The morning started off early with the family's rooster sounding the alarm at 5:30. Me and Alison tried to get a few more moments of precious sleep but all too soon the phone alarm went off. Since neither of us are morning people we have a set of alarms that go off: the first at 6:45 then the second at 6:50 then the first snooze at 6:53 then a third alarm at 6:55 and the a second snooze at 6:58 then a fourth alarm at 7:00 and then we finally resign ourselves to getting up. At first I thought I was back in my bed in the U.S. and it was weird that we were still in Peru, I had to remind myself that no, that wasn't a dream but something I actually did.
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| Our small concrete room. My bed is the one with the orange cover. |
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| Our room is the black door on the second story balcony |
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| The harrowing stairs! The top one is three inches higher than the rest and gets me every time. |
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| The disconnected kitchen and small garden where the chickens and dogs live. |
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| The patio, the kitchen is to the left and back and our room is on the right. |
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| The gorgeous vine tree thing in the patio. |
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| The hallway to the front part of the house. |
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| The view from outside. |
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| Our street. |
Alison and I had to leave at 7:30 to get to our new job at a local public school teaching English. We were assigned different teachers and for the first time in three days we parted ways. I was assigned to help Professora Eleonora and she is a tall, skinny woman who welcomed me into her class right off the bat which was absolutely wonderful. I was very helpful in the class, going around and checking the kids' work and helping with pronunciation. The kids had a wide range of personalities, there were some that were clearly very smart, and some that were very social, and some who got bored easily and would make trouble. There was even a girl in my class with my Spanish name Adrianna, she had a learning disability and would hear a phrase and then repeat it loudly for ten seconds or so, and it was hard to include her into the class activities. While reviewing another kid Carlos' work he spent fifteen minutes trying to convince me that a giraffe was larger than an elephant.
The next class I did I was reunited with Alison and Alison's teacher Katia as we took on a class of almost forty first graders.
Most of the students were hypnotized by our blue eyes and Alison's blonde hair and said we looked like princesses. Most of the girls are obsessed with Disney princesses and even the boys have favorite princes. They asked if we'd been to Disneyland and said they'd like to go except it cost "millions of hundreds of dollars." The school is very underprivileged, some kids don't have notebooks or even pencils and there is no technology.
My next class I worked again with Eleonora with third graders and I got my first chance to lead an activity which was reading the instructions for a project in English, First, Next, Then, Finally, except I kept messing up the order of the words and confusing the class terribly! I felt terrible!
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| The third grade classroom. |
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In the afternoon Alison and I returned to the youth center, INABIF, after another three course lunch that filled us up to our ears. This time we helped kids with their homework and I spent most of my time helping classmates Maria and David with a survey that they had to do for math class of 20 of their classmates favorite activities. Upon reading that she had to ask other people, Maria promptly made up her own numbers, and when I pointed out that they should at least add up to 20 she simply put the number 20 next to the word students on the bar graph they were creating from the data. David couldn't have been more different, he was shy and would only ask his classmates if I went with him. However if I left Maria alone she would complain and call out for attention, or fall out of her chair so that I would come back to see if she was alright. I felt both their behaviors were a product of their hard circumstances, Maria needing attention and David used to not getting it. The poverty was also evident when I was told to be careful that the kids didn't steal the 5 cent pencils we were using.
After work Nicole, Joyce, Alison and I went to the main square and explored around, going into the main cathedral.
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| The impressive colonial era cathedral. |
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| The huge space and golden center piece. |
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| One of the incredibly ornate shrines on the sides of the cathedral. |
Nicole is a Catholic and even goes to a catholic university and was explaining everything as we went through which was super interesting.
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Then we had dinner on the plaza and explored the city some more.
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What we found was no salsa spots, a empty karaoke bar and this empty arcade. Which was strange, stranger, and even stranger. After that we decided to go home.
