One Lost Intern Per Country. Follow me as I intern with Cambridge, MA based non-profit One Laptop Per Child in Sapallanga, Peru from June 14-August 9th.
Oh damn you swine flu You create panic and fear and cancel our school
Yep, the government of Peru has decided to cancel schools across the country out of fear of the epidemic. 12 people here in Huancayo have been diagnosed and 1,431 cases have been confirmed in Peru. Instead of staying in our school in Chilca until the 24th of July our last day will be the 15th. A brief article about the outbreak can be found here (I am pretty sure the dates of original vacation are incorrect).
I guess I´ll be heading to Ecuador or trying to find something to do with the extra time.
For the first time during my three weeks in Peru I witnessed the enchanting, smelly, and oft spitting mammal (whose outline blesses all things tourist about Peru): the llama.
I was moved. A herd of 20 were being quickly directed past our school and into the mountains nearby. While I knew little about Peru´s treasured 4 legged beast I knew one thing, keep those sunglasses on. Thank goodness for the Synder Quality Llamas Brochure I recently read on the internet. From this quick read I feel I may harness the ability to herd llama´s in my free time. Maybe I´ll swing the idea by Claire and try to get a couple for our apartment next year. A few gems from the guide:
¨Before attempting any procedure which requires handling untrained Ilamas you will want to put on leather boots to protect the top of your feet from injury if a llama accidentally steps on them with its hard toenails. Light gloves will protect your hands from incidental scrape, and sunglasses or other protective eyewear will allow you to face a llama unflinchingly in the unlikely event of threatened spitting.¨
That´s cool, I tend to wear my sunglasses at night, during the day, and especially when around fuzzy wuzzy llamas.
¨Llamas instinctively oppose any pressure you apply against their body. It may be valuable to realize that pushing a Ilama to the right will usually result in it leaning to the left.¨
So like backing up a trailer.
¨Catching a llama in a large field usually requires several people. ¨
Bring a friend!
For more lessons in the art of the llama click the link above.
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.
So this isn´t about Peru. But I´m watching it in Peru. And this is my blog about what I do in Peru. I´ll bet you don´t have to wait 15 minutes for it to load like I do. Lucky you.
Well, three weeks in class comes to a close tomorrow when Becky and I have the fifth and sixth graders for one last time. The principal has informed us of a going away party at noon and afterward we pack our bags and head out to Pucara. Pucara is a town about 15 minutes away from Sapallanga, a little higher up in the Andes moutains, and a little farther from Huancayo. It´s been a good experience so far, like most travelers I´ve had my bouts of homesickness and food poisoning, especially following bad ice cream or after some chewy guinea pig.
Midterm report: I am having a great time and I feel that the trip has been beneficial for the kids in the classroom. We have introduced multiple programs that their teachers hadn´t even considered opening and brought to both the teachers and students attention the importance of technology in the advancement of not only Peruvian children but children everywhere. Today Becky had some great points when talking to the teachers about how everyone gets frustrated with technology but with some patience and some devotion it can be both beneficial and a great tool. She even mentioned to the kids that if they work hard with programs like Turtle Art, Etoys, and Scratch, they could one day make movies like Transformers 2 or Ice Age 3. It´s really about using these computers to put things in perspective for these kids. They do have a chance.
I´ve included a video of a few of the kids jumping rope today after class. I don´t think I ever really liked kids before this trip, I´ll miss the kids from Miraflores, even the banshees of segundo grado.
Another video
This video is from the first week. One of the girls brought her puppy to school and was keeping it in her sweater.
