Last week in Casa Del Fuñ
My return to 3 de Mayo wasn’t quite as graceful as I’d hoped it would be. Kelly had come to meet me at the airport, and just as we were approaching her house I sort of broke into a slow jog type thing on seeing her entire extended family out at the door to meet us. They all did a collective “Ahh” type thing when I very obviously stepped in dog poo. It’s just impossible to miss it here. Children are pension plans, and dogs are house alarms, so everyone has plenty of both. The whole gang came out to try and get me into the house when I refused until it was all gone but they kept saying it was fine and I should just come in. I decided I absolutely had to take them off but as I tried to about 3 of them dashed for my feet to stop me and dragged me poo and all into the house.
It was the start of a very cool and very crazy last week in Casa Hogar, with the eight kids I’d lived with for 2 months. I only had 5 days of work left in Casa Del Ninos. Stephen, Jenny and Aisling arrived home from Cusco a few hours after me and our Team Peru was reunited when we met Michael back in the house. But we only 2 days left as a group. The day after we arrived back, 35 of us from the place we lived and worked all went out for a meal to say goodbye to Michael. The two of us had been working as part of Maynooth Mission Outreach, a group in our college, for 8 weeks (there for 9 with one week off), and now it was time for him to leave.
On departure day, all eight Casa Hogar kids accompanied us to the airport. Again we were each given one to not lose and I’m delighted to say I didn’t. I returned Cielo just as I had found her. Michael bought sweets for everyone, including us big people and left. He was the first of our team to leave.
The place was very quiet without him but we struggled on for our final week of work. I decided to keep working while waiting for my mom to come out here to celebrate her birthday. We had big plans to do some more salsa dancing in our last week but every night we were too wrecked or had presents to buy for the people here and at home, or else we just wanted to hang out with the children.
Our last day of work was, I think, one of the best. It all started in the Scoilita, the school for the children with special needs we worked in. They put on one hell of a display for us, with dancing and cake. And every class had been given one ‘gringo’ to make cards for. I got some crazy spellings of Claire on the cards but you know, no one could say my name, so I was never really expecting them to be able to write it. The most popular spellings were Clear and Clerr. Aisling helped one class and they got it almost right with Clare.
After cake No. 1 we headed home to Casa Hogar for lunch with our housemates; the eight little people. There, there was another cake waiting for us along with some really nice food. We ate, we mingled, we took lots of photos, and then headed to our other place of work, Casa Del Ninos, in search of more cake.
And cake we did find. First, we had to work. Goes with the territory of ‘going to work’ I suppose. We had lots of goodbyes to say the couple of hundred children who come to play there everyday. My final hour in the house of fun was spent in the creche section, where I said goodbye to the really little ones and my co-workers there took advantage of my crazy height one more time in making me hang decorations.
After work all our co-workers stayed behind to give us a Peruvian send-off. Kelly made sure they played all the songs she knows I like, and we were all dragged out into the hall to dance in the middle of a big circle of people. The guys can really bust a move here. I thought them being good would make me better but it doesn’t work like that apparently, I still sucked. Looking back I wished we hadn’t danced so long, it was because of our dancing that a lot of our co-workers were in the street or in taxis, and not with their families when the earthquake struck. Because only 15 minutes after we’d been salsa-ing across the floor the whole place started rocking….
Tags: 2 - Peru
cybersusst