Work on a Sunday

Posted on January 22, 2017March 14, 2019 by Lark

For the last two days technically being “off” days over the weekend, we certainly did a lot of work. I think that’s the teacher life though. You work whenever you need to in order to be ready for class. Good work, teachers of the world. I don’t know how you do it.

This is the inside of church. Check out that hip LED lighting!

The morning started off with a trip into Lima for church. The church (Camino de Vida) that the team goes to is pretty cool. It was celebrating its 28th anniversary this week! The mood was relaxed and welcoming, the people were passionate, and the music was great. We sang some songs that I know in English which was nice because then I had a much easier time mentally translating while singing (not the easiest thing to do, as you might imagine). Also, the pastor is originally from the US which meant that his Spanish during the sermon was easier for me to understand than if he was a native Spanish speaker (that’s a generalization, I know, but he talks more slowly than a lot of people here and says things in ways that make sense to me). I’d put my overall church comprehension at about 80%, and that’s being completely honest. That was also with me focusing extremely hard and not letting myself get distracted for even a second. If I had lost his train of thought, it would have been game over I think. I’m happy with that though!

We went grocery shopping after church but had to keep an eye on the time because the southbound side of the main highway is closed at 2PM on Sundays during the summer to accommodate beach traffic. People in Lima go south on the weekends to go to the beach which means that the northbound traffic on Sundays is horrible. To try to help with that, for part of the way the southbound lanes are closed to southbound traffic and are used for northbound traffic. That’s crazy! I mean, it certainly makes some sense, but it would have been a big inconvenience for us to have to find an alternate route home if we hadn’t made it in time. I can’t even imagine how much people would freak out at home if anyone even SUGGESTED doing something like that. At 2:05, we drove past all of the police officers who were just about ready to start redirecting traffic. Phew!

During the afternoon, Debbie and I went into Chilca to get the materials prepared for class tomorrow. We’re only teaching one class in the afternoon to allow time for the students to settle in during the morning (after this week, we will have a morning and an afternoon class on Mondays) which is a relief because we’ll have some time tomorrow to do some final planning. We got our maps printed out and then drove around and planned some stops and a route for the scavenger hunt we want to do in Chilca during our second class.

The town of Chilca is behind us in this picture. I’ll never get sick of the mountains in this place!

I’m getting excited about this class! I think it has the potential to be really cool, and I hope that we can pull it off. By “we”, I mostly mean “I”. I’m not worried about Debbie. She is going to take the lead on the explanations since obviously the class is going to be in Spanish, but I’m determined to help out. Hmm you know what? This could be perfect… Probably the best people I can talk to are kids because they’re the closest to my level of Spanish (probably like a 2-year-old kid, that is… they can mostly understand but don’t necessarily talk that much).

Keep us in your prayers (my Spanish skills especially)… I’ll let you know how things go tomorrow!

Chicken and Chilca

Posted on January 21, 2017March 14, 2019 by Lark

I survived my first work week!! Woo! I know, not that impressive considering it was only one day, but let me have this little celebration anyway. Week #2 is definitely going to be much more challenging, so I’m building up my confidence in preparation for that.

Debbie and I planned to go for a run this morning, but our plans had to be postponed when we woke up to rain. Everyone was confused because apparently rain isn’t common here during the summer, and when it does rain, it’s usually more of a mist rather than raindrops. Well, it was definitely raindrops this morning. This is what happens when I try to run… I think that means it’s not meant to be.

Instead, I spent some time getting mentally organized. I made a list of what I want to do each day (go for a run, practice Spanish, read my Bible, write in my journal, etc) and then tried to translate that into a rough schedule so that I can plan my time better. I always run into trouble with trying to pack too much into one day, and often the things that are most important end up getting pushed out because I’m too busy wasting time. I’m turning over a new leaf though! No more time wasting for me!

Feel free to marvel at my Spanish skills. I couldn’t find anything that was exactly what I wanted in English OR Spanish, so I decided to make my own (and swiped some graphics from the Crayola page linked to the left for the sake of time). Those street names though, those are all mine. Bear Avenue? Genius.

Debbie and I met again in the afternoon to try to make a more detailed plan for the first day of classes. We’re going to do some activities with the kids that are focused on maps, discussing what maps show and how to use them. I made a worksheet for the 7-9 year old class (C3) (with some help from THIS Crayola coloring page), and Debbie cleaned up a plan of the compound to do a navigating activity outside with the 10-12 year old class (C4). I’m feeling good about the first class now, so we’re 1/15 of the way there!

We all ended up going for an afternoon run before the sun set. To sum it up in one word: ugh. But we went! That’s accomplishment enough for me. We’re going to try to run 3-4 times a week, and I know that after 2 weeks I’m going to feel exponentially better. It’s that knowledge that will keep me going, but it doesn’t make getting there any easier.

Here’s Chilca, near the coast, south of Lima. We’re located a little bit north of Chilca.

A Catholic church in Chilca that’s located right off of the main square.

