A Week in Review
FYI: Photos updated in last post. Now on with the story…
Who said volunteering doesn’t pay?! On Wednesday I got my first pay check in the form of a toothbrush, mouthwash, dental floss, deodorant and two bars of soap. Before you start, everyone got them. I think they were meant for the theatre festival participants who didn’t show up. One plane never arrived and the New Zealanders got sick. I thought they were a strange gift at first but it’s practical, and I was about to go looking for floss so I’m happy.
I know I said I wouldn’t blog the whole time until I start travelling and having more to write than ‘I went to work today’ so I hope it’s okay if I just quickly (yeah right) sum up the week in one entry. The week, besides Friday, because that day was so crazy, it’s going to get it’s very own.
As well as hygiene products I also get more food here than three of me could eat. We have a ‘think chicken’ motto; pretend everything is chicken! The rib cage of Tuesday’s animal was too small to possibly be chicken but I still repeated our motto while I ripped off a bit of meat. You have to be careful in a country where guinea pigs are a speciality. Wednesday lunchtime I had one of my ‘what am I doing here’ moments. I was optimistic entering the kitchen because the last time we’d had lunch in the home it had been mashed potato. I hope my stunned expression wasn’t too obvious! One half of the plate was white, the other was green and on top was some red stuff. The white stuff was clearly rice, the green turned out to be mushy peas but the red is still a mystery. It seemed to be onion and frankfurters in a red sauce. I asked Jacqueline who was sitting across from me what it was but all I got was a mouthful of Spanish back at me. She didn’t stick to my few words as she now usually does. I tried again to ask her what the hell the meat was but I wasn’t too successful.
“Is it a pig”
“Huh?”
“Like….oink oink??”
“Que?”
“Pigs don’t oink in Peru?”
To this I just got a blank expression, so I gave up. The peas and rice were very tasty. I didn’t really give the red part a fair chance to be honest. That bit ‘went missing’.
The big news of the week is our new arrival in the Casa Hogar! His name is Kevin but as we’re in a Spanish part of world, it’s pronounced ‘Kebin’. We came home from work at lunch on Wednesday and he was running around playing with his Spiderman toy. There didn’t seem to be any big introduction, or maybe we missed it, he seemed to just straight away be part of the family. He looks a little like one of Angelina Jolie’s boys. I wasn’t able to strike up one of my attempted conversations with him. Can’t imagine what it’s like to be put in a place like this, but he seems to be ok so far.
I was given what is probably the one job I never thought I’d do on Tuesday, I was a singing teacher. It’s no secret among my buddies that I have an absolutely terrible voice but when 4 kids came running up asking me to teach them an English song I just couldn’t say no. I gave them the song book and they chose ‘Jingle Bells’. It didn’t even dawn on me for a while how out of season it is to be singing that but the accompanying picture was of a winter scene and it’s winter here. That’ll do me. There was one line at the end of the chorus and even I knew how out of tune I was. I had to be quiet and put on my thinking face and pretend I was listening to them for that bit. They never copped that I stopped at the same bit every time. By the end of it, they sort of had it. They had the tune of it but the words weren’t of any language I knew.
Afterwards I made the mistake of swaying from English lessons and helping some of the older ones with maths. They’d been doing fractions for the last week and I’d figured those out okay but the equations were a completely different story. I had to solve x,y and z and then put the numbers I came up with into the equation and both sides should be equal. I solved all three. My answers were horrible, massive fractions and I noticed the examples in the book had normal whole numbers. Regardless, I battled on looking confident as three teenage girls stared at the foreign stranger who was conquering the maths they all had trouble with. I’ll never know why they don’t use calculators here. I tried to hide the hideously wrong answer I’d gotten, terrified they’d know I was a fake. When one of them moved my hand to look at the answer she just laughed, they closed their books and headed for the door. I looked after them, wondering if it would be too pathetic to follow them, when two of them came back and did a ‘Well are coming or what?’ thing. I skipped after them excitedly and ended up in the psychology department. I was a little afraid they had booked me in for an evaluation but we were there for an arts and crafts type class.
The psych department is my new favourite part of the Casa. Instead of the usual lying on a couch talking, the children do various activities like drawing and making things and the psychologists observe and talk them. Here they’ve uncovered a lot of abuse cases and other problems the kids might have. I’ve had many an interesting conversation with the kids in there, and heard a lot of scary stories. That day the girls brought me in, we made little boxes. These are the kind two little posh chocolates would come in, if you were dating someone cheap enough to buy you two chocolates! I’ve made jewellery and cards in there two. We drew pictures from books one day. Which would have been fine had they had anything other than sex education books. We found a picture of two women playing that and ignored the ‘women’s health’ bit next to the picture.
