On Wednesday we began volunteering. A bit of preface:

In Lima, Bruce Peru runs three schools. We live in Miraflores, which I previously mentioned is one of the the more wealthy barrios of Lima. The schools are in the poorer districts at least an hour from Miraflores. To get to either school, you have to catch a combi, which is a van that has specific routes it runs through the city. Usually, you just look at the number on the top of the van but if not, you can just listen out as there’s a guy that hangs out the window to tell you where they’re going. Sometimes he’ll even hop out and try to get passengers to come in the van as if they might be able to be persuaded…. Peruvian logic.

In any case, there are three schools which are in two completely different areas of town. Pamplona is the first district and there are two schools there, Nazarena and Minas. Villa el Salvador is the second and there’s only one school there. Pamplona was said to be drastically poorer than Villa el Salvador but the children, in both schools, are much better behaved. At Villa el Salvador, some of the kids are really great students but others are completely obstinant and even dangerous when they get upset for being repremanded.

On Wednesday, Dennis and Jos decided Andy and I should go to Pamplona, presumably so we wouldn’t be scared off! hahah! We woke up at 7am to get ready, eat breakfast, and help butter the bread we’d be giving to the kids for lunch. By 8:15, we were on combi 33 jetting out of Miraflores. For the first 20 minutes of the ride, we were standing up. Well, I was standing up. Thanks to their being taller than 90% of Latin America, Andy and Jos were hunkering over, all of us gripping the hand rails as the little combi swung around corners, honking and swerving to miss cars and pedestrians. Balance is key.

So for the first 20 minutes of the ride, all I could see were the tops of passenger’s heads and Andy swaying around the inside of the combi, trying in vain to hold on to the bag of bread and the hand rail while still maintaining balance. As soon as the combi cleared out, all three of us found seats, the boys wedging their bohemoth Western legs between the seats. Now I could look out the windows.

See, the buildings in Miraflores are often two or more stories. There are tall apartment buildings, little parks here and there, and fast food restaurants just like in the States. There’s even a Gold’s gym… weird. When I sat down, we were still in a section of town that resembled Miraflores. Same architecture and cleanliness for the most part. I started talking to Jos and couldn´t have been talking for more than 5 minutes. When I looked back out the window, the cityscape had changed drastically. Where there were fast food restaurants and parks, there were tightly packed edifices half-finished openly displaying unpainted brick. The roads were no longer paved and lined with gutters and trees… now they were all dirt, mud actually as the morning mist had saturated the top layer of dirt. There were no longer signs on any of the buildings and, upon closer inspection, it looked like businesses were interspersed with residences. Where there was a department store in Miraflores, there were little home owned places, mostly the typical little general stores and snack shops with cement floors and bars over the entrance.

I was amazed. In a matter of moments, we’d passed from the first world to the third world (or whatever terms you want to use for developed and less developed areas). It was like there was a line drawn between the two and I had missed it. I promised myself I’d find the line on the way home, but for now I was flipping through mental snapshots of different places I’d been that looked similar. La Paz, Bolivia came to mind, particularly in reference to the unfinished top floors of the brick buildings strewn alongside the road.

Whether it’s true or not, someone told me that, in Bolivia, the goverment pays a little extra to people who are building their homes. To continue receiving this extra money, many people begin building a second or third story on their houses with absolutely no intention of finishing it. As long as it’s unfinished, they’ll continue receiving money, so when you’re riding around town, you see that most houses have an unfinished top floor with rebarb sticking out the top and bricks laying around up there. I wondered if the same was true in Peru, warranting all the unfinished buildings in this part of town.

Our combi continued through these areas, winding around small hills, through seemingly endless haphazard habitation. Where did it end? Jos said you could drive for another hour and not find the end of it. Looking around at all the people living their daily lives, I got that old familiar feeling of exasperation that I hate so much. It makes me wonder what the point of life is and often times I can’t answer it in reference to the people who live in these tiny places with little or no impression on the outside world. But then I look at my own life and wonder how useful I am. If they’re happy, why wonder if there’s some other purpose in their lives. Maybe that IS the point of life… to be happy. But there’s a lot of people who are happy who don’t matter. Aren’t there? It seriously puts me off to think about crap like that but I can’t help it. Everytime I drive through a one-horse town I do it. I’ve done it since I was a little kid riding in the camper passing exits in the middle of nowhere and wondering what the people who live there do. I feel ashamed for doubting the purpose of people’s lives but hear me when I say I usually can’t find any greater point to my own life when I turn the microscope on myself.

