More Dancing Pictures

After getting involved with this dance group, we have now found ourselves ministars and have been invited (the group has been invited, I mean) to dance every weekend in this month. The nice plus side? Lot´s of good pictures and unforgettable memories. This past Saturday, we danced at a concert. So although people were not paying to see us, we preformed at a pay-to-enter event. Maybe the first time I have done that in my life.....

Even though it was at night and we are entering winter, Seamus and I were sweating like crazy.

We got to lead the way for our group and clear a path through the drunk concert goers, while stepping over bottles of beer on the ground. And even though we were not always coordinated, I think we did a darn good job.

This photo is from May 3rd, and the quality is low, but its the best shot of us dancing and in our full get-up.

Some Not-As-Exciting-As-I-Was-Hoping-Photos

Here are a few fun shots from last weekend´s dancing.






Here is a shot of the end of the mass for the Fiesta de las Cruces in the Cathedral. There were over a hundred crosses parading out.










The four of us friends dressed up before heading out to dance. Seamus and I are Mistis, while Cara and our friend Karina are Cholitas. The costumes were quite wild.







We had to wait for hours before dancing, so to handle the anxiety, Seamus and I played around a bit in our crazy costumes. By the way, the whole idea of our role in the dance was to be real high energy, scream a lot, and to coqutear (or flirt) with the crowd. If I haven´t made it clear yet, I had barrels of fun.

Wild Wild Week

Wow. Well, so, it is just after 8 in the morning on a Thursday morning and after not hearing the start of school bell, I went outside to see what was going on to find no students anywhere. Suddenly it dawned upon me that because of a 6.5 - that is right, 6.5 - magnitude earthquake last night, there would not be classes. (If you read Spanish, check out this website for news on the quake: http://www.correoperu.com.pe/correo/ciudad.php?txtEdi_id=6).

The quake last night was noticable and strong - we went running out of our house and power was knocked out - but I had no idea at the time that it was a 6.5. The epicenter was also just 60 miles away. Luckily there was no real damage and no injuries here in Habitat. The experience was thrilling in some ways and terrifying in others, but at least now I am glad to have a sense of what a real earthquake would be like and hopefully would know what to do.

The events of the last 12 hours are just part of what has been a bizarre and adreneline-filled week. It began on Saturday with Nate´s birthday, and then Sunday and Monday we danced morenada in the Fiesta de las Cruces (which was incredibly thrilling and wonderful and I will write more about this when I can post the pictures), and yesterday I found out that we actually won the dance contest on Monday night. Needless to say, it has been an exciting and fun time to be in Tacna, and I promise I will try to detail what the dancing was like when I get my camera back.

Outside the Classroom

One of my duties as a co-tutor (tutoria is best described, in Cara´s apt words, as a beefed-up homeroom/guidance counseling) is to visit the homes of the students. This aspect allows us to better get a sense of the student outside of the school building and to build a relationship and level of communication with the parents for any issues or concerns that arise.

This past weekend I visited the house of a student named Leonardo, who lives on a farm about 10 minutes or so away by bus. On a small side note, his family gave me about 4 kilos of grapes, which I have been eating quite greedily (and suffering the consequences in my belly) for four days now). Leonardo had spent his whole childhood attending Cristo Rey, the elite Jesuit school that is the best in Tacna, on scholarship. At the end of last year, he was asked to leave because of his academics. Over the first few months of this year, I have found him to me an incredible worker and have a spirit to want to suceed, but also to be incredibly nervous and struggle with making connections from practice exercises to other work. Leonardo clearly has some learning and even emotional issues, but the extent to which he suffers from these truly only poured out at the house visit.

As we were sitting in his chacra (farm) and talking with him and his parents, I was trying to broach the subject of how he has been adjusting to Miguel Pro, and so I asked Leonardo about what activities he was involved in at Cristo Rey. This opened the way to Leonardo pouring out about he feels like he has never followed through with what he has started in his life (whether it be an extra taller on making ceramics, helping with teaching catechesis classes, or graduating from Miguel Pro). Additionally, he expressed the disappointment and guilt that his mother had been pressuring on him since the end of last year. He described in detail his last encounters with the teachers who supported him and his few friends, mentioning over and over how he felt like he lied to them by saying he would see them next year and not admitting that he would not be returning.

The tutor who I work with, Lizbeth (who happens to be eight months pregnant, work in three different educational institutions - she works until 5:00 on Sundays!) handled the situation very well, both talking with the parents about how they need to be supportive and help him follow through with his dreams, while also making sure Leonardo felt that he needed to be responsible too for his grades and the path his life has gone down.

For me, this student particularly hits a nerve because he is such a lonely, but good person (and works so hard), but clearly has trouble communicating with others, processing information, managing tension and stress, and just generally handling daily interaction and life. I want the best for him and I want him to become a Jesuit dentist (his two dreams that he adamently told his mother he could accomplish together), but there are so many obstacles and so much that he struggles with.

