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!

June 9

I had the best day at work today! I helped teach kids who were 16 and 17 and they were at a level where it was really beneficial to have someone understand English well. It was hard though because I can only tell them what sounds right without actually being able to dictate the exact rule. For instance Eleonora (the teacher I assist) thought that you should say "I have mustache" but I was pretty sure it was "I have a mustache" but I couldn't tell her why!
The kids in the older class. It's hard to get someone to respect you as a teacher when you're their age.
We play volleyball with the kids during breaks. All the girls here play volleyball and all the boys soccer. While we were playing there was a group of younger girls who would deliberately place themselves in danger of getting hit by the ball just so that when the ball came towards them they could run away screaming, only to come right back. So cute!

Playing volleyball!

Alison being mob hugged

The kids try to reach Alison to roll her rs with no success

After lunch at home, me and Alison went to INABIF and we made the mistake of showing one of the kids the snapchat filters on our phone and before we knew it we had mobs of kids following us around asking for our phones and if we gave in the phone would be consumed in a sea of eager hands and curious faces.

I show Alex the "dog" snapchat filter!

They all think it's hilarious, and even the adults find it funny when then kids make them try it! It's funny the things I take for granted that are so fascinating here like having an iPhone, but it's also interesting the things that they take for granted that I find fascinating, like how everyone here is obsessed with relationships! I was talking to two of the adults today, and they kept asking if I had a boyfriend and trying to set me up with the receptionist, a guy about my age. People here are obsessed with relationships, almost everyone has a significant other and they are always talking about their boyfriend or girlfriend and love in general. It's also a very loving culture with a lot of kissing and hugging and hand holding among even older friends. It makes the whole community seem connected and everyone is always so happy to see each other, it's my favorite thing about the Peruvian culture.

Eating Chifa!

For dinner the four volunteers, Nicole, Joyce, Alison and I decided to be adventurous and try chifa, the Peruvian shortening for Chinese food. Chifa sounds similar to the Chinese for eat food (chifan). We sat down at a restaurant and ordered, and the waitresses were mysteriously fascinated by us, even taking pictures of us from across the restaurant. Had they never had a Chinese person (Joyce whose Chinese Canadian) eat their food before? Had no one asked for chopsticks before? Had they drugged the food and were eagerly waiting for a reaction? Then we discovered it couldn't be the first one because there was a Chinese chef. He was the first Chinese person we'd seen in Ayacucho besides Joyce, there is really almost zero diversity in this city.

As we all struggled to finish out gigantic meals, we were all in a giddy mood after a long day of work and even joked that maybe they had drugged the food! We were in such a good mood that we skipped through the plaza to another restaurant to get dessert and then another for tea and then another for wifi, I've never been to so many restaurants before in one day! We all went home happy and tired!

PPK wins the election with a margin of 50.18 to 49.92! To celebrate there was a parade in the plaza with this giant chipmunk. So random.

Alison and I find an old piano in the house from the mid 1800s. It even has candlestick holders! It also sounds like it hasn't been played since then and Rudy told us his brother bought it from someone who brought it into market in a donkey cart from where it was abandoned on a country road.

June 8th

Our first alarm goes off at 5:30. It's also the family's rooster; everyone loathes that tiny bird that steals our sleep. By 7:00 when we finally do get out of bed, we are still exhausted. This morning we were particularly slow at getting ready and when we showed up to work the school door was locked! 

Our workplace

It turns out that classes start at 7:30 not 8:00, oops!

That darn rooster

Our school

The first class I went to with Professora Eleonora She warned me that the kids were a little crazy. I walked in to find thirty adorable eight year olds and I saw one passing a note to another one which was so cute and I thought they must not be that bad! However then the kid ran up to me to show me what had been written on the note and it said in Spanish "You're ugly and horrible." I was shocked; these kids are not as angelic as they look! 

Then Eleonora left and I was assigned to help in a first grade classroom, and I was excited because I had taught there yesterday with Eleonora, but the regular teacher was scary. When I first walked in the whole class got up to give me a giant group hug and the teacher yelled at them for being disorderly and for getting up during a test. They're five years old! Then I was sent to the back of the classroom without even being asked my name and graded papers while she disciplined the kids more than taught and even gave one boy a spank when he was in her way! I've also heard that another teacher pulls kids ears to punish them. I just personally don't understand how you can't realize that the use of violence in primary school makes it seem acceptable to the kids!

Alison had a great day and had gone to a local kindergarten to help as well as the school. There was a girl at the school that had lost an arm from a meat chopping accident which was a pretty crazy thing to hear, coming from the US.

Then Alison and I went home for lunch and had a classic Adrianne and Alison moment when we heard a sneeze and said bless you to each other only to both be very confused and find out it was the dog! 

