El Dia de San Juan

This week has been pretty much all fiesta. They don't do holidays halfway here. On Monday I learned how to make juanes, these rice chicken balls that I cannot make for you at home because I'm pretty much positive I won't be able to find the leaves you wrap them in. They eat them here all the time though, especially to take hiking and such. On Tuesday I went on a field trip with the Jardin kids, and on Wednesday we just ate and played. So no classes this week. Thursday was the big holiday. We spent the night at a friend's house in Moyo so that we could get up at four and join the rest of Moyobamba for the pandilla. To get an idea of a pandilla imagine a line of EFY kids (you know, escorts), then have them do a sort of prancy jog dance thing, then have them do it for seven kilometers through the streets with the rest of their city. And that should give you an idea of what we did for the pandilla. Of course we also stopped periodically to have dance circles in the street. Anyway, it was a lot of fun, but super tiring, so we slept through most of the afternoon. That night they did more pandilla, as well as the jungle form of the pinata. They have palm logs stuck in the street throughout the city, and attached to the top is a big loop with things like toilet paper and soda and baby clothes tied to it. They dance through the city and chop each one down, and people run up to grab the stuff off it. It was pretty fun.
Friday night we decided to go camping. We came to Moyo and got some supplies to make tinfoil dinners, borrowed a couple tarps and a couple machetes, and struck out for Wuilman's chacra. It was me, Jenny, Caleb, and Linea (one of the other volunteers here). With our usual perfect planning, we struck out at sundown for a place we had been to once our first week here. It made finding it a little interesting, but if I ever wanted to feel like a jungle adventurer, climbing through barbed wire fences by the light of a full moon with a machete in my hand got me pretty close :) We camped out in a cornfield and had our fire, tinfoils, and as close as we could get to smores and banana boats without being able to get ahold of marshmallows. It was fun :) The strangest part was waking up in the morning to our fellow villagers, who were at work.
Saturday was quiet, and then Sunday we did some moving. There's another house full of volunteers here in Yantalo, but they had more girls coming, so they wanted to move the two guys to our house and move me and Jenny there. However, we managed to arrange things so that we could stay in our little house with our little family, instead of with 15 other girls in one house. So Jenny and I moved into Caleb's room and he and the two guys, Viral and Tilon, moved into ours, and we are now happily situated. They're cool guys, it's been fun to have them around.
Anyway, there's my life for the last week. Yesterday and today were holidays too, but classes should start back up tomorrow. Things are going well here and I'm still really enjoying it, though I confess myself ready to eat something besides rice and beans. So happy Dias de San Juan, San Pedro, and San Pablo!
P.S. We bought a pet bunny. He is sitting on my lap right now, and we named him Casino (which happens to be our favorite brand of cookie here). He's a little bigger than my two fists and super cute. We're giving him as a present to our hosts, under the condition that they can't eat him until after we leave.
PPS I forgot, the other weekend we performed in a dance festival with the colegio here. Our numbers? Jenny and I acted out Love Story while we sang it, and our whole group of volunteers (about 15) rapped the Fresh Prince of Belair. It was a lot of fun, even if they didn't quite get it. I'll try to put up more pictures next week. I love you all!

Work-A-Lot... and Monkeys :)

So I said last week that I didn't catch a monkey, but I actually ended up getting to hold two that night. Their names were Carlitos and Martin, and they were super cute. I actually caught Martin, if you count him jumping to me and me not dropping him as catching :) We were at a hotel for dinner with the foundation, and they had a couple monkeys in a cage and let me and Jenny go in and help feed them and hold them. I want a pet monkey now. We saw a guy here in Moyo yesterday who had a teeny little pet monkey just hanging out on his shoulder on a little leash... Ashley, can I have a monkey?
Other than that this week has mostly been work here in Peru. I've gotten pretty busy. I got to do a few fun little things like help judge an art contest at the school. We also had a fire in our backyard one night with the other volunteers, which was fun. This week was mostly just quiet and busy though. We did have another couple of roommates (Jenny and I have had five girls in and out of our room since we've been in Peru) who were both native Peruvians, which was fun. One is actually LDS and graduated from BYU, so it was a lot of fun to have her there. We had a hymn singing night to Caleb's guitar one night, which was cool. Anyway, I love Peru and being here and working with the people here. It's a great place, and I'll be sad to go, but happy to come home.

