Antes de la Escuela

Due to the fact that I have been locked out of my host family's house, I have decided that this afternoon will be a great time to write to you all about the school that I taught at over the past few weeks. I may have given the impression that my trip to Peru has been nothing more than an extended vacation from the real world; however, I'm almost certain that I have done more work here than I could have ever done working a part time job in the United States.

When I'm not climbing the deepest canyon in the world, or riding horses through the Arequipeña countryside, I'm actually quite busy working. My typical day during the week starts a little bit before my alarm clock goes off, which happens to beep me out of bed at 6:40am. I usually manage to wake up a little bit beforehand. (Today, I woke up at 6:39am, which I found to be extremely impressive) I roll out of bed and get dressed, putting on my devlishly attractive GVI shirt, and a pair of clean or dirty pants depending on the last time I took clothes to get washed at the Casa de Avila. After getting dressed, I head to the bathroom to freshen up, and then I pack my bookbag for the day. While packing my bag my sound trivial, any volunteer will tell you the difference between a well packed bag and one that is slightly less prepared may be the difference between chaos and order in the classroom. Trust me, a day with Casinos (delicious chocolate cookies) is much better than one without.

I hate to break with the wonderful rhythm that I’ve already established in the post, but I’d just like to say that the internet here is Peru is strange. By that, I mean that is annoying and unreliable. I usually write my posts on blogger.com because they save automatically and it’s just simpler, but right now I’m using good old fashioned Microsoft Word. For some reason, the internet just isn’t working even though the computer and my iPod both say that everything’s fine and dandy.

Anyways, I eat breakfast with my host family every morning around 7:05am. We have bread, hot milk, and I get orange juice because I told my host mother that it was my life blood. After stuffing my breakfast down my throat, I wait for the combi at the corner of our block. Occasionally, the combi comes on time, but rarely. I usually enjoy my ride. I didn’t last Friday. I think I may have upset the driver because I was standing on the wrong side of the road. (It’s during those moments that I pretend I don’t speak Spanish ) He was an idiot, but that’s beside the point. I’ve actually made friends with one of the cobradores.

Next, after screaming “baja a la esquina,” I run into the Casa de Avila and depending on the time of my arrival, help hand out sandwiches to the other volunteers or count the fruit for the day. We bring 86 mandurins to Victor Maldonado on Monday; it’s quite the counting task. Then as soon as the counting ends, we’re off to Sachaca: the dryest, poorest, most densely populated (not with people, but stray dogs) section of Arequipa. No less than twenty minutes later, we are at school climbing the infamous set steps that lead us to our beloved escuela primaria: Victor Maldonado. We have two schools, soon to be three. The other is called Triunfo, and I will probably never speak of it again because it is inferior, and not worthy of this blog. (Basically, it is our rival school and every volunteer from there believes their school is better. The difference is our school actually is better.) We had a showcase day last week, where all the schools in the district met for a special program. You can probably guess which school was out of control, and inadvertadly led our students to act up. Haha.