In the afternoon we went to INABIF and helped out with homework and I cut out flowers for these incredibly intricate boxes the children make and sell to get money for the institution.

 The bottom part is crocheted and the top is a felt flower. It takes almost an hour to make. The kids there also found it hilarious that the name of the town I live in in the US, Boulder, translates as large rock. "You live in a large rock?!" they ask, amazed.

In the evening the four volunteers went to explore more of the city center

Another day another church. This one was closed except for one gate keeper who said he would open it up if we wanted. We said yes but expected some small church especially because Joyce could barely fit through the front door.


Joyce is too tall

 It was incredible we were almost all alone in this incredible place! It would have been even more impressive in the 1600s though. Ayacucho really is the city of churches, and I wonder if it doesn't have to do with its troubled past. It used to be the center for the infamous Shining Path gang and still has one of the highest rates of poverty in Peru, there's something about suffering that makes faith stronger. 

June 7 and I was surprised to find myself still in Peru

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.

Our small concrete room. My bed is the one with the orange cover.

Our room is the black door on the second story balcony

The harrowing stairs! The top one is three inches higher than the rest and gets me every time.

The disconnected kitchen and small garden where the chickens and dogs live.

The patio, the kitchen is to the left and back and our room is on the right.

The gorgeous vine tree thing in the patio.

The hallway to the front part of the house.

The view from outside.

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!

The third grade classroom.

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.

The impressive colonial era cathedral.

The huge space and golden center piece.

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.

Then we had dinner on the plaza and explored the city some more.

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.

June 6 We arrive in Ayacucho

The small propeller plane bumped and whirred over the Andes mountains which stuck up like knives into the sky, the sharp peaks topped with snow and glistening mountain lakes. I was reminded of the remoteness as we looked down on the dry barren landscape, we had climbed above the tree line long ago, and all that remained was hardy brown grass and cacti.

The view as we arrived in Ayacucho

Our first sight of Ayacucho! The city in the desert. The plane touched down on a dusty runway lined with cacti and crumbling concrete houses. The remoteness was even more obvious as we waited on the runway while the two or three runway workers rolled out the staircase by hand, there are flights only twice a day here (three arrive about 5:30am and three arrive at 3 or 3:30pm).

The view as we arrived in Ayacucho

When our luggage arrived we picked it up and headed out to meet our new host family. Rudy and his nephew Antonio had come to meet us. They were both extremely nice, especially since they had been waiting hours for us because they thought we were on a different flight. Rudy is an economics professor in the local university and Antonio is a student. As we drove through Ayacucho Rudy told us all about the city and the culture.

The houses here are like giant hollow bricks that have been piled on top of each other or attached together with the grace of a three year old playing Legos, all in arrays of topsy turvy structures. The streets are dusty and full of stray dogs chasing empty plastics bags or rifling though other trash. The ride home was also terrifying because of the lack of any road lines, street signs, or road rules. It's basically a free for all where every intersection is a near death experience, I've only seen two traffic lights so far.

Our home is wonderful, the front door leads into a short hallway with a few rooms and then out into the back patio which has this beautiful red vine covering one wall and a detached kitchen in the back corner. Alison and my room is on the second floor off the balcony overlooking the patio. Like the other homes ours is built out of cement blocks and our room is cement all around. We can see all of our neighbors from the balcony.

We unpacked and took a wonderful four hour nap before waking up for lunch. In Peru there is really only one meal of the day and that is lunch. Breakfast is bread and a bit of butter and marmalade, lunch is a three course affair involving soup, a platter of rice and potatoes, and usually some kind of chicken, and fruit, and then dinner is nothing more than leftover bread from breakfast. At lunch we also met the other volunteers in the house, Nicole and Joyce.

Nicole: A nineteen year old college student studying at a Catholic school in the northeast. She's smart and confident and is one of the fastest walkers I know even those she's short - and she doesn't look back.

Joyce: A seventeen year old recent high school graduate from the greater Toronto area in Canada. Even though she's only 5'8'' we've yet to meet anyone here, male or female that's taller, which goes to show how short Peruvians are. She wants to be a doctor.

In the afternoon all four volunteers took two rickshaws to a local youth center to start volunteering.

The tiny rickshaws

Lanes? Two way streets? Meh who needs them anyway.

The center is a place for children whose parents can't look after them at the present time for a variety of reasons from custody battles to work hours to having an unsafe home environment. The kids ages five to eighteen stay at the center until four and the volunteers help them learn English and do their homework. It was intimidating at first because there were so many kids and all in one big open patio but the kids are wonderful, I spent over an hour practicing English with one sixteen year old kid named Luis. He was so eager to learn and I was reminded what an advantage it is to have English here, it opens up so many opportunities, which is especially important for these kids who have been unlucky in the lottery of life. The center was severely under-resourced and it took me fifteen minutes to acquire paper and pencils, and when I finally got them I was told to watch that the kids didn't steal the pencils. The thin, wooden one cent pencils.