Chocolate and Monkeys

I've been getting busier and busier, so I do fewer interesting things besides work, but this week has been good. Milagros, the new teacher in the Jardin, is here now, so I'm her teaching assistant, which I like better. I like my work here and enjoy doing it, but am officially cured of thinking about majoring in elementary ed (though I'd already decided against it anyway). There's also a new group of volunteers here from Rochester New York doing a health study.
One fun thing we did do was learn how to make hot chocolate from scratch. Literally. We have a cocoa tree in our backyard. You start out by picking the pods and cutting them open (they're kind of like gourds), then you suck on the seeds. They're covered in this kind of slimy white coating that is sweet and tangy and actually pretty good. Don't bit the seeds though--nasty. You spit all the seeds into a bowl and let them ferment for a couple days (it makes them sweeter), then spread them outside to dry in the sun. Ants and things crawl on them, which is disconcerting, but doesn't adctually matter because of the rest of the process. After the seeds are dry you toast them for about 20 minutes (in our case over a wood burning fire, because Flora likes that better even though she has a gas stove too) until they're all black, then take them off the fire and peel them while they're still hot, which gets your hands very sooty. Then Flora has a little hand grinder machine (kind of the the apple spiraler) and we ground up the beans into a powder, put them in hot water with sugar and milk, and had a delicious drink that doesn't taste much at all like hot chocolate in the states. It was fun :)
Today we got to go on a jungle cruise. The real deal :) Canoes on a little branch of the river with native guides who don't speak English showing us the monkeys (yes Brindy, Parker, and Gracie, I have now officially seen monkeys. No, I didn't catch one, because they were up too high). We also got to swing on a giant vine swing they have there and just the jungle. I took lots of pictures, but honestly they just can't capture it. Too many of the cool things are too three dimensional for a camera to capture. I also got to fulfill a dream I didn't know I had of climbing trees in the jungle, though not quite as much as I would have liked to. It was a fun outing :)

Another Week in Peru

So, this week was mostly just busy. I had been teaching in the Jardin with Melissa (here are a couple pictures of the Jardin), but the foundation let her go on Monday, so it’s been just me for the rest of the week. And I’ll admit, the first day was hard. I was fighting tears as I went to the last class. But the rest of the lessons have gone much better, and it’s been great. It is really time consuming because I’ll decide at 7 or 8 at night what I’m doing the next day and proceed to find 20 pictures of families in my Ensigns and make copies to use in teaching Mommy and Daddy, or to draw, cut out, and color a life size preschooler to use to practice body parts. It makes me feel like Mom : ) It’s fun though. I now know the names of almost every child between 3 and 5 in the village (there are 96, I believe), which is fun when I’m walking around. I’ve also been learning a lot about effective ways to maintain discipline. We’ve been teaching night English classes for anyone who wants them, and I’ve started teaching some linguistics classes to the English professors. We also get to teach pretty regularly in the colegio (which is just a school), though mostly on topics that the teachers don’t want to teach on, which makes it interesting for three Mormon volunteers to be doing it. It’s been a good experience though, We learned how to make ceviche this week, which is really good (and very clean and safe at our restaurant for those who know what it is ) We also discovered this week that we have access to a bike through the foundations, so we’ve started going out in the evenings. I usually ride and Caleb and Jenny run, but Caleb found another bike for 90 sols (about $30) that he and I are going to go in on together so we can start going on trips. It’s beautiful to go out in the late afternoon here. The weather has been perfect at that time of day and the sky is beautiful. We follow different roads out of town and go through the countryside. It’s incredible. I’m really falling in love with this place. It’s so beautiful and I really enjoy working with the people. But no worries Mother, I’ll come home : )