Anyway, I digress. We arrived to Pamplona around 9:15 and started walking. Upon exiting the bus, a few elements of the town struck me. First, the smell. It was unlike anything I had ever smelled before and it was kind of unexpected. It wasn’t like the putrid worn-leather smell of a Bolivian bus or the fetid stink of stagnant, drying urine on urban concrete. It was sort of a mix of hot soup, mud and maybe a slight twinge of garbage, but not overbearingly so. Although it may sound odd, I couldn’t decide at first whether it was a good smell or a bad smell. I mean, there was the soup but then there was the little bit of garbage. Hmmmmm….

Looking around, I worked out pretty quickly where certain elements of the smell came from. First of all, it was muddy, which was befuddling in itself. Why was it muddy when it hadn´t rained? Looking around, you saw that you were standing in a cloud. Somehow our little combi had secretly transported us to the top of a pretty significant mountain. The geography of Lima is a lot like Los Angeles. It’s on the Pacific Ocean, so there’s that misty, watery cloud of humidity that comes off the sea. Normally, it would burn off or the wind would transport it away but Lima is surrounded by mountains that don’t encourage circulation. The effect in Miraflores is that it’s always cloudy. And here, on the side of one of the mountains that blocks in the humidity, you find yourself standing in the clouds you can see in Miraflores. With all the wet clouds, the ground is constantly saturated, not to the point of making puddles but definitely to the point of maintaining a thin layer of stinky mud.

Another ingredient of the smell, the soup, became obvious as we began walking. Just in front of us, an older more indigenous-looking woman with battered skin stepped out onto the front stoop of her house with a giant red plastic bucket. Judging by the way her body strained and swayed slightly under the weight of the bucket, I assumed it was filled with liquid. Assumption affirmed… with one swift movement, she guided the bucket from her shoulder, around the back, and out onto the street, all the while maintaining her grip. The contents of the bucket, now flying through the air, were a thin brown with little chunklets and bits of forcefully sqeezed lime peels. It hit the ground about 20 feet uphill and began trickling down to us, a waft of salty soup reaching us first. So that not only explained the soup smell as the bucket content was probably lots of left overs from dinner the night before or just cooking waste, it also explained the thicker patches of mud.

The garabage ingredient wasn´t too hard to identify either as you didn´t have to look far to see a pile of garbage. Each one was surrounded by skinny, mange-consumed dogs picking around in ripped open bags and fighting over scraps. Strangely though, the smell wasn’t inundated with garbage. I guess the dogs ate most of what makes that typical garbage smell.

A second element of the town that struck me was the prolific amount of dogs running around. The poor pups look completely battered too with scars on their faces, skinny but not emaciated, and many absolutely ravaged with mange, some to the point of not being able to tell what color they’d be as they have so little hair. One dog I saw was about 75% scab and still scratching away at the bleeding areas. It made my heart hurt and I suddenly felt so horrible for throwing out my dinner scraps last night. I should have saved them for one of these pitiful-looking dogs.

What’s worse, you notice that none of the boy dogs are neutered and many of the girl dogs are heavy laden with obvious signs of recent pregnancy. You don’t have to observe too long to notice that the dogs are constantly hard at work making new dogs, so there will always be way too many dogs in those neighborhoods. It’s terrible to think that survival of the fittest still befalls animals that humans domesticated. I could go on a soap-box about our responsibility as humans to take care of the animals we domesticated but I’ll spare you.

A third thing that struck me but that I had been warned of was the architecture, if you could call it that. Really, it´s more a matter of building materials. Most of the houses there are one room, maybe two, made of plywood and topped with either a piece of plastic or a piece of tin. But at least here, there’s a bit of space between the little buildings. In Bolivia, they were all strung together, which seems like it would offer a really uncomfortable living situation as a thin peice of plywood certainly isn´t sound proof and offers little privacy.

