7-22
Friday: I wrote a proposal for the women’s group with Alisa so we can buy the supplies with HELP’s money today. We also made a list of all the things we needed to do that day…. And it got pretty long. Then I went to ESL with two others. And it just so happened that today was the last day of school before a 2 week vacation so there were only celebrations today. They celebrated the principal’s birthday and gave her gifts and made speeches. We sat down at the end with the two English teachers and Rosita who will hopefully bring buy the Spanish- learn English books because I am going to make an English teaching curriculum, and hopefully we can give that to other schools who don’t have English teachers. Rosita bought me a tortilla and shared her spicy dorito chips with me. Her mom had a baby 4 days ago. So tomorrow we are going to buy her a crib. Her mom has an infection in her stomach so we are going to get her some fruit too. (this is our neighbor). Her dad is gone for business so her aunt and grandma are helping to take care of the mom. Rosita is 8 going on 18 because she is really responsible and takes very good care of her mom and her brother. Then I walked over to the women’s group leader, Meritza and she gave us a list of all the women who are planning attending the women’s group to make bead straps that hold up shirts. We were planning on going to the Mercado today but timing didn’t work out so now we are going tomorrow to purchase the supplies and refreshments.
7-25
Happy birthday Andrew!!! We dug neem trees in the morning. They are medicinal trees that target both preventing and curing. We have an information sheet but its all in Spanish so I don’t understand it, but some other group members are project leads so I’m not all too familiar with the trees. We brought like 15 to plant at this lady’s house. She has a mini park growing in the back of her land. She has land in this neighborhood. She has a vision to build a school. She likes the bottle school idea but there are so many more logistics that still have to be worked out. She also wants to plant trees to make a park. Her neighbors also wanted some trees so we have 4 to a man and 2 to a woman. They paid 50 centimos for each tree. The neighborhood (community) was huge… like really vast. And most everything was made from straw-looking material and aluminum roofs. Its made of dune-like sandy “tierra”. So we had to dig up fast so the sand wouldn’t fall back in. We bought the trees from a lady’s business that began from a micro-credit loan. Then we broke bamboo and made a little fence around the trees and tied them to a branch so they would stand up straight. After neem trees we got some lunch at from the fruit man. Then ashlee and garett rechecked pricing for the preschool with the engineer that is overseeing the project. We got the contract signed later that day and so we should start the assembly and building Wednesday. Then we made some calls to the orphanages and met with the ladies that oversee the rehab center because they have the contacts for the orphanage with disabilities. We chatted over a glass of water. And the guy showed us the birds who make the houses again. Then we went to a pre-preschool. One of the ladies from the women’s group asked if we could donate supplies to her program that she runs. They have been training for a year by the Ministry of Health. They had 3 volunteers that come and teach and they have it mon, wed, and fri. They go in waves according to age. So we observed the 0-11 months old, and the beginning of 1-2 yrs old. They just started the program last Monday. It is run at this lady’s house. She makes them all wash their hands before they come in. She also has records of everyone who comes. They gave us a list of materials… most of it is for the older kids who need notebooks and such to learn to read. They also said they need help teaching them to read. They had a lot of baby/toddler materials like play equipment. There are 3 organizations that sponsored the beginnings of this group. It is also for single mothers or mothers from humble circumstances. Then we walked over the meet with Meritza from the women’s group. The first meeting of the women’s group was on Sat and that went really well… it lasted for 4 hours from 2-6. We stayed for 2 hours of it. The women made beaded straps to hold up tube top shirts. The next event is this Saturday and they are learning how to cut hair so we talked about the planning and advertising. Meritza goes door to door with Fedelina to advertise to the women. Talk about dedication. They are going to have a sign up sheet ready for thurs and they are going to talk with the secretary of the community to figure out whether we can use the community building for this Saturday. We are still in the process of putting together events and lessons. We are going to plan out one activity per month and let the leaders plan out the other activity. If you have any cheap interactive ideas… Feel free to suggest them! Then on the way back we bought a watermelon and brought it to our neighbor who had a baby last week. The kids were excited for it. I hope it is yummy for them. Then we went to the internet café and I called my bank… because I was taking out money for someone when the atm shut off… so we are still in the process of fixing that and sending in claims. We always go to the same internet place so the people that work there know our names. One of their birthdays is tomorrw. They invited us to his party to go dancing. It starts at 11. But considering Peru time, that means it starts at midnight. No way. But tomorrow is a holiday so they said… oh no you don’t have to worry about Wednesday. I got some fruity ice cream afterwards because I was so done with the bank. One of my favorite things is discovering fruit… there are so many new kinds of fruit, it undoubtedly boggles my mind. Within the past week I tried 5 new kinds…. That I never knew existed. And because of that, I can’t ever remember their names. But its cool finding fruits that you never knew existed!