I had a delightful afternoon with Cielo that day. Cielo lives with us here and is possibly the most grown up 6 year old on the planet. Most of the kids in Casa Del Niños run up and tug at us trying to get us to play with them, and ONLY them (this can cause fights) all day. Cielo usually spends hours playing educational games in the computer room but that day I noticed her playing games on her own for an hour or so. I wasn’t even sure if she’d want me butting in, she looked content in her beret building a beautiful house with tiny blocks. I went over anyway to say hello with the few kids I had dangling from my arms. Her face lit up when she saw some people heading over to her to play. She happily let us join in and explained what we were to do. She was the Project Manager-type person. If we spoke the same language I could see myself and Cielo sitting around drinking coffee together discussing the previous night’s Desperate Housewives! But she’s six and I hate coffee! Around here games generally get flung at some Senorita to put away at the end of the day, but that’s not how Cielo does things. The blocks come in 6 different colours and there’s 6 tubs for them. But it never even dawned on me that it should be one colour per tub, they’ve just always been mixed. Cielo emptied all the tubs and started sorting, when everyone else was turning to head home for the evening. The others decided to stay and within a few minutes we had successful sorted all the blocks. It’s sometimes easy to forget the quiet ones with the others jumping and tugging at you. I must remember to look out for the little people.
Okay, last thing before I wrap up, I swear. On Saturday we had the last of the theatre groups performing here in the Casa Del Niños. I knew from the start it was going to be an ‘out there’ one, due to the fact that they performed where the audience sits and we were squashed onto the stage to watch them. They had 5 actors, two female two male. The guys were in posh suits and they women in white dresses. It all went downhill after about 20 minutes. For the first part they brushed leaves around the place, one girl screamed at herself in a mirror and the guys moshed with their long hair. The had torches and a red light so it was all very moody. I was just getting used to their abstract performance and the guys at the back were starting to chat amongst themselves when a girl put a net sheet over herself and a guy and they started kissing. I had a 6 year old next to me who wasn’t sure what all the squiggly and moving around was about. Then I’m pretty sure the girls started kissing, but the guy blowing up a condom like a balloon distracted me. I started laughing hysterically and I became the main attraction for a few moments while my co-workers tried to figure out what was wrong with me. I didn’t have the Spanish and there was no way I was miming condom. This blown up condom was still floating around later after the performance so I naturally checked, and yes I was correct. One of the girls then stripped. I kept thinking ‘That’s it, she’s not going to take off anymore’. But she was a determined young one and was soon down to her underwear in front of what was mostly a male teenage audience. She then put on guys clothes, tied up her hair and put on a hat. I think it was meant to be a sex change. Before I could decide what it was, she stripped again, this time putting on a ballerina’s tutu, and stayed like that until the end of the performance. She had whipped cream on her face for a while too.
I wasn’t sure what else could make this even more inappropriate for the children, but the male actor showed me. It was their turn to strip, two left on just their trousers and one went down to his underwear. It was a navy and white stripped vest and jocks. When he danced around, he looked like a gay sailor. He then gave himself a bath with a bucket. When he was soaking wet he grabbed one of the partially naked guys, sat him in a chair and started pouring what looked like chocolate sauce all over him. The other guy held the red light over them and the girls rocked back and forth while seated in front of them. My co-workers seemed to have other places to be and I found myself alone on that side of the stage trying to keep a load of teenagers quiet while looking at what I hope was the most erotic thing they’ve seen. They pulled up some people to dance to Gwen Stefani’s ‘What you waiting for?’ towards the end. The guy dancing with the girl in her bra who was covered with cream seemed more frightened than excited about the situation. The girls were less impressed about dancing with the wet guys. The now topless gay sailor had to kneel down to be almost as small as his dance partner.
At the end, they gave out glasses of Inca Cola, but most of the young ones just darted for the door. I was still in shock at what I’d seen, and even more shocked that I seemed to be the only one shocked! Some of the performances we’d seen had been all talking and therefore painful for those of us who didn’t understand, so at least it kept me entertained for the hour.
In my effort to write a shorter blog, I have ended up writing my longest yet (take that Sharon!). I promise my second next one will be shorter (next one is also long). I will also try to use less brackets (they do get annoying don’t they)!
Chau!
Tags: 2 - Peru
cybersusst