La Sierra, La Selva, La Sierra

Another Peruvian weekend is officially over. Today was a teachers holiday so Becky and I decided to visit a few of the other interns in the jungle this weekend. We left on Saturday and paid around 10 dollars for a 3 hour car ride east to a community called La Merced. We went from 11,000 feet in Huancayo to just around 4,000 feet and the trip back up into the mountains today has ment that I´m feeling a little elevation sickness. These conditions persist even though I took some medication recommended by the travel clinic at the Univeristy of Oregon for changes in elevation.

We stayed in a hotel called El Refugio, The Refuge, and enjoyed good company, good meals, and great scenery. I ate deer and mountain boar this weekend and also had tasty fruit smoothie made from apple sized fruit called cocona. I tried to find a link to more about this fruit but everything seems to be in Spanish, you can atleast see what it looks like. We visited waterfalls, a native amazonian community, and took a boat ride on a river where a few of the interns jumped in and swam around. I made a new friend, you can catch that video at the top of this post. I also ate immense amounts of oranges, mandarins and tangerines.

We are back in Huancayo now, and have found out that we will actually be staying in a hotel in the center of Huancayo for the next three weeks and commuting twenty blocks to a school in a community called Chilca. We saw the classroom today, and quite simply, it was depressing. It´s one room attached to a small storefront with dirt floors and around 40 desks crammed both inside and outside adobe walls. The conditions in Miraflores were definitely far superior. By the sounds of things the students at our next school are responsible for taking their XO´s home so that they can charge them because no functional power exists in the classroom for multiple computers. This could also be promising, meaning the students have spent more time with the computers that those at Miraflores, who were not allowed to take the computers home until Becky and I lobbyed the principal to start with the 5th and 6th graders.

From what I understood and was translated for me this school mostly caters to children of families that have migrated from the country side to the city looking for better employment. The majority of these families work in and around the market which I took photos of a week back. 2 teachers operate out of the tienda-school in Chilca.

We have our first day in class tomorrow, yet because of a series of national strikes against new government laws in Peru cars and buses may not run in Huancayo for the next three days. Class seems to be scheduled to go on as usual, but if things are anything like they were during a strike day last week we will have less students and less teachers than usual. I´ll try to keep the blog updated this weekend and give a better perspective of our experience in our 2nd and final school during this internship.