A very happy time in Arequipa

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  Arequipa, Peru
Sunday, August 10, 2008

My first full week staying in Arequipa has been a very happy time for me - a lot of fun and actually pretty busy ... reminding me somewhat of my time at Spanish school in Guatemala. Itīs been nice to settle in one place for a while , meet some new friends , throw my stuff all over the place in my room , cook for myself in the kitchen and not have the constant packing & lugging of my rucksack every couple of days. Iīve really been enjoying the volunteering work teaching the kids at the classroom in Chacani village every afternoon and in the mornings Iīm now having a couple of hours Spanish lessons four days a week. At the classroom things have become a bit more organised as we are trying to create and follow some sort of structured curriculum which apparently has been lacking in the past and also trying to group the kids in the lessons by ability. Itīs pretty hard to pitch a lesson at the same level for such a broad range of ages - as the youngest child is three and the oldest child is fifteen. The kids do seem to enjoy coming along each day , we consistently get around 20-30 kids and for the most part they are reasonably well behaved , can be very funny & they are very affectionate and appreciative towards all the teachers

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. Generally they do seem to be mostly happy little souls despite living lives which are inconceivably different to the comparative luxury enjoyed by the majority of children in developed countries like England. Chacani Village is one of the "pueblos jovenes" (young towns) which are all over Peru and South America ... basically what happens is a a group of people take over a piece of waste/unclaimed land & petition the authorities to give them legal ownership of the area. The houses are very basic indeed and many still lack electricity & waste water disposal and have only very recently been supplied with running water. Chachani village is thus a very poor & deprived community and I find myself wondering what the kidsī futures will hold ... possibly its an idealistic notion but nonetheless I would like to think that teaching them English will help them somewhat ... such as to get jobs in the local tourist industry which brings prosperity to the city of Arequipa. The children have one hour of English lessons and then one hour outside in the playground (which is basically a concrete basketball court / football pitch) where we play football , volleyball , tag , skipping and other childrens games with them. We try to bring a strong element of fun into the English lessons with different games and prizes ... for example they all really enjoyed the letters bingo game which was designed to help them learn the english alphabet ... even if chaos ensued when about six of them were all waiting for the letter "T" to shout Bingo and they all started jumping up & down excitedly

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. The classroom really is way to small for 30 kids and 6 teachers so we desperately need the completion of the new school nearby , "Flora Tristan" , which the volunteering organisation is driving as another project. On Friday morning I didnīt have any Spanish lessons so before teaching in the afternoon I joined the other project building the school ... they were laying foundations for a couple of the new classrooms and needed every extra hand possible. None of us volunteers has any experience with making concrete for the foundations so we were relying on someone surfing the internet and the instructions of another volunteer who had been around the prevous week but had to leave (and who is an engineer by trade) .... it was lots of hard work making the concrete from gathered water , dug out sand and bags of cement ... we seemed to produce & lay decent enough concrete but there is still a lot more work needed to do all the walls. The journey to Chacani each day is a cultural experience in itself , taking about an hour in all and involving jumping on a usually rammed-full bus where there is only standing/shoving space amongst the locals ... with me not exactly being designed to fit in Peruvian buses Iīm usually bent over getting a neck ache and being unable to see anything out of the window. The bus has gotten used to us though and on the way back when we walk from the school the driverīs wingman is often waving at us at the end of the road ... he very nicely always gets the bus to wait and even drove off the main road to come and pėck us up one day ! The Spanish lessons in the morning are conveniently held at the volunteer house with a Peruvian lady called Sandra ..

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. theyīre going well but it really requires concentration and effort from me outside the lessons to make any progress so Iīm trying to take some time to revise all my notes from Spanish school in Guatemala ... there are so many verb conjugations to master even for the most basic tenses that it all gets more than a little confusing ... but I will persevere ! Outside of the Spanish and the teaching itīs been a fun social week in Arequipa aswell ... Monday night I had a farewell dinner and few beers with Lotte , my Dutch friend , as she is now leaving Arequipa to head onwards with her travels. Tuesday some of us watched a British film , "Confetti" , in the volunteer house ... Iīve seen it before but it seemed funnier this time around ... think I must be missing English television and itīs humour. On Wednesday night there is always a volunteers meeting at the house with the people from all three projects - Chacani , the orphanage and the new school building . Afterwards some of us went go-karting at a place called "Kartomania" which was a lot of fun ... apart from one Peruvian girl maybe taking the name of the place too seriously by literally running over Oliver , one of the volunteers when she failed to hit the brakes when she came into the pits ... luckily he was OK , if a bit miffed by the girlīs subsequent laughter and lack of apology. As sadly quite a few of the volunteers are leaving this weekend we had a big farewell dinner in the city on Thursday night , taking up a very large table at an Italian restaurant as there were over 20 of us ..

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. very good food & wine & a lot of fun and afterwards we naturally decided to carry on to hit a few bars into the early hours. On Friday night I went to the Arequipa International Guitar Festival in the Municipal Theatre which was really outstanding - it brings together classical guitarists from many different countries who play both by themselves and jam with each other ... some of the flamenco guys in particular were really unbelievably talented . After the concert I then went out with a few of the other volunteer guys for a few beers. Finally on Saturday night we had a big card game at the house which was very enjoyable and capped a fun first full week in Arequipa ... looking forward to being here for a month and very pleased that I definitely picked a good volunteering project and location.

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