Martes, 16 Septiembre
So after a long night on the bus and returning home from Lake Titicaca at 4am, all of us were up bright and early again to go up to the school.
On tuesdays, the volunteers do not have any classes with the kids.. so we just made ourselves busy. I helped Hannah, Jes and Cathy with painting the computer/ library room. This room was previously used as storage, but Peru's Challenge have been able to source about 11 computers which we will have by of the end of the year. So all of us set to work getting our hands dirty with different shades of green. It took us all morning to do and I've still got green fingernails from last week...Miercoles, 17 Septiembre
Wednesdays is english class with the 5th and 6th graders. Cilla, Lyn (the other Lyn) and myself prepared a lesson plan of the "who, what, when, where" to go through with the kids. But we found out that this was actually too advanced for them. So we had to improvise and come
decided to only go through the names and numbers of the kids. We broke up into smaller groups and spent the better part of the 45 minute lesson with the 5th graders going through "My name is xxx .. I am xx years old". Next we had the 6th graders, but they were busy dying wool and preparing for the "fiesta" on friday. So we had to can that lesson plan and find other ways to make ourselves useful.I decided to help with the fencing as I hadn't helped with that before. We had to chip off the ends of the poles and then drill and nail them on to the poles that had been rooted into the ground. Wasn't easy with one drill, one hammer, one chipper thingy and about 8 volunteers.. but now, two weeks later.. the fence is almost finished. All that is left is to hang the gate. Yay for us!!
In the afternoon, I was rostered for house visits again. We visited the same family as last time who were meant to get the bamboo sticks for the walls. They hadn't done it yet as they did not have access to the stuff when Peru's Challenge were not around. So, we went up to the school, got all the bamboo out from the yard... and then proceeded to carry it across fields and down into a valley and out again to the family. It took us a good half hour of lugging around bamboo on our shoulders as we were following one of the young boys and suddenly lost him. So, we were following Mark (the volunteer Manager) who was following a puppy. And of course, we got to the edge of the hill and didn't know where to go. After some backtracking and shouting across the
valley, we had the young boy come back to show us the way. I kept walking into the trees with the bamboos as there were twice as tall as I am. But we eventually made it and Syliva (not Jessica as I previously thought) and her family should have some walls pretty soon.After all that manual labour, we only had one more stop and that was to drop off the hairdressing course completion certificate for one of the mums. She is part of the project for life programme and the money from her sponsors helped her to enrol in and complete a hair dressing course. She will be practicing next week on the kids up at school.
Jueves, 18 Septiembre
No classes up at the school... so I didn't do much for most of the morning. Just bummed around at home and then sat on the couch with Hannah and watched 6 hours of Srubs in the evening.
Viernes, 19 Septiembre
The day of the fiesta ....... as part of some festival, the kids were putting on a dress rehersal for all the volunteers on the dances they were doing. The actual day of the festivities was on saturday in the Plaza de Armas in Cuzco centre, but we were not going to be around.
When we got up to the school, we knew there wasn't even going to be the 1 hour of classes that we had planned for. The kids were running about everywhere in their colourful costumes and getting their hair braided and having their photos taken. So we sat around for a bit, took lots of photos and the show started at 11am. All the grades from 1st to 6th put on a different dance. They were absolutely adorable as usual and very entertaining.
A BIG thank you to all my Aussie friends who contributed money as some of this was used to rent costumes for the kids. While this may seem like a small thing, it actually means a lot to the children. As I understand it, some of them have costumes made by their parents, but those who are not living with their parents for whatever reason would have had to go without.
Thanks for your contributions....
Vikram
Frank Moore
Anh T.
Kim Trang
Bosco, Ginette, Nathan
Judy, Chris, Hayley
Siew Gin
There is lots of money leftover from the donations and we are still deciding what to put it to.
Rest of the photos from our second week at school can be found here...
http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2040457&l=e0365&id=212900300
...and photos from the fiesta are here...
http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2040618&l=f620f&id=212900300
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