The Last Hurrah

So, tomorrow classes finally start for me. It´s been almost four months and I have spent a fourth of it in a small town working with adolescent boys, a month of it traveling, a month living with host family, and just a few weeks sprinkled here and there actually living in Habitat and on a routine. I have to say, I am sort of looking forward to finally getting into the meat of the experience. Also, I have to say that I have been feeling odd about living like a tourist and enjoying the benefit of my host family and status as a Westerner who is living quite comfortably. I am sort of looking forward to the challenge of involving myself more in the lives of my students (who are poorer and have much fewer resources than even I do). And I want to do this not because I see myself necessarily as helping them a ton or being able to offer them something, but just because I want to try to accompany them and come as close as I can to feeling and knowing what life is truly like for these Peruvian children. Whether or not I will be able to overcome the obvious obstacles to this, we will see.


The only down side to it all is that pretty much nothing is planned and ready for tomorrow. I know I will be teaching 16 hours of classes with the secondary kids - but I have no idea of my schedule and haven´t planned out anything with the other english teacher. If we do it like we did last year, I will be teaching half of each class (the advanced or ¨better¨ half). I also will probably be teaching the fourth grade little ones. I really need to do some serious brainstorming for some opening activities, so if anyone has some good good ideas, please feel free to post them as comments to the blog!! I also am not too worried because I know I will not be jumping into teaching right away and I have a sense of the school and the kids since I did spend about two months with them when I first arrived.

This past week I spent in Lima - which is a suprisingly enjoyable 20 hour bus ride away. The buses - and we did ride and nicer and thus safer as well line - are pretty nice. They serve meals, the seats pretty much turn into beds, they play almost continuous movies (though quality varied from Spider Man 3 to Norbit), and they play bingo for a free return ride (which I won coming back from Lima and which will serve no purpose for me since you have to use it in a month). Some highlights of the city included the beach (which is like right off the edge of the city with this cliff, so it has some amazing views and little touristy spots), getting pooped on by and pigeon in one of the nice old churches and then being sketichly cleaned off by some random Peruvians (who may or may not have been trying to pick my pockets as well - and that isn´t just paranoia), eating some tasty tasty anticuchos on the street (anticuchos are the cows heart and it was a dollar thirty and so amazingly tasty - I can´t use that word enough), seeing some random traveling band from France perform in the middle of one of the nicer parks, and just generally enjoying city life. It made me realize how much I miss just a real real city and I was soaking up all the observing of the different markets, people, and general hustle and bustle of the city. The bus system is especially interesting as it is all privitized and so the result is a million buses going like crazy men trying to pick up fares and without any real rhyme or reason.



As promised, here finally are some photos with the accompanying, hopefully helpful-enlightening captions:









This was one of the ways we got to and from work most days on Mes de Mision. This was the safer way....































Mes de Mision (with the laguna that we checked out and provides much of the electricity to the region in the background)

This is a picture of some of the dances going through the street in Puno during the fiestas. They were all this wildly dressed.















Street meat - Lima-style. Look how happy we are!