After work the four volunteers went for dinner in the plaza de armas, the main plaza and center of Ayacucho.

The view from the restaurant

The whole day had been a bit of a culture shock. Everything looked, sounded, smelled, and tasted different and especially for Alison who hadn't been to a third world country before. Ayacucho is a very local city and we hadn't seen but one other foreigner the entire day. It felt like the other side of the world.

June 5th finally arrived!

The morning started far, far too early. My alarm went off at 4:20 and I dragged my eyelids open to find the world dark and silent. I stumbled into the clothes I had carefully laid out the night before and grabbed the two packs I had spent a week carefully planning and packing. The day was finally here. I was leaving for a five week trip to Peru, four of which would be volunteering in Ayacucho, a remote and impoverished city, and the last week traveling the sacred valley.

The DIA stallion at dawn

Both my mum and my dad had gotten up to take me down to the airport and as we left the house we found my cat with a baby bunny rabbit in her mouth. We then spent an unexpected fifteen minutes chasing the cat chasing the bunny rabbit who had managed to free itself before I unceremoniously threw the cat into the house and slammed the door. See you in a month!

At DIA we meet up with my friend Alison who would be doing this trip with me, and we said goodbye to our parents and they left. Alison described it best by saying it felt like we were being kicked from the nest and we were going to have to learn to fly. All by ourselves we had our first scare when we miscalculated the flight time and showed up to the gate only to see the last five passengers remaining to still get on the flight! Yikes!

The journey to Peru would take over 25 hours. The first leg was Denver to Houston then a five hour layover there followed by a seven hour flight to Lima followed by another five hour layover in Lima followed by another one hour flight to Ayacucho. It was bad enough already but for unlucky Alison and I we had just run a half marathon the day before and our sore legs protested the confined position the entire way.

Before and after the half marathon

Alison even won first in our age group with a blistering time of 2:05!

Another scare happened when we got on the seven hour Lima plane assuming we would be fed dinner only to hear over the announcements that a light breakfast would be served in FIVE hours. Mortified and starving we dug around in our bags and pulled out a few granola bars, needing to eat a lot because of the run. But just as we'd given up hope a trolley trundled past with that unmistakable reheated mush scent. It turned out the announcement had been a miscommunication and we savored every bite of what we were told was chicken and rice.

In Lima airport our bags were no less than in the last five to appear out of a plane of 300 passengers and we were sure they were lost, but they arrived and just like that we were finally in Peru! And I was unceremoniously welcomed into the culture by getting yelled at by a cleaning lady in the bathroom reminding me that they don't put toilet paper in the toilet in this country. Oops.

The five hour layover in Lima was also the hardest. We arrived at 11 at night and, not being able to check in until 3 in the morning we also couldn't fall asleep on the hard floor of the public check-in wing. Instead we played card games to keep ourselves awake that slowly declined in mental capacity as we grew ever more exhausted, first it was poker, then crazy eights, then go fish, then war. By the end we were struggling to figure out which card was higher.

Yucca chips

Alison tried some fried yucca chips we found in the airport. We also had a sandwich which we think was alpaca meat because that definitely was not chicken!

We went through security and found our gate but still managed to turn a five hour layover into a close call when Alison remembered she had to buy water for her motion sickness medication last minute and we rushed onto the bus to take us to the plane.

We were expecting small but not a propeller plane! As we sat down on the tiny plane with the twenty other passengers and experienced one final 30 minute airport delay, it seemed even less truthful than at the start of the journey that we were really going to Ayacucho!

Reflection

Sunday October 25th
           So, this is the end of this blog. The end of a chapter of my life, and it's taken me a while to finish but I have now. I think Peru changed me in more ways than I can ever fully realize, but, looking back the biggest lesson I learned was just that life comes in many, many different forms and that my home state of Colorado, and my home country of the U.S.A. are just a small, small part of the great human experience. My way of living is not the only way to live, and my purpose in life is just that, my own purpose, and many people have completely different purposes. I am so incredibly grateful for my time there and every single person I met along the way, and I wouldn't change a second of it if I could, not the food poising, or getting my phone stolen, or trying Quoi, or even that horrific night in Lima airport, that is the worst night of my life. And now I look forward, to finishing High School next year and going to university, and having many, many more adventurous!

           So I know that I kind of left things on a cliffhanger, me being on a plane to Rarotonga, so if you want to keep following my adventurous as I travel to Rarotonga and New Zealand you can read all about it here.

http://kiwilandandrarotonga.blogspot.com/