1st post

4 September 2008

Right now it is 8:15 and I am sitting on my bed a bit exhausted after another long day…I forget where exactly I left off, but I think it is around Monday or Tuesday. Well to just give a small recap, even though realistically I don’t think any of my recaps I have given are quite that small, I only have enough energy for one. Oh yes, I do remember I had a bit about my exercise class as the last comment on my 3rd post… okay so here I go…
Tuesday was a very long day, I was up and out by 7:30… again thank God I am not still using the instant nescafe as my fuel. I had to be at the Colegio before 8 to meet with the English teacher. I talked with her for a bit about my session of tutoring and what exactly I’m doing; I’m not teaching only re-enforcing what the students know and of course help with pronunciation. I was out of there about 8:50ish enough time to run over to my socio-comunitarios house to be ready before we left for our meeting with the other groups of artesanas at 9 in a neighboring community. She was a little late because she was at another artesanas house, dropping off products; this gave me just the right amount of time to change from jeans and a cardigan to a polo and skort bc fyi its freakin hot here. We headed to the meeting and waited a bit for the engineer to show up from Piura. Engineer here is used to describe a professional not necessarily someone who studied mechanical or civil engineering. He was the same man that last week I went with my socio to meet in Piura to discuss the disunity of the groups. Well this meeting lasted a nice 5 hours, which I might say is a bit long to discuss which products were going to make 25 of and which products were bringing to the exhibition in 2 weeks. (Which is in Lima and I’ll be heading too I’m pretty sure) Karrie the volunteer who works with two associations of Paja weavers and lives very close to me was there too. That’s when I decided to bring up the idea in front of the engineer and all the groups to add cloth to the hats and purses as decoration. If you recall in a few of my pictures, I have a very pretty colorful scarf that I like to wear with my blouses. I actually bought it from another volunteer’s grupo de artesanas en Cajamarca. Well I brought this along with me to the meeting because I really wanted to make purses with this material since it is more modern and hip. Or you could say that I just really wanted a purse with this material as the handles. Lol either way, when I suggested it Karrie of course backed it up because she had a similar ideas well and even had a picture she took. Then I went around to the products that were at the meeting and started to put my scarf around them and manipulating the scarf to look like handles for the bags and to create different styles. With that much I guess agreement between me and Karrie and the engineer they all said yes to the idea which would have never happened if we suggested this individually to our groups. And at the same time we created a semi-contract for the ladies who were there to work together with this new idea. We also scheduled another meeting which is actually tomorrow at 10 am. Karrie and I are in charge of the price estimates and the material to cut and determine which size for each product and the ladies will bring 3 designs each that they think the material would go with. I will take some pictures (which, unfortunately, is something I haven’t been doing lately) so you can see what I trying to explain. All in all, it was a successful reunion (meeting) and I’m really glad that I was here to go. After the meeting I had to rush back before the municipality closed to print out my plan de trabajo for the math and English teachers, because I had meetings with them the next day. After that I ran to Catacaos to use the internet, hence there were blogs uploaded and emails answered =) That night I was pretty much exhausted but a little annoyed because as always there was some meeting or other going on about what else but the tutoring sessions I was going to have the next day and how there weren’t enough students in the morning and how I should switch it to allow more time, I told them no, I’m not a teacher, I’m a business volunteer, so in reality I’m doing this because they asked me and I felt I should to know the community not because I wanted that as my full time job. I’d rather not go into to much detail because I think you will get a negative image of what is going on and that is not what I want to portray. I must say that having such motivated people is a blessing which many volunteers don’t have, but it is a challenge when it’s your first couple weeks and I simply would like to adjust. Anyway I’m prob getting of topic here, my night ended pleasantly when I received a call from my mom and dad and mr. flemming. lol

The next morning I got to sleep till 7:30 then was up preparing because of course my students were on time at 9 for tutoring there were about 7 of them which is a good number, though they were from all different grades… one from quinto which is like the last year in middle/high school I still don’t understand the system here. But whatever grade it was, they were studying trig. I told him that I would try but prob couldn’t help him and not to worry bc you don’t use that too much in your life… lol I don’t think I should have said that. It was really hard though even without the trig kid because you can’t imagine translating math into Spanish, I mean sure the numbers are the same, but the words they’re hard enough in English. Then we played some fun games so I think everyone had a good time. The class ended at 10:45 and after cleaning up I realized I was late for my 11 o’clock with the English professor. And when I got there she said so and that she thought I wasn’t coming, mind you I was 10 min late which is completely acceptable in the US. And plus it was the 10 minutes it took to walk there!! That meeting was…interesting to say the least. Boy, that woman can talk…and not in English lol. Oh I really shouldn’t say such things but I mean she is an English teacher, I do have some expectations. However, one thing from PC I’ve learned is to not have expectations, so who’s to blame, but of course me!
Oh forgot to mention that that morning I went to the muni to drop of my full plan de trabajo for September to the mayor. I was kinda impressed with myself for that; a full work plan, in Spanish, in official Peruvian format. I may hold the title of a volunteer, but in that moment I felt like a person from corporate America. Going back to my reunions with the teachers… I had my meeting with theEnglish prof till about 1ish which is when I had my other reunion with the Math professor. She’s really sweet and only took about 50 minutes because she understood what I was doing and was very matter of fact about everything. I got back to the house at about 2:30ish and just wanted to pass out. My brain was full of Spanish and I think I was in overload, but instead I had a meeting with my artesanas but she was understanding and could see the exhaustion in my face, so she let me go home and rest. I was really grateful for that. Though she did make this unnerving comment about how that whole tutoring thing wasn’t my job and I needed to focus more on them, which would be the truth if I was in one of the past business groups, but fortunately or unfortunately, depende, for my group (Peru 11) we were trained to help youth as well and to have 3 socios with 3 organizations instead of just 1. Therefore, yes it was my job as well, yes not tutoring math or English, more like starting youth business classes, but I figured this is a way into the community to spread my name and what I’m doing here as well as getting to know the kids who will be in these groups in the future. And plus, it’s a hell of a lot easier to tutor school kids then to teach accounting to artisans in your first month =)
At about 5ishIheaded to the estadio for my exercise class, this time even more people showed up which was good because, my “faithful” and “supportive” friends didn’t come lol… conveniently all had really important obligations to attend too and at 5 o’clock exactly lol. This time we did running, I did yoga with 2 other woman then we did abs, then we played a game of soccer with a bunch of the neighbor kids so it was just massive mayhem, however the gringa prevailed, my team won with in a demolishing 10-0 victory! WHOO RA! Another thing that I like to say I started which I’m really proud of is high fives and fist pumps (not north jersey style, the one that’s like a cool handshake with the touch of fist and explosion). Taught them that, who would have thought they didn’t have high fives and cool handshakes. I think that’s a sustainable project if not for anything else except to remember how cool I am.
Okay that’s enough of my “small” entry for tonight… plus I’m only a day behind…
Sweet dreams <33 elizabeth