With such little houses and clearly no running water, I started wondering where they took baths. Jos said he’d happened upon a guy taking a bath in front of his house once. He said he was walking past trying to work out what was going on, staring all the while. Eventually he recognized it as bath time but didn´t think, “Oh gee, maybe I shouldn’t stare at this peculiarity as the gentleman would probably like some privacy.” Eventually, the bather whistled at Jos to repremand him and only then did he realize he’d been staring. Sounds like something I’d do!

We walked up the hill to pick up four girls and walk them to school. I’m still not sure why we had to pick them up as they walked most of the way by themselves. I think we got on a combi for a while, so maybe we were just there to pay their ride down the hill. It’s little expenses like this that keep kids from poor families from going to school, I guess. That’s part of what Bruce Peru does: pays the expenses to keep these kids in schools. Then, if they make it through a year in a Bruce Peru school, we try to get them enrolled in normal schools.

We arrived at Nazarena at about 9:30 or 9:45… about 30-45 minutes late, which is probably not the best example to set for the kids. Oopsy. Nazarena may actually be the name of the larger school where our classroom is housed. I’m not sure. But I was suprised when I got there to enter a normal school… quite a large building in a sort of U shape, wrapped around a basketball/soccer area and properly walled in from the rest of the community. The Bruce Peru school is just a classroom, tucked away in the corner of the larger school. I think it was once a storeage room.

I met the teacher, Laura, just long enough for her to point out two little girls about ages 4 and 5 and tell me to work with them. I can’t say for sure what my reaction was to seeing how young the girls were but I’m pretty sure I visibly winced. For some reason, I had in my mind that I’d be working with 10-14 year olds that could go to the bathroom by themselves and talk audibly. I smiled and said ok, reluctantly approaching the girls. From the moment I sat down with them, I regretted being so apprehensive. They were really sweet girls. The younger one definitely had some trouble concentrating and was clearly more interested in fishing crayons from under the table than doing her assignment. The other girl was very studious, coloring shape after shape and insisting upon reveiwing the colors with each new shape.

About 45 minutes into the class, the littlest girl looked at me with baby doe eyes and asked to go to the bathroom. I said yeah, go for it and she just kinda looked at me blankly. When I reassured her she could go, she walked over to the teacher and started talking to her. She must have said something like “Teacher, the new girl won’t give me any toilet paper and wants me to go to the bathroom by myself.” Laura came over to me and asked where the toilet paper was. Someone handed her a roll which was directly transfered to me and the little girl grabbed my hand, dragging me to the classroom door. “Jesus. How awkward is this going to be?” I thought.
Sure enough, it was awkward as hell as I had to stay with her and, presumably, watch her pee and help when she couldn´t work out how to pull her pants up. Reason number 348 not to have kids. To my chagrin, when we got back to the classroom, the other girl said she needed to go too. Shit. Again, an awkward situation but you get through it, you know?
I was just getting tired of trying to focus the little girl’s attention to her work and getting frustrated at not knowing the word in Spanish for crayon when Jos rounded up me and Andy and hearded us to the other school. On the way over, we started talking about why the school day is so short. In Peru, kids older than about 8 only go a half day to school. Their parents can either choose to send them in the morning (about 8am to noon or 1) or in the afternoon. Bruce Peru chooses to teach in the morning because the afternoons are more dangerous to be out in the communities. Apparently, and this is what I was told, many men who don’t have jobs drink all day rather than go seek work. So they sleep late then wake up around 11 or 12 to start drinking. In their depression over not being able to provide for their families, they get violent in their drunkeness. So, around 2 or 3, bad things start happening out there. Several volunteers have returned to the communities in the afternoon for whatever reason and many have met trouble. To keep us all as safe as possible, we leave the communities by noon.
To get to Minas, the other school in Pamplona, you have to walk straight up a hill. The downside is that it’s literally straight up a hill. The upside is that it’s good exercise and offers a really great panoramic of Pamplona. From the top of the hill, you can see that Pamplona is built in the crotch of two mountains. The main street runs straight down the center and people live on either side of the valley. From there, Andy noticed a black streak running down the side of the opposite mountain from where we were. Like Andy said, it looked like a fire had blackened the ground and a lot of the little flimsy houses around it, reducing them to what looked like even more fragile and less careful constructions. Jos said it was a pig pen. That big nasty black streak was a pig pen… hmmm. Right in the middle of everyone’s houses.

