You are hereFeed aggregator / Sources / Emily in Peru
Emily in Peru
Adios Pancho y Meche
Wed, 15/02/2012 - 00:11
So as you may well guess, we sadly had to say goodbye to 2 of the kids last week. Pancho and Meche were two of the kids in casa 5 with the toddlers. Last Friday whilst we were out taking the kids to swimming lessons their parents came and decided they wanted to take them home. Within half an hour of them turning up Pancho and Meche were gone. It’s sad that we didn’t actually get to say goodbye as they were 2 of the kids I was most fond of and it’s scary at how fast it moved. There was no pre-warning and, as far as we can tell, very little paper work. From what we understand they were in the aldea for mostly financial reasons which is a relief as at least we know they won’t be taken to a dangerous or violent home. Hopefully they will be given a good chance at a normal family life and their parents can finally provide for them. The Aldea’s social worker has scheduled monthly visits to check up on them and make sure they are being cared for properly and if not then there’s a chance the two of them could be back. Who knows, maybe they’ll come back to the aldea at some point.
Other than that things have been chilled in the Aldea. We’ve been taking the kids to swimming twice a week which is a lot of fun. Partially because we get to spend two mornings a week getting out of the 40 degree sun and into some cold water but also because the kids make it fun. They love the water (although the odd one or two are still pretty afraid of it) and it’s one of the only things that we’ve seen them be really excited to learn. We can’t help but laugh at some of the techniques they come up with but their having fun and can mostly keep their heads above water which is all that really matters I guess. One boy called Carlos was so afraid of going in the water without help that he put armbands on his arms AND legs. Needless to say the minute he got in the pool he regretted that. He flapped about a while and didn’t get very far. However it gave me and Louise a good laugh. The swimming pools really pretty cool. Its’ in a complex called Chilalo where there’s a restaurant, football pitches, bar, concert venue and a mini zoo. There’s quite a few monkeys, turtles and other animals and it’s quite cool getting up close to them, and the kids love them!
The weather in Piura has been pretty nuts recently. Its summer, so the heat is ridiculous. Every day is above 35 degrees and we’ve found the only way we can cope is by taking cold showers 3 or 4 times a day. Funny how I used to complain about only having cold water whereas now even the mention of a hot bath makes me feel a little bit ill. I’ve taken to cuddling a bottle of cold water on occasion in the nights to cool me down. It also rains every single night now! Pretty insane rain as well. It starts at about 7ish and goes on well into the early hours of the morning. The clouds start to get thick and dark at about 5 which then makes everything clammy. One day we left the house around this time and everything outside had been turned yellow by the air. A mixture of the sun being low, the clouds being thick and the general sandy dust of Piura had put a yellow haze over everything. It was like walking about in a sepia photograph.
There’s not really much other news right now so ill finish up there, however, watch this space for future news!xxx
Did you know Piura is known as the City Of Eternal Summer?
Thu, 26/01/2012 - 18:15
Hola! So I haven’t written a blog in a really long time so I thought I should get on it now. Guess it’ll be my new year’s resolution to keep up with it!
As you may guess by the title, things are hotting up here. Some days can get to over 36 degrees which is an uncomfertabe heat to say the least. Its not very important to the blog but its just a little fact about where I live and the reson behind it....So things have been going really well in the aldea, I’m learning loads of new things about the kids every day and lots of cool things have been happening. It’s been so long since I last wrote that I won’t be able to fit everything in so again, I’ll just choose a selection of the most significant things to happen recently. The run up to Christmas was pretty hectic and seemed to go on forever! From around the last week in November to Christmas day there were people coming in and out of the aldea to run ‘chocolatadas’. Chocolatadas are basically events put on by people who want to give the kids Christmas presents or sweets. They come in and set up a party for them, give them a bag off goodies and a present. It’s such a good idea as otherwise the kids probably wouldn’t have had many presents at all. They were really good but so tiring as we sometimes had 2 or more a day, every day for a month. We also spent quite a bit of time going round different places selling handmade chocolates to raise money for the aldea and the kids Christmas. We started selling the chocolates at the beginning of November and were selling them right up till Christmas. It was again a lot of work and not as easy as it sounds. We went everywhere! Police stations, the market, doctor surgeries, hospitals and shops! The Tias spent hours every night making chocolates with peanuts, manjar, raisins etc. they were pretty professional chocolates and a lot of effort went in to making them. Christmas in Peru is celebrated on the evening of the 24th of December. It was a pretty different experience to say the least. Me and Lou spent the day in a nearby town called Catacaos, eating ceviche (raw, marinated fish) and wandering round the market. It was pretty bizarre knowing that it was Christmas time, even though we were wearing shorts and vests and eating ice cream! When we got back in the evening the festivities kicked off starting with Los Posadas. At around 9pm we had a knock at the door. Two of the kids dressed as Mary and Joseph were there asking for a place to stay the night. We were meant to tell them through the window that there was no room and to go away, however as the only Los Posadas I know of is Catterline Los Posadas where we welcome Mary and Joseph into the house, I almost ruined the aldea one by flinging open the door and telling them to come on in! The kids looked a little confused but the situation was saved by one of the Tias shouting over at me to close the door and tell them to go away. After the rejection we left to follow the gathering crowd. This happened at every casa. Mary and joseph knocked, were rejected, moved on and the ‘inn owners’ left their house to follow. After we’d visited every house the kids from each casa sang Mary and joseph a song. We then headed to the front of the aldea where they played out the nativity story. It was a pretty cool way of doing it. Everyone felt involved in some way even if they didn’t have an acting part in the play. There were a few differences though. There weren’t any shepherds and