Claire takes on the world….

I’ve discovered that being one of the last two people still on a bus when it is driving into it’s little bus house for the night and still looking out for your stop is stupid and crazily optimistic. That’s the predicatment myself and Michael found ourselves in in the dead of night (or it may have been 9pm). I’ll tell you about that soon. But first:

12 hours earlier
Monday was our first day of work in the special needs school down the road (dammit I’m back to not remembering names here). I’ll have the name of the school for tomorrow. This establishment is one of three set up by the Irish priest, Fr. Tony, who’s been here for 12 years. His other two are Casa Hogar, in which I live, and Casa Del Ninos. It’s a primary school but a good few of the students are older than primary school age. For one reason or another they fell behind in school and failed a year. Some of them repeatedly fail and end up hating school so much they refuse to go. It’s not their fault they fail really, with only 4 hours of school a day there’s not much chance for any special attention from the teacher. This school gives the student a chance to work on their weaknesses, be it maths or spelling, and then the plan is to get them back into mainstream school.

I was put in the physical education-type class to learn the ropes; the classroom with the spongy multi-coloured floor. I was fairly shocked to see that Ruth, who is the director of Casa Del Ninos from Tuesday to Saturday, is the Phys Ed teacher here on a Monday. These people just never rest. Most of the activities we were doing were hand-eye co-ordination exercises. We started out with some drumming. We had to tap along to the beat. Being an ex-drummer (I was in a band once, y’know) I let loose a bit on the chorus. The teacher seemed to appreciate it. I think I put a bit of life into those Spanish nursery rhymes. We did some dancing then. The aim was to get our hand and legs doing the same thing. Trickier than you might think. We had to tie a piece of rope around one of our ankles and pull it upwards to the beat. We then did that for various parts of the body. When it got to the neck, I had to stop and look in astonishment as these students innocently tied a rope around their necks and pulled up.

We finished up with some hula-hoop work. Years of package holidays has made me quite the dab hand at the hula-hoop so I had a competition with some of the kids. When we were finished messing, we were told to stand in our hoops and the teacher said ‘In’ and ‘Out’ and we had jump in, then out. She got faster and faster and changed the sequence and if someone went in when they were meant to be out, they had to sit out the rest of the game. I’m a little ashamed to say my competitive streak came out again. But I did let some others win a few times. When we were singing some nursery rhymes Humpty Dumpty came on in English. Everyone was a little confused as to how an English one got on there. Ruth asked me what it meant. I had to tell the story in my pigeon Spanish of how an egg, who is also a boy, was sitting on a wall, fell off and died. Think I upset a few of the little ones.

After school (which because we work in Peru is 1pm!!) we walked home with the kids from Casa Hogar who were also on their way home. I noticed Maria, the second oldest, was wearing a different jacket to the rest of them. It looked like a team of some sort and she was holding a baton. Not knowing the Spanish for majorette, I took her baton and started marching and twirling it around saying ‘You do this, ya???’ She looked at me utterly disgusted (should have known that is not Maria’s style). The ‘minder guy’, Abel, laughed and said ‘No, police!’ and pointed to her police badge. I quickly handed back the baton and checked out her many school police badges. I’m not quite sure what she is, I’ll investigate and get back to you, but I think it’s like the hall monitor system they have in North America, where students patrol the corridors. In Peru they seem to be taking the iron fist route with those batons.

I said at the end of my last blog that I was in no rush to get back to the rich side of Lima. Well about 12 hours after writing that I was back there. We wanted to go to the beach so the taxi driver left us in the mall that was over looking the beach. We were right next to the beach, could even hear the waves but there was a 100 foot drop or so (could have been 20 I’m bad at guessing) between us and it. We never found the steps so we never got there. It looks great though. Not in a white sand way or anything, but the surf looks good. I found what may become my favourite sport. Paragliding. It’s like skydiving but instead of jumping from a plane you run off a cliff, or get pushed off. The parachute is shaped differently which enables the ‘pilot’ to go up as well as down. It seems to be a lot calmer and more relaxed than skydiving. Everyone seemed to be moving slowly and no one was screaming. That’s more my style! We were a little too tired to do it that day but it is now firmly on my to-do list.

I could give you a step by step description of our day in the big smoke but a city’s a city. We weren’t in the centre of Lima, it was the Miraflores area. The really posh bit. The shorts I wanted to buy there were $58. A little steep when you consider my pants last week were $4. We browsed, we walked, had fast food and went to church.
Getting home was a bit of an adventure. We got on our No. 73 at 7.15 after being assured that it would only take an hour and a half to get home. A few hundred yards down the road the bus stopped and everyone started getting out. I’d been listening to my ipod and didn’t realise what was going on so I jumped for the now free seats and made myself comfortable. Then the bus started making this scary hissing sound and the conductor simultaneously started rushing people off in a fairly urgent manner. My fire phobia kicked in and I don’t think I even touched the steps getting off that bus. I remembered in the blur of it all seeing his finger pointing at the bus behind so I quickly shuffled on that. Once on, I realised that it had been a routine bus changeover and his urgency had only been because the second bus was leaving.
We were a good hour into the journey before I stared questioning our decision to blindly get on the second bus. It seemed to be the same number and the same colour with the same neon lights and cheesy music. When we passed the supermarket not far from our place I figured we were ok. Then it all went terribly wrong. Around 9pm Michael thought to ask the conducter when we would be arriving in Huandoy. To which he replied we would not be going there. We were ready to jump and get a taxi but Mr. Conductor assured us that we would be ok. This is Peru and the people like to look after lost foreigners. We arrived into what looked like the place buses are kept at night, and after the elderly man woke up and jumped off, it was only me and Mike. Mr. C escorted us off the bus and brought us to the security man on duty, like two children lost in a supermarket. He brought us over to where the Huandoy bus should be. He brought us to a curb and told us to stand there, so naturally we did. A few minutes later he returned to escort us to another bus. There were only the two of us on the bus and we gave the driver our address. I got extremely excited thinking we were getting a lift home on a bus. Michael quickly burst my bubble and explained that he had not told the driver where to go but just where to let us off. Soon into the journey other people got on and our private bus trip was ruined.
We managed to get lost on the short walk home too and I gave up our ‘roughing it’ plan with the public transport and hailed a moto. It’s sort of like an auto rickshaw they have in India. It’s a customized motorbike. The front-half is a motorbike and the back is a bench where two people can sit. Then there is a car-type frame around it. I’ve checked it out and these things cost $1800 here so mom if you’re reading; next birthday please.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 1:36 am and is filed under 2 - Peru. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.