¡De Peru!

I´m here! So sorry, guys. Internet costs and, to be quite honest, the few minutes that I have convinced myself to buy have been mostly devoted to emails to a certain....someone.
There´s a lot to say and no time at all, so I´ve been drafting posts in a notebook on bus rides to and from work sites. This one was written yesterday, so here goes.

Yesterday was probably one of the best days of my life. We went to one of the poor villages to do childcare/laundry/hairwashing/drama. And it was amazing. The drive there was around forty-five minutes, and I was cracking up the whole time. Everything is exactly like Sr. told us back in Spanish II. I saw a moto (small car used for transporting very large numbers of people) with a picture of the gorgeous Che Guevara (ha, Mom!), a sign advertising clean restrooms with a picture of a duck sitting on a toilet with a roll of TP that said ¨Jesus loves you¨ on it in Spanish. Also funny was a wall with ¨no pintar¨(the Spanish equivalent of ¨no painting¨) on it, followed by a cynical ¨jejeje¨(our ¨hahaha¨). Some things are the same in every culture.

When we got to the village, I immediatley volunteered to help with the children, along with six or seven others from our group. They led us into a tiny room crowded with a few cribs and twenty to thirty young children (probably between 1 and 5). There were a few women in teh room also, and although everyone was excited adn happy to see each other, it quickly became apparent that no one had any idea what to do next. Tehy didn´t speak English, we didn´t speak Spanish. The kids stared at us, waiting. This was my chance! I asked the lady to help me get the kids to sit down,a dn then asked them (everything in Spanish, of course) if they wanted to sing. They said they did, adn we quickly began to chant Ï´ve got the joy joy joy joy¨song we´d learned in language training as loudly as we could. The kids loved it. After that, I asked if we could go outside, and we split into groups to play duck duck goose (only we made it pero y gato, as no one could think of the word for ¨goose¨in Span), jump rope, and be taught new Spanish games by the kids.

It was so much fun. Most of the kids´ parents work during hte day, adn you could tell they were thrilled to have new people to talk to ad play with. They were so cute. I knew there was no way they´d be able to correctly say (and definitely not remember) my actual name, so I introduced myself with the name I´ve used in Spanish class all year-- Miriam. They didn´t seem too suspicious, and you coudl tell they were relieved to hear a name familiar to them. Very familiar, actually. I happened to be standing with two little girls. and asked them what theier names were. The second one said her name was Miriam. ¨¿Tu tambien?¨I asked. (you, too?). She got the sweetest shy smile on her face, adn she and her friend giggled over the coincidence for a long time.

I must not forget to mention that I have found, as one of my roommates put it, ¨a new man.¨That is, I met Raul. He is ten years old, and although of course nowhere near as gorgeous as Paul and probably not my type anyway, I have to say he was pretty cute. I´d noticed him following me at a distance, his friends laughing as they looked at him and then at me, then poked him before bursting into laughter again. Finally I had to ask them what was up.
¨¿Que es tan comico aqui?¨I demanded playfully. (What´s so funny here?)
¨Talk to her,¨I could hear them whispering to him in Spanish as they pushed him forward. Raulito himself wouldn´t look at me, but kept smiling as they shoved him closer.
¨Do it!¨They urged.
Finally he looked up, shyly.
¨¿De donde eres?¨He whispered, before looking quickly back down at the ground.
I told him. His friends nudged him again.
¨¿Cuantos anos tienes?¨ I almost busted out laughing.
¨Demasido anos para ti¨I wanted to say, but refrained.