Postcards from Peru

Headed to the elementary school this morning, where we talked to the director and created a weekly schedule for the three of us. Kelsey and Jarrard will teach together, since theoretically two sort-of-Spanish-speakers is better than one, and I´ll be making a go of it on my own. My Spanish is getting a lot better, and I feel so proud when I successfully make a joke or make a kid smile (the important things). As Jarrard kindly pointed out, no one would mistake me for fluent. But I´m getting there.

We´re teaching in the mornings, but school lets out at one p.m., so we´re going to be working on a variety of projects with our organization, Awamaki, to work a full 40 hours and feel useful. Awamaki is trying to bring more tourism to Ollanta to promote economic development, so I´ll be drawing a map of the town with important landmarks for tourists. We´re also going to do a lot of the more popular hikes in the area- Jarrard will take pictures, I´ll write up a description of each trail, and Kelsey will put our hiking skills to shame.

This afternoon, we had lunch at Jarrard´s house, and it was by far the best meal I´ve had yet. Blog post soon to come on that subject. But afterwards, we headed out in the extreme afternoon heat and sun to take pictures of the Rio Urubumba which runs through the valley, as well as the road beside it.


(Trying to skip rocks and failing. Kelsey was clearly the pro.)

Kelsey was sound girl, which Jarrard informed her was a very important job. She had a microphone with a fuzzy hat that picked up even the slightest sound, and every once in a while we´d be very quiet and she´d record sound to use for Jarrard´s video. Jarrard, or Jay, as the Peruvians call him, took a lot of videos of things and cursed loudly when they didn´t meet his exact specifications. We discovered that he gets very perturbed when he becomes the subjects of photos or videos, so we´ve had a lot of fun with that.



Much to my excitement Jarrard showed me how to use his other camera. He said a lot of things about aperature and shutter speed that I tried really hard to remember but pretty quickly forgot. It was the coolest thing. The camera was really heavy but made everything look ten times better than it looked in real life. I took a ton of pictures, most of which turned out really overexposed as it was crazy bright outside and I didn´t really know what I was doing, but a few turned out well and I´ll try to post those at some point.



After a few hours of our photography and video extravaganza, we were all pretty tired and hot. It´s a strange experience to feel so hot but not sweat at all. There is zero humidity here. It´s great. But it´s also a great way to get dehydrated, so we headed back to Jarrard´s house for some water. I ran around with the two-year-old, Paulita, who was entirely fasinated by my theatrics. Probably thought I was insane, but it´s a fun way to work on my Spanish, as she´s pretty forgiving if I use the wrong verb tense or forget a word for something. Paula and her eight-year-old brother Gabriel adore Jarrard. It´s adorable. He introduced them to the concept of playing catch which was apparently very revolutionary, and their faces light up when he ducks through through the door.