7-26
We took some study time in the morning. Then at 10 we went to the Mercado to get supplies for the music class. We found some colored papers. Then we walked to ovolo grau to pass out English flyers. Sometimes people flocked and other times we gave them to street vendors. A lot of people are genuinely very interested. So we were looking forward to seeing how many would show up. It felt like a toss up. There was one lady who appeared on some stairs out of nowhere. I gave her a flyer and she showed up! We only made 25 copies because we didn’t think there would be a large turnout especially since it is the holiday weekend. Alisa wrote up the assessment tests yesterday. At first we had more difficult questions then she revised it so there were mostly easy questions. Then we came back and made books/the lesson for music class. There are two preschools that don’t have books so we are making picture books for them. I made 5 mini pianos out of paper. Then we went to the rehab center. I worked with the linguist therapist. Three kids came in. Erice, Pedro, and Monica. Erice was practicing her vocabulary words. She was quiet when I talked to her and wouldn’t answer my questions… I am not sure if she understand what I was saying. Then the teacher (there is one teacher) who looked through a newspaper with her… picked out letters and thought of words that started with those letters. Pedro was cutting and pasting a sequence of pictures and writing a caption for each one. I liked that he smiled all the time. And then Monica worked on her writing. She copied sentences from pages of a workbook. The teacher said she loved to write, but she couldn’t read or understand what she was writing. She said that she could learn small words, but little by little. She couldn’t write her capital cursive r’s so we practiced them. I tried to get her to talk but she didn’t talk to me very much. When we asked her what her favorite ice cream flavor sometimes she went off on an explanation. I want to say she is 24 yrs old, but I’m not entirely sure. Then afterwords we stopped by Lupe’s house to get the number of the lady who is over the orphanage with children with disabilities. Even though we went there once, it is like everything is working against us to go again because phones don’t work then they don’t answer. So we chatted over some pear juice and came back for a 10 minute Spanish lesson then we went to dinner. After dinner we had English and music lessons. So I talked to the bank more to file a claim. Then we saw tons of people standing outside. There was a really good show. There were almost 40 people. We introduced the English class with why learning English is valuable to them… and we said that it opens up more opportunities and so they can understand music and movies. Then we split them up into 2 groups to play pictionary. Then the kids 15 years and up took the assessment tests. There were all ages young to adult. There was one hilarious kid named carlos… 5 years old. Never stopped moving or talking… even smiling. He had a gum show all your teeth smile. So cute! We had to distract him during the classes. Then after was music class… and so we most of them migrated but some other people came just for the music classes. In the beginning we asked them why they want to learn to play the piano. And we were surprised at their profoundness. Some said because it’s a beautiful instrument, another said it helps to understand someone’s soul. I wish I could have written them down. But they were good. Then I pulled out letters that I had cut up. I told them:
- There are 7 letters
- They follow alphabetically
- C is the most important
- Whenever you sit down at a piano, always look for c and then you can find out all the other letters
- Where is C?
- Find all the c’s
Then we had volunteers come up to hold the letters c-c. Then we had everyone say the letters out loud. And put the letters on the keyboard on the right keys. After I thought we wore out where is c and how can you find c, we played the fly swatter game… or where are the letters. So they split up into 2 teams and then one person from each team came up, I said a letter and they would have to point to the correct key. It occurred to me during the game that we would have to make sure they all understood. Some of them knew where the keys were and some people were struggling. So then I first told them to find middle c and then find a different letter. For them all to be able to play right hand piano they are going to need to keep up with the lessons. So I am thinking group work might be valuable to work with a smaller group of people. Some people were embarrassed to come up so we need to find a way to assess their progress as well. I am thinking homework sheets. At the end we reviewed. Brady dragged her finger across the board. I told them a letter and they would shout out when Brady’s finger reached stopped at the right key. As a group, they understood the concepts and knew the letters. We ended 5 minutes early and told them, they need to know where c is. We told them to draw a picture of the keyboard to take home with them to study.
7-27
We made some calls the orphanages and to the women from the women’s group, but got no answers. We decided to venture out to find the orphanages because we had the names but not the addresses. We first went to the Mercado and asked someone there and he directed us to the police across the way. We crossed a lot of streets today. And then we were directed around the street. We didn’t find anything… until we saw a sign with the same name as one of the orphanages (not the one we were looking for) so we went inside and it ended up being an inn… but it had a monkey! The monkey was chained to a tree and came down and was swinging out to us. It took our hands. It was so cute! It smiled this sly smile. He climbed up and down and swung out to us. I want a pet monkey. That was the first monkey I have ever touched! It was like a little person. It looked like it was going in for bite a couple times. The cook came out later and it went onto her shoulders. I want a monkey! There have been some complications with the women’s group this week so hopefully we can work that out asap.
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