June 10

Today was a long, long Friday. Friday's are always long but today surpassed them all. We woke up at 6:30 and headed out for work. We have yet to not arrive to work late, and we didn't make it today either. It's getting really bad. Today the third graders were learning the names of English fruit by making a fruit salad. We helped them peel, cut and mix the fruit. I was a little nervous at first because the eight year old kids were using these giant knives, but they seemed to get the hang of it pretty quickly. I cut one of the pieces of banana into a star and Carlos spent the rest of the time trying to make another one with little success. Poor kid! At the end we all enjoyed our fruit and germs together. There are a lot more types of fruit here than in the US. Some like Maracuya and fruit that grows on cactii are very sour and full of giant seeds. Others like the orange bananas and grapes with seeds are almost normal, my favorite fruit apples are terrible here though! Tiny and mushy!

Alison braves an orange banana?!

Fruit salad!

By the time we finally got done with the salad, cleaned everything up, and helped one girl who did manage to cut her finger and another who had a blood nose it was already 1:45 and our work at INABIF starts at 2. With nothing else to eat we had to take a mottotaxi straight there. The kids were awesome as usual and me and ten year old Alex created a drawing where we would each add something new to it in turns. It ended up looking hilarious! I said it looked like an alien and he told me that he had actually seen aliens, apparently he'd seen some late one night on the street and they had strange circular heads. I didn't know what to say.
We were hungry but we stayed an hour and a half later anyway to help one of the workers cut out paper letters. Even though it was a hard for us it took a lot off her plate. By the time we walked home it was six and it had been almost 12 hours since we left the house. But just before going in we met Nicole on the street who said that there was a neighborhood party down in the community's plaza. We decided to go check it out and ran in to quickly change before heading down with the family's cook Merilyn. She lived in a tiny two room shack on the roof with her two young kids. One room is the living room and the other is the bathroom. She left her abusive husband and it is now just the three of them, but she also has two kids in college.

Neils

This is the bedroom/kitchen/living room and the little boy is Neils. He is the sweetest kid I have ever met and we often play soccer with him up on the roof. The cook then offered to go with us to the block party and we agreed. It was the block party to end all block parties. It was a huge concert but not for pop music or anything but traditional Peruvian music! The lead singer even came down from the stage and took a picture with me! It was one of the most unexpected and wonderful events that I've ever been to!

The lead singer!

Marilyn met up with some friends of hers who were all twenty something college students and they taught us to dance traditional Peruvian dances to the music. We started holding hands in a big circle but then also danced with a partner. There's a lot of hopping and kicking your foot in the middle, it was incredible! And to finish off a wonderful night, as all of the 33 cathedrals struck midnight a giant framework of fireworks exploded ten feet from us and they were setting off fireworks into the sky even closer!

We got home a little after one, and on the way back we were followed by some pretty scary drunkards who kept insisting they wanted to dance with us and clapping. We had both Merilyn and one of her friends, Luis, escort us though so we felt relatively safe but it just goes to show how careful you need to be here, especially because we stand out so much.
When we got home we collapsed into bed only to spot a MASSIVE spider on one of our walls, both Alison and I ran out screaming. She's very afraid of them and I'm okay with them up to a certain size but this definitely surpassed that size! We ran and got the bravest one of us all Nicole and she came up to our room.
She tried to flick the spider outside through the door but then the worst case scenario happened. It not only did not go out the door but we couldn't find it in our room! After ten minutes of terrified searching we evacuated to the living room and slept on the couches. Nicole joined us as Joyce had been feeling awful all day and throwing up. It's such a bummer to get sick out here we all hope she gets better soon! At three o'clock we FINALLY got to sleep after the longest day ever!

Evacuation!