the wise men brought gifts of bananas and mangoes. Maybe it’s just because gold frankincense and myrrh don’t fit into the aldea's budget but maybe that is always how they do it here in Peru… After the Los Posadas we all headed to the auditorium for Christmas dinner. All the kids set up tables and everyone ate together in their casa groups. We were invited to eat with the older boys. We had duck stew, chifles (salted banana chips) and spaghetti whilst we were eating we listened to songs by Paul Simon, Men at Work, Soft Cell, the Boomtown Rats and Atomic Kitten amongst others. Definitely not like the Christmas dinner I’m used to, and the fact I found a little cockroach mooching about in the spaghetti made it even weirder! After dinner we had mass and then some of the staff made speeches about the kids and the aldea. The speeches were mostly about how another year has passed and how the kids need the aldea every year. It got pretty emotional at points but it was really nice to hear how some of the staff feel about the kids. There’s a real sense of family here with all the staff, not just the mamma Tias. After the meal there was a huge fiesta! Lots of dancing and singing and fiesta things. Just before midnight the countdown started, it was like New Year at home, we counted down from 10 and once it turned midnight everyone hugged each other, said Feliz Navidad a lot and set fireworks off! The party continued for an hour or so after then the aldea gave the kids the presents from them. We headed to bed after that as we were pretty partied out. Christmas day was totally chilled. We spent the day in the aldea. I spent a lot of the time on Skype to my family as it was pretty tough being away from all my home comforts, especially the roast dinner. However the rest of the time was spent with the kids, playing outside in the sun with their new gifts. As I said before things have been running pretty smoothly in the aldea. We just got our summer timetables which are looking pretty cool. Twice a week we’re taking some of the kids to a local pool to teach them how to swim, we’re also getting to take art with the disabled boys and help teach some of the youngest kids English. However the thing I’m most excited about is the addition of the bakery room to the aldea. Seeing as cooking and baking are one of my favourite things to do at home I jumped at the chance to be able to help out in that class. As of yet I don’t know what the kids are going to be baking but hopefully I’ll come home with some good South American cake recipes! In other aldea news Jessie, the little girl I live with had her cleft palate fixed! A charity from America called ReSurge International came to Piura for 3 weeks to perform surgery on kids mostly with cleft lips and palates. They were a really nice group of people and what they did was really wonderful considering many people here wouldn’t have been able to afford that surgery. Jessie was in and out the hospital in a day and although she was really groggy she didn’t change much. Once the anaesthetic had properly worn off she was back to her giggley, gorgeous self again although now her voice is very different. She’s now getting speech and language therapy along with physiotherapy for her spine and muscles. Fingers crossed she’ll be able to walk a little before I leave!We’ve been here almost 6 months now so since my last blog (a long time ago) we’ve got some exploring done. We visited two other volunteers in Chiclayo one weekend, Mancora beach in October and for our New Year travels we spent 3 weeks in Ecuador! It was absolutely amazing. We started off In Mancora for New Year where we met up with all the other Peru volunteers. We stayed there for 3 days then Louise, Myself, Harriet and Rosanna (Chiclayo volunteers) took a 15 hour bus journey to Quito the capital of Ecuador. It’s a very beautiful city and we did loads of things there however my favourite was definitely visiting Volan Cotopaxi. We hired a local guide at the gate who took us round the park in his incredibly sketchy combi van, then lead us up the side of the volcano to the first mountain refuge where we drank well deserved hot chocolates at 4800 metres up! It was a cloudy day but every now and the clouds and fog would part just enough to give us a glimpse of the summit. It was a very beautiful mountain and the views were pretty special. After we’d spent some time in Quito we headed to a town called Banos 3 hours south. In Banos we booked a rafting trip in the jungle. We and 3 Finnish people spent 3 days rafting down a tributary of the river Napo, sleeping under the stars on the river banks and hiking in the jungle. It was an awesome experience however I got really badly bitten by sand-fly’s and when we returned to Banos I had local people telling me I looked ill and flinching every time they saw my legs. In total we spent about a week in Banos/ the jungle. There was so much stuff to do there that we just didn’t want to leave but we had to move on eventually. Louise and I then split off from the other 2 girls as we wanted to visit Ecuador’s highest mountain, volcan Chimborazo. We spent one night in a town called Riobamba then headed off to visit it, leaving our bags in the hostel. We hadn’t been told that there were no return busses from Chimborazo so we had no choice but to sleep in the refuge at 5000 metres. It was a very cold, uncomfortable night. It felt like I was being punched in the head all night because of the altitude and I didn’t get much sleep. Some kindly Russians took pity on us earlier in the evening and lent us spare sleeping bags so at least we didn’t freeze to death! We we’re given a lift back to Riobamba the next day and got straight on a bus to Cuenca after collecting our bags. We spent 2 days in Cuenca, a pretty colonial city in the south, as there wasn’t a lot to do there and we were running out of time. We then took another lengthy journey by bus to the coastal town of Montanita for our last couple of days to top up our tans and meet some fellow gringos. Then was the long (21 hours) journey back home to the aldea. Although very tired it felt really good to get back home and back to normality. Its strange being back after being away for so long, the kids have all changed in some way or another and especially the babies all seem so much different. The youngest is now walking and they all have more words. Had we been there we probably wouldn’t have noticed the small changes that are happening to the kids every day so it’s quite nice to see it from an outsiders point of view once more. Thankfully getting established back in the aldea hasn’t been hard, the kids were all very excited to see us and so were the Tias. It’s weird going back to the feeling of being settled down and not living out a rucksack but I’m sure I’ll get used to it again soon. OK, so I think that’s about it for now. I’ll write again in a couple of weeks to keep people posted. Byeee xx
