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 : )

Soritor and Waterfalls

You don’t know the meaning of the term “field trip” until you’ve ridden in an open backed truck with 50 students and a couple professors through the Peruvian countryside. We went to another away game on Wednesday , this time to a village called Soritor. The drive was like riding a roller coaster, screaming and laughing and all, only more exciting because in a roller coaster you actually know you’re safe (no worries m Mother, I’m never actually in real danger). But after a while we diecded we wanted it to be even more exciting, so we through in some pouring rain. Fortunately we had some tarps to hold over us so we weren’t completely soaked. Plus, I was the more popular in Soritor than I’ve ever been in my life. It’s the white skin. We were sitting in the bleachers to watch the soccer game, and before long we each had a circle of fascinated teenagers wanting to talk to us. One of their favorite games was “translate this word,” meaning they say a word in Castellano (what they call Spanish here) and you translate it into English. It amuses them for a remarkable amount of time. They also love to hear us talk and sing in English, singing especially. Jenny and I sang “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” and the Titanic song, we all sang the national anthem for them, and they got Caleb going well enough and long enough that if we’d been charging we would have eaten for a week (not that we can complain about how much we pay to eat, since we eat on less than $4 a day with all three meals at a really good restaurant)It was an interesting experience to say the last. We don’t get nearly that reaction in Yantalo, probably because they’re more used to volunteers here. When we got back we realized that we hadn’t told anyone we were going (we were gone all day). When we walked into the restaurant we got the Spanish equivalent of “Where were you, we were worried!” from our happy little restaurant family and the same from our cute little Mama Flora. It’s nice to have a little family here looking out for us. Other than that this week has mostly been teaching classes in the Colegio and our English classes. We did get to learn how to make lomo saltado, one of my favorite dishes here, so I’ll make it for you when I get home, family.
Today was probably one of my favorite days so far. I got to go swimming! We met up with the JAS and hiked to some waterfalls, where we spent a few hours swimming, jumping off rocks, jumping off the falls, building rafts, etc. I did get pretty burned, but it was totally worth it. I wish I could capture how beautiful this place is, in words or with pictures, but I can't. Anyway, it was a blast. Have a good week!

Fishing and Mountains

This was a fun week with a lot of activities besides work. We don’t have to stick to a P day here when it comes to doing fun recreational things :)
Tuesday: Peruvian Pizza Adventure! (And my first earthquake) Caleb decided he was bound and determined to make a pizza, so he scrounged up some mozzarella (since a fair number of people here have never even heard of it) and flour and a few other ingredients and we went to the restaurant to have a pizza party with them. It was admittedly not really like American pizza. For one thing they don’t really have ovens here. The only oven they had is used for roasting like five chickens at once over a wood burning fire. So we set up a sort of barbeque over that fire and grilled our pizza by cooking one side of the crust, then flipping it over and putting the toppings on the cooked side and cooking the other side. There were only a few mishaps with the crust breaking, but it mostly worked pretty well. We also made up the dough recipe. We had a sort of sauce with chopped fresh tomatoes, garlic, salt, oregano, and basil, and for topping we had red onions, spinach, chicken, and steak. And in spite of its un-Americaness, it was really good. It’s funny what foods you find yourself missing. Jenny and I discovered that the Church building has an oven, and we are now determined to make chocolate chip cookies : ) Tuesday night we were just sitting and chilling when I felt my bed start shaking. I figured it was just Lura on the top bunk shaking her leg until someone said “earthquake” and I realized everyone (we had two other volunteers staying with us at the time as well) was looking at each other in alarm. There was some frenzied questioning about what we should do, and then we all hurried out to the backyard. We could see all the trees swaying and the bathroom mirror swinging. It only lasted a few seconds and nothing was damaged, but nobody was ready for bed after that. (The green "S"s are safe zones for earthquakes and are all over here. We took this picture a couple days before the quake.)
Wednesday: We expeditioned to another village with the school for the school kids to compete in soccer and volleyball. It was one of the moments where we just have to laugh at the differences. Transportation for the kids consisted of a large open backed truck that they just all stood up in (we were in a van with the professors, but there were still too many of us by US standards). We took those as far as the river, where they had to be abandoned upon taking the ferry. On the other side there was another truck for the kids and a fleet of motos and motorcycles for everyone else. The games were fun (though super hot) and it was interesting to see another village. It made us all really appreciate Yantalo, because as far as poor rural villages go it’s a pretty nice and clean one, mostly because they have a trash system instituted.
Thursday: Fishing! Caleb managed to make friends with a fisherman who agreed to take us on a trip. It was way cool because it involved about half an hour of walking through jungle river bank, which was beautiful. I wish pictures could even capture it. Fishing seems to be simpler here. You have a piece of wood with fishing line wrapped around it and a hook and a weight on the end and bait them with earthworms. I was the only one who managed to catch anything (meaning I caught one about 3 inches long that we cut up for bait, with which I managed to catch a crab that got away), but Jenny did manage to throw her line in the river when casting once, so our guide’s son had to dive in and save it. I’ll admit, I was jealous of the diving in part :) It rained while we were there, but it was so beautiful on the river. I loved it. Our guide gave us a big fish he caught so we could take it home and learn how to cook it and eat it, again at our little restaurant.
Friday: Sleep. It was kind of a crash day all around.
Saturday: Hiking! We hiked Mount Moro, which is sort of the Mt. Timp of this area. It was definitely the hardest hike I have ever done, which was probably a combination of the climate, the fact that I’ve only really been hiking once yet this year, and the fact that the philosophy of the trail seemed to be “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line,” because we were pretty much going straight up the mountain. (We found out later that there are three ways up the mountain, and that the way we took was the longest and hardest). It was so beautiful though. For part of the climb we were in serious jungle, and it was amazing. I wish pictures could capture it, but there’s something about the three-dimensionality of it and the space of branches, trees, and vines that flat cameras just can’t capture. It’s the kind of thing you have to see. After we came out of the jungle we got sweeping views of pretty much all of the San Martin valley area I think. It’s so green here, between the fields and forest, with little scattered villages. Climbing down was of course a lot quicker (on the way up we ended up having to rest kind of ridiculously often—I don’t think my body is used to losing water that quickly), but down was still kind of slow going as we had to be careful not to fall off the mountain because it was so steep. We got to do some bouldering/rock scrambling too, which was fun. It’s the first time that my arms have been really sore from hiking and not my legs—all the rock climbing stuff. On our way back through the jungle section we took a stop to swing on vines (see picture at top) :) It was a fun, crazy American thing to do, that the Peruvians really enjoyed as well : )
In general, life goes on here in Yantalo. This week my major goal is to really focus on and work hard on the language. Mostly understanding is ok, but can be really frustrating and embarrassing in conversation, especially when they can tell you’re just nodding and smile a little and say “no entiendes,” or “you don’t understand.” But it’s all good. Favorite quote for the week (besides being called Barbie at church—it’s the hair): “Mama, mira, gringas!” or “Look Mom, white girls!” Have a good week!

