Sunday June 26th and I go to the upper barios

The morning was spent doing chores around the house, and somehow the monotony of the tasks made me feel like a real part of the family. I thought that doing laundry by hand would be awful, but it turns out to be fun. It's a great chance to talk and laugh with the others, and there isn't a better view than from our rooftop.

Then we made a salad for lunch, and I tried to help but failed miserably. It turns out you can't eat the peels of vegetables here because they could make you sick, but I only discovered this after I'd sliced and diced a whole cucumber and it took some time to fix the mistake.

                                                        Alison excited about a lettuce.

          After lunch Katia and Uziel were going to volunteer with an organization that brings together art instructors with kids who live high up in the upper barrios, where poverty is most desperate and give them free arts classes.
         Uziel is a theater teacher and is teaching his group of kids a play called street kids which sounds depressing, but is actually about the hopes, dreams and imagination of the kids and is really good.
         It's hard to make progress though because each time different kids keep showing up, and when Uziel tries to teach them they are very shy and never volunteer. It must be hard to have the self confidence needed to want to be an actor when so much else in your life is hard. These kids have to worry about the basics, shelter, food and water, and so art and acting is outside the norm for them, and for most of them this is their first experience acting.  can see why Uziel and the organization do the class, it teaches the kids how to express themselves in a new way and broadens their horizons on what they can do and achieve. At the end of the July there will be a competition with all the other plays from different neighborhoods, including the one that Katia and Alison are rehearsing.

                                                   It's an alpaca!!!! I saw an alpaca!

                                             The community center where we worked.

Uziel teaching the kids. There was also one kid, Antonio, who he was teaching to use stilts (you can see him in the background). Apparently when Uziel was a teen he used to make money in the summers by performing on stilts, who would have guessed!

                              The barrio after dark. Uziel told me it's a different reality here.

              The only way to get to these remote neighborhoods is to ride the rickety buses. This is absolutely the worst, and I have discovered I hate them. There are so many people on each bus that you can barely move, and I usually find myself barely holding on to anything to keep me stable as the bus speeds down the busy roads, careening around corners and not slowing down for bumps. Through all of this, I can't actually see what's happening because I'm to tall to see out the windows, and usually there's a layer of people around me anyway, so I can't prepare myself for any of the ways in which I'm thrown about and it's all I can do not to go flying into surrounding people.

             After work me and Uziel took the bus and then walked back to the restaurant. Uziel had to stop outside of every single restaurant because the one hundredth COPA America final (soccer) was on and it was Argentina vs. Chile. The streets were silent and everyone was packed into the restaurants watching excitedly.
        Along with the game there was a fancy dinner at Mono Sazon for all the people that had worked on the fair, the one that Katia & Uziel (or as I have now dubbed them KUte) had performed their play in. The dinner not surprisingly consisted of chicken, potatoes, and rice, which seem to be about the only thing people eat here. There must be a small chicken genocide by this point just for my meals. Everyone gave speeches about how much they enjoyed the fair and thanked different people which I thought was so nice, and exemplified the friendly, community culture in Peru, something we could work towards in the U.S.
         In the COPA America final, not one but two players injured themselves on the same gol post, and then it went to penalty shootouts after a 0-0 draw and star player Messi missed making Chile the winners. I cannot describe the reaction to Messi missing in the restaurant it was so crazy.