For dinner, Debbie, Julie, Eddy (one of the local staff members), his daughter, Dasha, and I went into downtown Chilca. We went to this place that serves “pollo a la brasa” or roast chicken cooked on a rotating spit (basically a rotisserie chicken). It’s considered a typical Peruvian dish and is often accompanied with fries. There are also some sauces involved that vary depending on where you get it (mayonnaise is typical, plus some hot pepper sauce). My picky eater self was happy that the meal wasn’t much of a stretch for my food habits. I did try the sauces though… and decided to stick with the Peruvian “ketchup”. The quotes are required because no one does ketchup like the USA. The stuff here is similar what they had in Ghana. It tastes okay but is just not quite right… It’s too thin, and there’s something about the flavor that’s off.

Look at this place! So trendy. Not shown: the nonexistent 4th wall because when you have bearable weather year-round, you can do things like that.

After dinner, we roamed the streets of the downtown. In general, being here doesn’t feel like as much of a stretch as being in Ghana did. At times, I can even fool myself into feeling like I’m still in the USA… and then someone talks to me, I have no idea what they’re saying, and I remember where I actually am. We went to this new ice cream place (VERY new – they’ve been open for one day!) in town that seriously looks like it could be in the middle of a city at home. Feeling sufficiently stuffed, we loaded back into the Esperanza de Ana van and headed back to the suburbs.

Tomorrow, we’re going into Lima for church. It’ll be my first time seeing the city in the light, and I’m excited! Now I just need to figure out how to fall asleep… Our neighbor is having a party and the music is incredibly loud. Don’t they know that their old person neighbors are trying to go to sleep at 10:30PM on a Saturday?

Let’s Get Down to Business

Posted on January 20, 2017March 14, 2019 by Lark

After having some time to relax and settle in yesterday, today we got to work! The morning started off at 9AM with a staff meeting… in Spanish. I’m going to put my comprehension at maybe 50%? And if I’m being completely honest, that might be a little high. Either way, I was proud of myself because I at least got the general idea of what was being discussed. I’m sure that more than a few details fell through the cracks, but expectations of my language skills are low, so no one is really expecting me to know much after group discussions and meetings.

The compound is located in a part of town where the properties are bigger and everyone’s lot is surrounded by walls. I never realized how nosy I am until I saw how much it bothers me not to be able to see what’s going on behind the walls. It also makes for a sort of ghost town feeling because everyone is hidden from view.

To give you a better idea of the dynamic, there are currently 5 of us who are from the US: Jim and Tony Kay (the directors who I mentioned before), Debbie (a Penn State architect!), and Julie (a teacher). Everyone besides me can speak Spanish, though they all mostly learned after arriving in Peru which gives me hope that I’ll at least have passable skills by the end of my 10 weeks. The national staff members obviously speak Spanish and have varying levels of English knowledge. When the group is together, Spanish is the language. Even though it makes it much harder for me to have any clue about what is going on, I’m happy that’s the case. It’s forcing me to work on my Spanish, and I can see how much better my experience will be once I feel more confident and can actually communicate back to people rather than just semi-understanding what they’re saying to me.

A five-week summer school is starting next week, and Debbie and I are teaching a “Mini-ingenieros” (mini-engineers) class together. We met once around the holidays when she was in the States to come up with some ideas, and today we had to actually plan out the classes and fill in some details. We have a much better framework now, but there’s definitely still a lot of work to do. To give you the gist, we’re going to talk about urban planning, transition into talking about building types and space planning, and have the kids each design the exterior of a building that takes up a “city block”. The hope is to inspire them to make some funky designs and interesting shapes and decorate them, and afterwards we’ll put everyone’s together to make a “kid city”.

Here you can see the one green part of the neighborhood up ahead to the right. Bright green grass looks very out of place in the middle of the desert!

Part 2 of the class is a robotics project that may or may not go well… Theoretically, we’re going to have the kids build these little, simple robots and then set them free in the city like it’s a robot takeover. That’s the current/still somewhat a work in progress plan, and Debbie and I are going to test build a robot next week. Cross your fingers for us because it should be interesting.
We have two classes of older kids (7-9 and 10-12 years old) and two classes of younger kids (2-6 years old). Obviously the younger kids aren’t going to be doing these projects, and we thankfully have only 30 mins – 1 hour with them each week. We’ll have three 2 hour classes each week with the older kids. The big challenge now is coming up with “engineering”-ish projects to do with the younger kids. Now accepting suggestions…

Besides planning our classes, I got to use some of my technical knowledge today! That was exciting because I was feeling a bit like this whole year was going to be me out of my element and not really using my education for anything. It wasn’t anything complicated, but they’re planning to add fans into some of the classrooms here, and I helped with some electrical investigation and gave a few options for how it could be done. Like I said, nothing too exciting or complicated, but I finally did something that made me feel like my knowledge from 5 years of college and 2 years of working could be useful in this context!

I didn’t do a great job of taking pictures today (aka I took zero), so the ones above are just more that I took while walking around yesterday. I’ll be better tomorrow!