First Day At Work

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Luke´s Day:

I met Geoff at the bridge at 7:30am, soon after Dan turned up & Walter & his wife Rachel got off the bus from Urubamba. Rachel was there as interpreter as Walter doesn't think his english is very good (but it is) & explained what we would be doing for the day. Dave & Abi then rocked up & we waited for the next bus. It was important that we all caught the same bus as Rachel was late for work so we all crammed in when it arrived. Generally local buses in Peru are chock-a-block but this was Monday morning & as many people were standing as sitting, you didn't have to hold on as all lateral movement was severely restricted. The bus weaved its way up the mountain overlooking Pisac & continued on picking up & dropping off school children along the way, barely stopping to let them off. A woman who luckily had a window seat was overcome by the stuffiness & had her head fully out the window was throwing up the dry potatoes she no doubt had for breakfast.
At Sacsayhuamán the bus door opened & we ran off the bus that didn't quite fully stop & walked across the ancient site to the office. Here we met Sandra who was in charge of reforestation at the site. We spent the day taking cuttings of native trees while the others softened the soil in which they were to be planted. The hope is that introduced plants will be removed from Sacsayhuamán & native plants reintroduced, to produce a landscape similar to incan times.
Our families had given us lunch in a variety of receptacles, mine came in a basic plastic lunchbox, Geoff's was in an elaborate box along with a thermos of tea & Abi & Dave had their sandwiches in a large casserole dish. After lunch Walter took us round the excavation site where we would be working on Wednesday & showed where idols had been dug up the previous week. There is a series of tunnels which we walked through & so much more at Sacsayhuamán that you never get to see on a rushed city tour.
We picked up the bus by the roadside back to Pisac, it was no less packed.

Sam´s Day:

All meetings between TAPA staff and volunteers take place on the orange bridge that leads to Cusco, and so it was on the bridge that I met Carla this morning at 8 am before walking 10 minutes to my school; Bernando Tambohuasco. There I met Profesora Luci and copied down my weekly timetable. As I am only here for a month, I am just working with Luci and I do not get a day off in the week, which is fine because some days I have 3 or 4 hours of teaching. School begins at 8.15 am now for the winter season, but this morning all the children are in assembly and they sing the national anthem as the flag bearers walk by. There are some kids who are the equivalent of monitors at home. They stand at the front of the lines with red and white braiding on their blue jumpers holding out their scary looking white poles that they permanently carry (in castellano they are called "disciplinaras" or similar, and if kids are late they can give out punishments such as making the kids do press-ups!). After this, it was off to class 2B to begin a week of the kids re-taking their english tests for the end of the first semester. I had 7 hours of lessons with 4 different classes (here teachers move around and kids stay put, or in fact don't stay put!). In each class, I went through introducing myself, answering questions and then invigilating tests (basically asking the students to stop talking most of the time- very tedious). Luci and I did manage to discuss which topics she wanted to cover next week so that I could start preparing the lessons. School ends at 13.45, so I returned home for lunch. Lunch here is always soup with a potato in it followed by a second course of something and rice and a couple more potatoes for good luck. It is a carbohydrate fuelled country.

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