I got to thinking about how much conquistadors suck. It has been said that everything terrible that has happened in South America has been the fault of the Spanish who came over during the 1500s and forced their culture upon the natives. From religion to commercial city living, they screwed everything up, insisting that people do it their way even though they didn´t understand it and didn´t know how to make it work. So here are these people who are used to living in artesan and agricultural villages that are stuffed into major metropolitan areas like Lima and trying to survive by buying and selling rather than trading and helping out their neighbors. 500 years later, it seems native knowledge of survival has died and methods of agriculture have died along with it. I would be suprised if the people in Pamplona know to rotate the pig pen to different places and plant a garden in the fertile soil left behind. I know that’s true for cow pens… maybe I’m wrong about pig pens. But I don’t remember seeing a garden in Pamplona, which is what gives me this impression. I blame the stupid conquistadors for this situation. Granted, the majority of the people in Pamplona were born in the country side and migrated to the barrios of Lima in search of greater monetary opportunities, so I would think they would at least know a little bit about agriculture even if they are mostly forced to leave it behind when moving into such an overly populated place.
Minas is pretty far up the hill and is actually a church, but definitely does not look like it. From the outside it looks just like any other of the plywood edifices but squeezed pretty tightly between the neighboring buildings. It is completely different from Nazarena, though, as it is not a room inside an already established school and the kids are mostly 7 and above so you won’t find many of the tiny kids in there like you would at Nazarena.
Just before we entered Minas, Jos pulled us aside and told us about a girl named Lourdes who is mildly mentally challenged. I hope y’all don’t mind me using the word “retarded” as that’s a direct translation from Spanish and is much easier to say than mentally challenged even if it’s not the most PC term. But, in Spanish, “retarded” may mean any sort of mental deficiency even if the person doesn’t fit our traditional definition of retarded. Anyway, Jos explained that Lourdes has a tendency to want to hug and kiss people excessively. To avoid feeling uncomfortable, he said, just count to three then push her away. She’ll keep trying though so you just have to keep doing it and usually she’s pretty good about obeying if you just ask.
We went into the school and I immediatly began working with a sweet boy named Victor who was doing his math and another kid whose name I can never pronounce properly who was trying to draw triangles. Both were pretty eager to keep doing their lessons so I didn’t bother them too much, just instructed the littler one with the difficult name that a triangle has three points and three sides.

I was just sitting there watching them do their work when I met Lourdes. She came right up to me and gave me a huge hug and a kiss on the cheek. She started talking to me about something or other when her friend came up and started asking me what my hair looked like. It was pulled up in pigtails with ribbons so I told her it was about shoulder length brown and curly. She held out her hand and asked for a piece so she could see. I pulled a loose peice out of my pig tail and held it up. She grabbed it and started messing around with it then took it over to her friends and started bragging about it. Before I knew it, I had 5 kids asking me for a piece of hair. I couldn´t find them fast enough and a little hand reached out and ripped about five good hairs out of my head. I saw the crinkled bits the kid had in his hand and immediatly stood up and tried to escape. There was no where for me to go but at least if I was standing up, they couldn´t reach up and pull it out of my head again. In this way, I was able to pull the loose ones out and divvy them up.
Victor ended up getting a really curly one and was just amazed by it. He kept boinging it and flattening it out then watching it curl back up. At one point he had it twisted around the wrong way, you know like an old phone cord that has one curl that’s twisted the wrong way. I took it and fixed it back into a spiral and he started giggling and boinging it again. He must have played with it for the next 20 minutes, laughing and showing anyone who was interested how it would boing.
A while later I started helping Lourdes with her math. Her task was to write the numbers 1-100 that are divisible by two. To teach her this, I explained the idea of evens and odds, which is “pares” and “impares.” She was so into her math that we worked on it non-stop even while they were passing out the bread, fruit, and drink for the kids. At 11:30 we heard the teacher call everyone together but we were so engrossed in our math that we just kept right on going. Turns out they were huddled together to do the prayer. Jos said he could hear the children saying their sweet little prayers and hopes and in the background was me saying “PARES, IMPARES, PARES, IMPARES!” Heh heh… oops.