Anyway, I have some ideas and have undertaken a mission to at the very least help boost Leonardo´s self image. With my compañero Nate at Cristo Rey, we are getting his ex-teachers and his friends from there to write little notes letting him know they still think about him, are not disappointed in him, and that they all want the best for him. In English class, I have noticed that he can apply a rubric or a chart to exercises relatively well, so I make him his own for each new grammatical theme we discuss. And lastly, I am going to try to help integrate him socially into the 4th years as best as I can by bringing him into my recess conversations with the students or including him on different committees or in different activities.

I hope too that maybe, at the least, bringing a little more warmth and interest to his life will lift his spirits a bit. We will see.

Just a Musing

As I sneak a few minutes of internet on the director´s computer (they finally put internet in the teacher´s lounge yesterday but then of course it stopped working), I hear the sounds of students marching outside as they prepare themselves to be policia escolar. Oh Peru.....

Holy Week

Possibly one of the biggest deals of the year, Holy Week came and went here in Tacna with a lot to do. Despite having Thursday and Friday as holidays, I feel like I did more and slept less last weekend than I have all year so far.

It all started last week with a Friday night reconciliation service and then an early Saturday morning hike to climb the nearby sand dune. It was a small pilgrimage of sorts, and here is the evidence (look how tired my homeroom students look at 3 in the morning. If only they were that calm in class.....):

Wednesday with our first volleyball game as Team Habitat Forever in the local tournament. And though it pains me to say it, we are horrible. With all of the neighborhood out en masse to watch, we certainly provided a lot of entertainment with our inability to set each other up and numerous shots to the face. Oh well.

Thursday I took a nice little trip with my goddaughter (I was the padrino of her first communion, so it`s not quite Godfather-like, though she insists on calling me Padrino all the time) and her mother to visit the nearby valley of Tarata. There we did some walking around and for me it was super special to see Leslie enjoy the outdoors and the change of scenery. She had never travelled outside of Tacna before, so it was very special for her. We also ate some delicious fruit and I bought lots of yummy manna - kind of like big, sweet popcorn.

Friday I went to my host family, and since we are in a super Catholic country, there is no meat to be found in the entire country on this day. We feasted on some fried rice with seafood and some fried calamari - all homemade in the house. Then I returned to Habitat for some Viacruces, or stations of the cross. Although it was not as intense as last year, it still involved some scenes of cruifixtion and some carrying around of a big cross (see photo).

Saturday night I participated in an all-night vigil with the kids of the youth group with whom I worked last year. I have not had a chance to work as much with them since it is out in the neighborhood where I taught, but it was great to share this special time with them. We went to the vigil mass and then had some reflections, watched Passion of the Christ, and had a little celebration for the Resurrection. I got very little sleep though, and was very exhausted all Sunday. Easter was a food-filled day as we invited the neighbors over for breakfast and chatting (see below), then I went to my host family`s for lunch and chatted some more, and then I came home to run (to make space in my belly) and nap before a community dinner of quinua risotto (very very delicious creation made possible by Cara).

So, all in all, very busy and very enjoyable - but what more can you ask out of life?

When Life Strikes

A few weekends ago, as I breakfasted with my host family (and was taking fire for being the chico light and choosing sleep over late night activities), some tough news arrived to the household. An uncle of the family--who was also the host father of a former volunteer and someone whose house I would visit once every month or so last year--had passed away. Though not particularly close with him, he was someone I had interacted with often since arriving down here and had even planned on visiting the week before he died (but had forgotten).
I don`t want to make it seem like all I thought about after this event was my own feelings and reactions (obviously, it was incredibly hard for the family and their emotional rollercoaster and attempts to process his death and burial was very moving), but I did feel particularly moved in ways that I had never experienced before.

One particularly odd moment of the day was when I found myself, dressed in a suit, with six other people in the back of a pickup truck, holding on by one finger for dear life, sweating because of the nervousness of preparing for reading a letter at the burial, and generally just emotionally overwhelmed as we made our way from the funeral mass up to the cemetary. I had been given the job of presenting and reading part of a letter from the volunteer who had been down here two years and become part of the family. My reading followed the family´s own discourse at the gravesite and I both felt incredibly sorrowful and out-of-place. I accomplished my task without any big mistakes and I do feel appreciative to be able to have done something for the family on that day, but I could not help but ask myself why I was there, with all the attention, and trying to do service to the incredible life of a man, who in contrast to the many friends and extended family there that day I barely knew. In retrospect, I believe that in some way it reflected even more on who he was (since he always opened his home and took in many at first ¨random¨ people to share and celebrate with).

Nevertheless, in my limited experience with death and the discomfort at times of being an outsider down here, I felt very torn at the time. If anything, those emotions speak more to my own doubts and my American culture; I don´t think there was a moment that anyone there felt that I would have been out of place. So many of the Peruvians we know have come to see us as one of the clan--and I feel incredibly blessed for that acceptance and inclusion. I myself have been inspired to write some heartfelt letters to my own host family, who is so giving, so joking, so inclusive, and just generally so happy to share with me. They will never replace those for whom I care and love in the States, but they have also made me feel a shared humanity across spaces of cultural and distance that I never had thought possible before.

On that note, happy Easter to all, and my you all pass it well, in good health, and in the good company of family and friends.