Advertisement
Published: August 28th 2006
On my last day of school, the director, Gilberto, told me to keep my day free. This meant that i was to give the kids their cumulative exam on Thursday instead of Friday. I thought nothing of it and simply did as i was told. After class on Thursday, the kids asked me to come to school at 10 am, which was odd since school normally stared at 2pm. They said they wanted to have a farewell party and i assumed it was going to be a small party in the classroom with a little bit of food and nothing more. It turned out that they had planned a whole excursion into the forest up in the mountain. Next thing I knew, the kids came to get me from the hostal at 10am, dragged me into Gilberto's car and he drove us to school. Once at school, we started hiking up to one of the student's houses. I was confused the whole time, but decided just to trust them.
Once at the house, my little students were preparing us lunch-peeling vegetables, frying chicken, and to my horror i saw a dead guinea pig ready to be fried. Unlike the one we
Cooking
In one of the student's houses before heading up the mountaintasted next to Lake Cuicocha, this one had the skin and fat removed, making it look like a dead pink rat. I could see its rat-like ears and its claws. What topped it off was that it was swimming in a see of blood. I thought nothing of it, but later I would find out that the guest of honor was to have the
cuy-meaning me. When we were done, the kids put all the food into pots and loaded the posts into a pick-up that was waiting outside. We all packed into the back of the truck, all 25 kids and lunch pots, and headed up the mountain.
Once we got up there, they unloaded the phone and dragged me by the hand to hike some more up the mountain where we played games for a good two hours. Simon Says and Marco Polo fascinated them and the whole scene felt so out of this world. It felt magical playing in these dense woods running amongst trees, getting our clothes stained by berries, and seeing the children pick flowers made me remember a childhood innocence lost so early these days. It's amazing how so little can make you that
Arriba!
In the back of a pick-up truck taking us up the mountain happy.
After taking a few class pictures, we stared heading down the mountain back to where we had left our pots. We settled into a small shack for lunch were, as I feared, the children served me a humongous
cuy on top of my plate of rice and potatoes. I didn't want to be rude, so I simply said I would rather share the
cuy than eat it by myself. The children didn't seem to mind and actually finished the whole thing. After lunch, the day was coming to an end and I gave each kid an indigenous bracelet to remember the time we all spent together that summer. They were all so grateful, and after that we stared making our way down the mountain, this time without a truck. On our way down, the kids ran into different fields among the way and brought me fruit and vegetables to demonstrate the variety on food grown in their village. We spend the two hours it took us to get down sucking on corn canes and chatting amongst us.
When we got back to the school, we played some more and when we walked down the road to meet Gilberto, saying
Cuidado!
Diego holds on to the back of the truck while eating a quick snack to the kids was the hardest thing. Even though they were stubborn and hard to control at times, the children were by far the highlight of the summer. They now think that I taught them, but they also taught me so much without realizing it.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.094s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 10; qc: 52; dbt: 0.0456s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
laura_lee
Laura
wow
you ate cuy?! you are soo brave. Haha, whatever "i didnt want to be rude." you just didnt want to eat it. aww. thats so sad. have you kept in contact at all? i know sarah got a letter from her kids...i didnt though, i never thought to get the address or anything :(