We walked down the hill after school seeing kids to their houses. Unfortunately, Lourdes lives almost all the way down the hill so she walked with us the longest. I say unfortunately because she had already fallen in love with Andy and wanted so much to hold his hand and make smooches at him while we walked. Andy wasn´t having it partially because he’s not really good at outward affection and partially out of fear of it being misconstrued as something else to anyone watching! Jos agreed with him that this was a valid fear as natives are known for trying to peg Gringos for doing something wrong because they know they can get money out of it. eek eek!

So Lourdes was flirting with Andy and he was obviously disturbed by it. I tried to ameliorate the situation by telling Lourdes that Andy was my boyfriend and that he was only allowed to hold my hand. She looked around at us and asked why we weren´t holding hands, so I dragged Andy’s hand out of the haven it had found in his pocket. She didn´t look convinced, probably because Andy’s hand was like a statue’s, stiff and unbending as if it was a burden to have to hold his “girlfriend’s” hand. So Lourdes continued to make smoochies at him and eventually began bickering with me about who he belonged to, me or her. “Mio, mio, mio” She´d say and I´d do the same thing right back, all the while making a game out of blocking her view of Andy with a notebook so she couldn´t make smooches at him. He looked majorly put off but sometimes he looks like that and is actually quite content…
We rode the combi home, twisting through the one-story communities on damp dirt roads. Again, I turned and talked to Jos, this time only for about 30 seconds and when I looked back up, we were back on paved roads in the two-plus story part of town again. I looked out the back window, baffled as to what the line was. To me, it looked like maybe there was a bridge that went over a rather large interstate. On one side is the less developed area and on this side was the more developed area. So there it was… I think. I still need to double-check that.
After school, we have lunch, prepared by Yanet, a precious-looking Peruvian girl about 23 years old. She’s a really great cook and thus far has made us some really great traditional Peruvian food. I always look forward to lunch and dinner knowing she made it! One thing though, there´s always rice involved. I vaguely remember this from traveling last year but Dennis put it best when he said his insides are all made of rice now because you have it about 4 out of every 5 meals. And if it´s not rice, it´s noodles. Fine by me!
I´m not sure when we had our chat about Lourdes, whether it was during lunch or sometime afterward but her home life came up as an aspect of her mental incapability. Apparently, she has been sexually molested a lot in her life. Her mother´s boyfriends tend to the biggest problem. To think of the implications of this makes me shrivel up inside, so I´ll spare you an personal thoughts and just leave it as that. But suddenly, all the joking around from earlier that day had a different meaning. To her, a 14-year-old, that was a part of life… all the more reason to worry what it looks like to anyone watching. Yet another reason to be thankful I’m an automatically-assumed-innocent woman.
After lunch we have a bit of a break before English classes start. Recently, Jos has been teaching a rather large beginner class with about 6 people in it. They became concerned that 3 of the 6 were true beginners while the other three were a little more advanced. The three true beginners seemed really lost so they were hoping to let Andy and I teach them in a different class. We agreed and, Wednesday night, did our first lesson. We kept it really simple just doing pronouns, the vowels, and the first half of the alphabet. Dennis said we did a really great job and that the students looked so much happier when they left this time. So that was definitely a success. So now that’s our normal class to teach. Since then, Dennis has organized another class of younger people (a group of 8 kids that are about 10 years old, I think) that he and Andy will co-teach. So I´ll probably end up teaching the beginner class alone, which is ok with me. It’s a nice class to start out with and I must say I´d be much more comfortable teaching the adults than the kids! Don’t ask me why but I’m slightly intimidated by kids… but you know this!
After classes, we have dinner, which ends up being around 9pm. Kinda late, yeah, and I´m not a big fan of trying to sleep on a full stomach, but you do what you have to, right? So we finish dinner around 10pm then try to be in bed by 11 so we can get up between 7 and 730 the next day. Inevitably, Andy and I end up talking all night and not getting enough sleep but there´s a lot to talk about with all the new situations, so it never gets old. I´d rather be tired in the day than miss a conversation =)