carnaval.. the end of the month of water balloons

Recently, life at Casa has been a lot more routine-y, with lots of work painting, painting, and re-painting everything yet again, (we've painted the front entrance door three times now, since no one can decide what color they really want it to be), preparing for the Bishop's visit and the celebration of the orphanage's 25th anniversary. This is will be pretty much a day-long party with a bunch of important priests, benefactors, and generally important people from the States and Lima this Wednesday. I've been teaching an English workshop to the kids three times a week for the past month, which has been SO much fun!! We just had our last class this past Friday, where I taught them how to play kickball while speaking only English--we had such a great time! My favorite part about playing any game outside here is that within minutes, it never fails that kids will start running from all directions to come play too. :)

So this morning, I had a pretty eye-opening experience as Jess and I visited another orphanage near us.. It really made me realize how different Casa Hogar is from the typical orphanage here--we use the Boys Town program, and the kids are all arranged in families, with at least 1 adult ("family teacher") per 8 kids. Although we are constantly in desperate need of money, donations, and supplies, the kids are happy, well-provided for, and are surrounded by loving staff. The orphanage we visited consists of a chapel and a giant, run-down building with peeling paint and stray, flea-covered dogs. It's home to over 120 children, who have about 1 staff member for maybe 30 kids, and no organization or teaching whatsoever. In mass I had to watch one boy pinch and hit the one next to him until he started sobbing. Eventually, I intervened since no one else did, but sadly this was the case with just about all the other kids in the chapel.. It was just hard to see that I've kind of been living in denial about the incredibleness that is Casa Hogar and neglecting to realize the reality that is most orphanages around here--way too many children that are taken off the streets but are still just as neglected, if not worse, in an institution with way too few staff members, too little organization, and so little financial support that they still have clothes full of holes and sores on their legs. Unlike our kids, they still have no idea what it's like to feel love, have someone in their lives that believes in them, or what it's like to be a part of a family. They have never had someone to teach them how to treat others with respect and kindness. It was unbelievably frustrating to feel so helpless, knowing how many children there are in our world who have no one they can depend on or to love them. Yuck. Moral of the story, any chance you ever get to help someone, no matter how trivial, it's worth it. And donate to Casa Hogar!! Kids need you!!

Okay. And on to more positive things, the past month (the last month of summer) has been Carnaval here. All day every Sunday, there's a live band that plays in the central plaza, and everyone goes there to watch & dance--this is one of my favorite things here, especially since any sound anywhere echos off all the cerros and sounds like it's right outside our windows. Carnaval also means that if you're walking anywhere in town outside the grounds of Casa, you're likely (especially on the weekends) to get hit with water balloons from anonymous children running around on rooftops. You're lucky if a)it's just one, and b)it's full of water, not paint. So today was the last day of Carnaval (unfortunately, because it's so hot here for a Minnesotan, and I can't get enough spontaneous water-ballooning from kids I don't know), and I discovered what Last Day of Carnaval means, at least in Lurín. We wandered into town in search of popsicles and butter, and happened upon a parade of soaking wet people covered in multi-colored streaks of paint, carrying buckets, and accompanied by a drum and 3 marching-band tubas. Last Day of Carnaval also means random parades and random explosions starting before 8am. (Random explosions are actually pretty normal here--now there's just a reason for them, and there's a lot more than normal). So it was really exciting, and if you know me, there's nothing I wanted more than to be involved in a wet, mud- and paint-soaked parade, but unfortunately I was too late. So I guess I'll just have to come back. Like next year. ;)

I LOVE PERUVIAN BANANAS

This is an informative post, because since coming to Peru, I have learned something very important that has kind of changed my life. If you don't know a lot about bananas, please read on and change your life too! Until coming to this country for the second time, I never realized that there was more than one kind of banana. Really. In the US, you go to the store to buy a banana, right? And when you think you're going to come home with a banana, you know what kind of banana you will get. Because you know that a banana is a banana. Is a banana. There are also plantains, but they're hard to find, and you're not quite sure what you'd do with them if you found them, anyway. End of story. Wrong. Apparently, though (upon researching Google) there are somewhere between 500 and 1000 varieties of bananas in the world. (I just wanted to be exact. Exact-ish.)
Now, THESE are bananas. Just a few kinds of bananas, though (note they're the size of a 5-year-old/small animal/at least the woman's arm in the picture). Some of the ones pictured below are what you use for frying--they're way denser than what you eat in the States, orange-ish yellow, and really sweet. REALLY sweet. So now, I found yet another reason to love Peru. This country is the reason why I now love to pieces the one fruit I'd previously written off as boring. I love life-changing moments.

Oxapampa, Paracas, and Nazca--story half

After a day of hiking and climbing in Pachacamac (neighboring town), playing Soccvollike (we invented a new sport of soccer+volleyball+a kid on a bike) with the kids, then finally settling down with one of my favorite 7-year-olds to eat grass and talk about important life issues, here I am. The Killer Ant Situation still is not under control, but life here is still great despite all the creepy-(but friendly-) crawlies I shoo out of my bed each night before tucking myself in.

