with lunch and then an hour to help with homework. The teachers aren't there because they want to be: there are more teachers than teaching positions, so they are stuck here. Their methods are very old school, where the main method of teaching is writing something on the board and having the students copy it, even though many of the first and second graders can't read or write. Then they are instructed to do a worksheet on the material, which of course they can't do. Then they get yelled at. Remember, these are kids with terrible home lives and school is merely a respite from manual labor or abuse. They don't really have an understanding of why they're there or why they should be learning, as many of them won't continue past sixth grade.

Given all this, this next month will certainly test my patience. Yesterday I just couldn't possible think of another way to explain "Write this word right here," and oftentimes the kids just say ·I can't, I can't." One little boy, who might be my favorite, Jose Antonio, was trying to do a wordfind in English. One of the words was "peach," and neither he nor I could find it. He kept looking up at me and saying in a really cute accent, "Peach, señorita, Peach!" (By the way, there are only four girls in first and second grade and the rest are little boys-perfect!) There's no doubt in my mind that this next month will be very trying in a lot of ways, but I look forward to getting to know the kids.

My first full week there should be quite interesting/disastrous. Monday is the "day of the teacher," so the teachers, to celebrate, won't be coming to school. GVI will teach all day, which seems like it will be a challenge since we have little authority. Starting Wednesday, there will be nation-wide strikes about all sorts of social issues, and the city could be closed down for up to five days, possibly making it impossible for us to get to school, which would be really unfortunate. If we do make it, I doubt the teachers will.

Tomorrow morning I leave super early to go on a 3-day trek through Colca Canyon, returning Sunday night, so don't expect to hear from me for a while (especially with the strike and everything, I'm not really sure what to expect).