Mi Vida Peruana

I am having the most interesting experience every day at the school. I am sort of confused about when they actually have class or learn anything other than how to dance and have fiestas. Last week we partied all week for "el dia del colegio"- the "day of the school". Wednesday was chess tournaments all day, Thursday, students from each class recited poetry and sang songs in front of the whole school (800 students), and Friday, the whole school walked together to the Cathedral in town for mass, then came back and the students performed traditional dances in brightly colored costumes. It is quite impressive how well they can dance- but I guess they do all start in kindergarten dancing in front of the school!
The days we do have class (or at least I am stubborn and try to get my class to have classes in the middle of all the partying), it goes like this: I arrive to school and all the students from the 3 different fourth grade classes croud around me grabbing my hands and trying to drag me to their class saying (in Spanish of course)"come to our class today teacher Heidi." I have one class that I spend most days in, and also happens to be the worst behaved class ever!!! Normally the professora shows up for about 20 minuts to give a lesson or start them on some busy work and tell me to keep them working. As soon as she leaves, they go crazy, literally hitting, punching, and yelling every two minutes. I always thought I was a patient person, but I am not so sure anymore! The problem is also that disciplining kids in Spanish is pretty difficult- especially when they laugh at me if I say anything wrong. One day they knocked me over because I was sitting on a stool that happened to be in the middle of a fight.
There are about 50 kids in the school that are assigned to be the "policia escolar", or school police. I think it is the most ridiculous idea in the world. Basically, the best dressed (uniforms of course) students walk around with a special rope tied around their arm and big white sticks and have the authority to use the sticks when kids come to school with messy hair, ripped uniforms, etc. or simply to get kids to behave. Unfortunately one of the biggest bullies in my class is a "policia escolar" and I constantly catch him beating the other kids with his fists or his stick.
Although school can obviously be stressful some days, I always love my afternoons at Azul Wasi. I have been helping the boys with math homework almost every day, and I know my Algebra skills are improving daily =) I love the boys so much, and am so happy when they run in and give us all huge hugs saying "Amiga Heidi!" Today I found out the whole history of Azul Wasi, which I found absolutely fascinating!

Alcedes, the director of the project, is a police man working with boys off the streets in Cuzco. About 10 years ago, he worked with the police to find a home for about 15 street boys in Lucre (an hour from oropesa). There was a huge abandoned estate house (Hacienda) that was actually built in the 16th century for one of Pizarro's generals, that Alcedes pushed the police to open up for these boys. It was a brilliant placement, with wonderful facilities, showers,etc. They even raised guinea pigs and sold them and I think had support from the government. The biggest problem with the house though, was that the police were very involved and sometimes rough with the boys, or things like the chief of police would come over and take all the guinea pigs that they were going to sell (for example 1 guinea pig could buy 12 chickens) and just eat them for him and his friends.
A mormon volunteer from a huge U.S. morman volunteer organization (even with funding from Bill Gates) came and saw the orphanage, liked the idea, and wanted it for their own program (I don't know all the details about how that happened). Anyhow, he payed off some officers in the police force to get Alcedes (a very well respected police man!) deported from the orphanage to work instead with traffic somewhere. Then, they took all the boys from the home to another placement where they basically started shoving Morman religion down their throughts and not feeding some of the boys. A bunch of the boys ran away from the new placement to Alcedes' house and moved in with him and his family for awhile.
Eventually, Alcedes started looking around again for a new place for the boys. That was 3 years ago when he found this land in Oropesa and started getting connections with other volunteer organizations. Two backpackers from Scotland ran into the program and took interest in it. One happened to teach Salsa dancing lessons in Scotland so she decided to have a huge salsa dancing party and raised 5,000 pounds to donate the money needed to buy the land and start building. Now Alcedes completely runs Azul Wasi and it depends completely on international volunteer funds.

-I didn't get all the details down here, but I absolutely love this story because of all the small pieces that fit together that God has so obviously worked out for this project to survive.

That's all I have time to write now, but I would love to get some comments and feed back from ppl reading this =) Also, the school has vacation for my last 2 weeks (starting monday) and I will be spending my whole day at the orphanage. I would be very grateful for any good game or craft ideas that can be done with boys 6-17 years old.

School in Oropesa

I now work at the school in Oropesa every day from 9-1, teaching 4rth graders and absolutely love it! This is the most disorganized school I have ever seen, with kids constantly running, fighitng, playing, screaming. . . today was a pretty typical crazy day at the school. I arrived at 9:00, which is actually already half an hour late. No surprise that the teacher was not in the room and the kids were just cleaning from last weeks crazy activities- which included spending a day making an oven out of stones to cook potatoes in. Then, my teacher called me to come with her to a large meeting room with all the other teachers where a few students served us bread and mate. Seriously every day the teachers have random meetings or activities like this that make them just leave their class to fend for themselves. I found out next that I was switching to another fourth grade classroom. I never know what I am teaching until I am actually starting- like today I asked, "Ok but what do you want me to teach today?" And the teacher asked her class what they wanted to do. Of course they wanted art- one thing I am no good at! Since I knew I had practically the whole day to teach what I wanted, we started with music and then did art. I'm teaching the scale and notes with Do, Re, Mi. . . in Spanish with motions and all. Then we did art which consisted of drawing a guitar, copying the scale, and drawing pictures from the song- I love planning on the spot and stumbling through my rough Spanish explanations :P After I finished with this class, I moved and taught the same lesson with the fourth grade class next door. Then we ate MORE potatoes from those stone ovens that they made. As we ate our potatoes, I looked out and in the center basketball court area, there was music blaring and all the students watching people dancing. Apparently tomorrow is the day of the teacher, so we were celebrating- another reason to not have school. . .
The funniest part about the school is that the teachers all just leave randomly throughout the day, sometimes for an hour or more at a time. When that happens, I just get up and make up a lesson about something. Sometimes I have major problems with the students hitting, fighting, yelling, and running around when I'm trying to teach something ( any great discipline advice?). But often they are excited enough about learning something like music or english that they are relatively well behaved.
At the end of the day, or during recess, a bunch of the girls all crowd around me and ask questions about my family, the U.S., English words, etc. One student ask me what year it is in the U.S. right now =)
Often after school I try to find one of the boys from the orphanage and we walk the 15 minute walk jumping over ditches, through fields, and passing all the motor cars, bulls and donkeys to get to Azul Wasi where I spend hte afternoon helping with homework, playing Uno, or playing soccer.

I need random song ideas to do with my class. the best are simple ones that teach english- like Head and shoulders, knees and toes is perfect! The school is Catholic, so they can be Christian- like Open the Eyes of my heart is good.