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Published: April 2nd 2005
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I missed the first day of my last week at the orphanage because of the Cotopaxi trip, but when I came in on Tuesday, I had the whole day to teach and new school supplies to get the kids interested in learning (thanks Nana). They spent the whole morning filling out sheet after sheet copying their letters - which is impressive considering it would normally take all morning to coax them into filling out one page. I think the colored pencils and cartoons on the bottom of each page really helped.
On Wendnesday, I decided to head out for an early movie (Closer) before we went to pick up Molly, the girl who´s taking my place at the orphanage. She´s taking a year off before college, and spent the fall caring for children who live in jail with their parents in Bolivia. Molly dropped by the orphanage on Thursday to meeet the nuns, but didn´t come to work with me until Friday.
We had both been at a party Thursday night with some of our friends in Quito, so we were pretty tired when we got to the school and not looking forward to teaching gym that afternoon, especially
when Sor Rosie told us we´d be taking all the grades (something I rarely do, but with two of us I´d guessed we´d be able to manage). Instead, we were surprised with a goodbye party/assembly that also introduced Molly to the whole school. (The combination hello/goodbye confused a few kids, though, who thought Molly was the reason I had to go. One of the six year olds (Mayay) even to told her to leave so I could stay....while sitting on her lap).
They´d made me made a goodbye banner and Sor Rosie gave a speech thanking me for the time I´d spent there, then the kids in grades 5 -7 (a combined class) performed choreographed dances to Reggaeton songs (starting with ´´Gasolina´´.....yes, it was as odd as that sounds) and brought Molly and I out to join them after the first song or two. Carolina, a German volunteer who had stopped by for the party, was also brought out onto the floor with us a couple times. Afterwards, the foruth graders sang me a song, followed by a card from the whole orphanage (they make greeting cards out of pressed flowers to support the school) and more dancing. The littlest ones (mostly the six year olds) clung to me and cried so hard that I was soon crying with them (Molly, too, for a bit). The older kids were more able to enjoy thew dancing and picture-taking. I also got a lot of personal goobye notes and one girl, Evelyn, copied out the lyrics of the song they sang for me (Mariposa). I had expected a few of the kids to take it hard, but it was a much more emotional morning than I had expected.
By five in afternoon, I was on a plane to Peru, the second solo vacation I´ve taken in my life (the first was almost ten years ago and only for a couple days at Lago di Como in Italy). I landed in Lima a couple hours later with the name of a hostel in Breña, but no reservation. One of the operators on the shuttle bus I took into town convinced me to got to a an inexpensive hostel in Miraflores instead, and I´m glad I did. I was able to walk to a sidewalk cafe nearby and have a a really good veggie panini by myself at night in a strange city and feel totally comfortable. I was also close enough to the Pacific that you could smell the salt in the warm night air (it´s summer), but I´ll have to wait until I´m back in Ecuador to actually see the ocean.
From what little I saw of Lima, it looked a lot more promising than I´d expected. The parts of the city I went through looked much more prosperous than Quito, and very clean. I drove by a ton of car dealerships, neon-heavy themed casinos (some of which are pint-sized copies of the more famous Vegas ones), and spotless parks that no one was sleeping in.....even at four in the morning. There was also a hotel that keeps thwo dolphins in a rooftop pool, at least according to my bus driver. And they have a huge Starbucks (which actually didn´t bother me at all here.....I would have lived there if Quito had one). All in all, Lima struck me as a comfortably cosmopolitan city and Miraflores reminded me of Coral Gables.
I arrived in Cuzco at seven this morning and don´t have much to say about it yet except that everyone here speaks to me in english and it´s freaking me out.
Thanks to Joanne Mallon, Marissa Mallon and Hillary Kantor for sending puppets and school supplies as well. They arrived after I´d left the school on Friday, but Molly is happy to bring them to the kids on Monday, and I´m sure they´ll help her break the ice.
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