Working in El Jardin

Buenas Tardes!
So, I've finally gotten to work here in Yantalo. I've been working in el Jardin, or the preschool here in Yantalo, helping to teach English classes. There's a girl from Moyobamba already teaching here, but she's very soft-spoken, which doesn't always work well with three, four, and five year olds. The kids here are adorable. They call out to me on the streets when we're walking around and come up and give me hugs. They call me 'profesora' or 'estrella'. I've really enjoyed working there so far.
As for life in Yantalo in general, it's definitely a different world. There are chickens in the backyard and coffee beans drying on tarps in the streets and roosters crowing any time of day or night. Last night for an evening snack we knocked some coconuts down from the tree in our back garden and had coconut water (which is definitely an acquired taste, but I'm learning to like it) and fresh coconut meat. Something funny, they don't really believe in mixing things here. If you ask for a salad you'll get a plate that has a pile of avacado, a pile of cucumber, and a pile of tomato. Last night Caleb mixed his coconut with passion fruit and mandarina in the shell, which was way good, but when he showed it to Flora she looked disgusted. It was funny. Sadly they don't really sell fruit or veggies in Yantalo, so we stock up while we're here in Moyobamba. What do they eat then, you may ask? The answer is pretty much always rice, potatoes, and chicken, sometimes beef. Today they really switched things up by having pasta. In general, life here is good. It's definitely a different time frame, and when we find ourselves waiting we joke about being on Peruvian time. The people here live really day to day. We go to the school and they say 'how about you give a presentation on your major--right now' or 'how about you teach a class on nutrition--right now', which definitely make things interesting. We realized that we're really pretty much going to coordinate everything here ourselves, so we should be getting a lot of that done this week, plus we've got some really fun activities planned.
Something cool we did this week--Wuilman, the coordinator for Yantalo, took us up to his family's chacra, or field. He and his brothers were setting up a boundary to mark his land, because since his dad died people keep encroaching on it. They taught us about a lot of different plants and some bugs (bugs are a major part of life here, and sadly one method of entertainment for us. We watched a spider and a beetle battle it out the other night). We also got to try sugar cane, which is tastey, and pacai, which are these bean pods about a foot and a half long that grow on trees. The seeds are in this spongey white stuff that you suck off and then spit out the seeds. I actually didn't catch the spit out the seeds part until after I'd eaten four or five, but it's been more than 48 hours and there seem to be no ill effects, which is relieving. We've gotten to try a lot of fun fruit since getting here, and it's all good.
Anyway, I'm alive and well and learning to enjoy things like cold showers and lots of rice, and I promise I'll try to get some pictures up soon. I forgot my cord again today. Adios!