A much needed update!

So, I realize that I have left you all in the dark for a few weeks now… Sorry about that. I’ve just been soaking up the Peruvian life-style and getting used to a somewhat crazy schedule. I have still been going to Coto Coto (the children’s orphanage) every morning. Besides the giving the kids attention that they never get, an important task has been working with the mentally disabled children. There is a brother/sister pair of children; the 2 year old brother mentally retarded, while the older 4 year old sister has quite severe autism. One of the objectives is trying to get them to walk… they require a lot more attention and work, but have made some real progress. Last week, I witnessed one of the happiest and saddest times at the orphanage. One of the girls was adopted! Usually, you would think this is a great thing, but the orphanage encourages the families to stay and play with their new child in the familiar setting of the orphanage before taking the kids away from the only thing they have known. This is great for the child being adopted, but the all of the remaining kids have to sit and watch from a distance as one of their sisters or brothers prepares to leave them forever. All the children cry for days and are constantly shouting out “mama” and “papa.” The kids definitely know what is going on and it is heart wrenching to see them go through that. Besides the sometimes horrible nurses that work at the orphanage and the occasional urine bath that the children treat me to, things are going well there.

In the afternoons, I began working in an extremely poor community called “Ladrillera.” Ladrillera is the community of poor brick(ladrillo) makers where the houses are little more than 10ft x 10ft mud huts that entire families live in. The children in the community are made to work at the startlingly early age of 7 or 8 and when they are given free time, they have no toys at all. Generally, the children spend their free time playing with broken bricks or in a river that is the only water supply to the community, therefore making it the bathroom and also the clothes washing water. The homes are so small that they can hardly fit a bed, let alone a table for the kids to do their homework… that’s where my job comes in. There is a building in the community specifically for volunteers to come and help children with their homework and give them a clean, safe place to play in the afternoons. At times it is a daunting task to help 3 kids with their homework and at the same time, trying to keep twenty 8-10year olds from killing each other. Helping with the homework is also quite a challenge for a few different reasons: The kids don’t always go to school because they either have to work, or their parents are too busy working to make them go. The result is 10 year olds in kindergarten who still can’t read or write. Another frequent problem I encounter is the lack of any motivation to go to school, let alone do their homework. Now I know that it is not unusual for kids to hate school, but it is worse in this community. They figure they will spend the rest of their lives making bricks for a living, so what good does trigonometry to them? Speaking of trigonometry… another reason why it is hard for me to help with some homework is that I simply don’t remember how I did that shit in high school. The whole purpose of high school is to teach students to remember something for a test and then forget it for the rest of their lives right? It definitely succeeded with me! I do genuinely enjoy working at Ladrillera and it offers me a challenge that I can’t turn down.

To save money and get in-shape for some upcoming treks that I have planned, I have been walking everywhere in Huancayo. I usually end up walking more than 4 hours a day to and from the orphanages and into the center of the city. It is paying off as I am getting quite used to the altitude(10,830 ft) and find myself huffing and puffing a lot less on the many hikes I have been taking. The first weekend I was here, the other volunteers made a weekend trip and I decided to stay back and get more acclimated to the new city. I hiked up the closest peak that I could find (13,880 ft) with great city views. I hiked up through Torre Torre, which is a strange sand-stone formation in the side of the mountain. I hiked straight up the side of the mountain, startling the few local farmers and herders that were working in the high altitudes. As I arrived at the top, I was treated to a great view of the valley, Incan ruins (just walls), and a killer headache from the altitude. It was very tranquil to be sitting on top of the mountain all by myself looking out over the valley and not hearing a damn thing! A few of us volunteers also make a hike out to the small town of Cochas which is famous for its gourd artwork. It was amazing to see the craftsmanship put into burning and etching the finest detail into the dried gourds. After leaving, we decided to hike up a hill where the obligatory (in Latin America) cross stood overlooking the valley. It provided us with some excellent views! A few of us also made a hike to nearby Chongas, where we saw the oldest church in the entire valley (1534), an inquisition plaza (complete with a whipping post), and views of the city with the great snowcapped mountains overlooking. After seeing the snowcapped mountains, it was quickly decided that we would have to make a long hike to visit them. The mountain is called Huaytapallana and there is actually a glacial formation on the top. The hike was a grueling 15mile trek that has us walking the first 6 miles straight up the side of the mountain until we reached the ice/snow area. We then dragged ourselves up another near mile of snow. Now this hike definitely wouldn’t have met and safety standards in the United States, but our guide urged us on as we walked on a 2 foot wide piece of ice bordered on both sides by extremely deep ice crevices (I don’t know how deep they were, but when you dropped a piece of ice down them, you didn’t hear a thud for about 3 seconds). We pushed on though, even through the sounds of avalanches (which we thought were thunder at first) and the snow that was then falling were trying hard to deter us… not even the clouds which surrounded us (changing the scenery to something similar to staring at computer paper for hours) could slow us down. Finally we reached our goal of 5,250 meters (17,224 feet) above sea-level and slid down on a piece of plastic for a few meters. Besides some extreme head-aches, the altitude didn’t seem to beat me up as bad as I had thought… I guess chewing coca leaves works! We returned from that hike last night around 8 and I was in bed within an hour.

Things are going well here in Huancayo, but I have decided to only stay here a little more than a month. The combination of a severe travel bug and some disagreements with the way the volunteer program is run here, has led me to the decision to travel for most of November before making my way into Ecuador to meet with the next volunteer organization. I hope to be able to visit a lot of Peru and hopefully spend a couple of weeks in Bolivia. We will see what happens, because plans definitely change quite frequently on the road. I hope everyone is doing really well and I will try to make the updates a little more frequent! Enjoy the pictures!

---

---