Jess, some of the staff, one of the priests, and I went with the kids who'd graduated (from high school/the orphanage) on a graduation trip to Oxapampa, now probably a couple weeks ago. It was SO refreshing to finally get out of the city and see green things. The journey there involved a bumpy 6-hour drive in our convi (a 15-passenger van, which is also the most common form of public transportation here), a stop at 4,828 meters (high enough to freak out our lungs), a couple throw-up stops, and a lot of switchbacks, we arrived in the dark at our destination in the middle of the jungle.

The next day, we woke up to an absolutely stunning view--mist-shrouded, leafy mountains divided by a roaring river. The river's noise had been a lot more soothing to fall asleep to than the normal city-sounds of lonely dogs barking, big trucks, and music. On the way to the actual town of Oxapampa the next day, we stopped at a butterfly garden, full of butterflies and flowers native to the jungle, which was complete with a random zoo behind it. There were a group of banana-eating turtles that lived in the same cage as some alligators (for some reason they live together well).. We then explored Oxapampa, which I realized was the home of the BEST yogurt I've ever eaten, as well as locally-made (and incredibly delicious) honey. We actually bought one store out of their bottles of yogurt, so we asked around and went on a wild goose chase thorugh the mazes of side streets in the convi looking for more yogurt. :)

Father Joe, the Polish priest who'd started our orphanage, also had some land in the outskirts of Oxapampa, where the re used to be another orphanage. Unfortunately, he'd had to close it because of finances, but we were able to take the students up into the hills and see an absolutely incredible stretch of rolling, tree- and flower-covered hills where it used to be located. There's also a home for the elderly that Fr. Joe started which is still in use--it was great seeing hte kids interact with the people there for awhile and explore their wonderful garden. On our return trip, we decided to go to Lima a different way so we could stop at "Bosques de Piedras" (Rock Forest--if you know me, you can imagine how excited I was to wander among fields and fields and fields of HUGE boulders with a bunch of kids!!) After an hour-long hike, we piled back in our little convi and continued on our merry way, until we happened to see tiny patches of snow through the windows. The kids went absolutely crazy, because they'd never seen snow before in their lives, and finally we pulled over after cries of "NIEVE NIEVE NIEVE NIEVEEEEE!!!" (SNOW!!!) and begging Fr. Sebastian to stop the convi. It was such an unforgettable moment to see a group of 17- and 18-year olds trample each other out of the convi screaming to a few tiny piles of snow and throw the first snowballs of their lives! (A picture of this will hopefully follow soon!) The rest of the ride back to Lima was supposed to take about 6 or 7 hours, but mysteriously ended up taking over 10 hours because of broken and sometimes non-existent roads. All in all, it was great.. and exciting :)

The dog from the air (courtesy of Wikipedia) :)

A few days later, a few of the staff (plus me) went to Paracas and Nazca, which are areas about 5 hours to the south of Lima. The highlight of here (other than dune-buggying, where my camera decided it'd had enough of life and broke on me, and a boat ride in the ocean through a beautiful national reserve) is the famous Nazca lines, a serious of giant, mysterious drawings in the ground. They're believed to have been created between 400 and 650AD and include pictures of a monkey, a dog, a hummingbird, a pair of hands, and more. Because the lines are so big, however, they can only be seen from the air. So this meant going up in the tiniest airplane I've ever been in (4 passengers!!) Compared to what I'm used to flying in, this plane shook so much I thought we were going to drop out of the sky any second. Needless to say, even though I love being up really high, my hands were sweaty enough during the whole flight for me to realize I prefer hanging from something I trust, like a rope or a parachute. And speaking of parachutes, that's a story for another day. ;)

ANTS OF DEATH

I'm going to start by apologizing, because I know this is definitely not "Oxapampa, Paracas, & Nazca--story half" but at the moment, what's concerning me (and everyone else here at the orphanage) most is the Killer Ant Situation.

Take the picture above, look at the ants, and multiply it by at least four. Then add all those ants on the same sized surface, and that's kind of like what the Killer Ant Situation is like. Normally I think ants are cute, although maybe kind of annoying at a picnic. Normally I feel a little bad if I kill one. ONE. Here, however, I wish I had radioactive strings of Killer Ant killer inside my hands and I could run around and shoot them all with poisonous goop like Spiderman would. Basically, if we even look at an object wrong, suddenly we realize we're crawling--literally crawling with ants.. One tiny tickle now makes me go crazy because usually it's an army of ants crawling up my arm, or on my floor, or in my bed.. And THEN, a giant cockroach or six scuttles in front of my feet. But hey, it could be worse :)

Anyway. New post to come soon, with no more ranting and plenty of happy stories !!

oxapampa, paracas, and nazca--the picture half :)

Into the jungle!! On our way to Oxapampa--some of the kids

Butterfly garden near Oxapampa

I was SO obsessed with this banana-eating turtle that lives with the alligators

monito :) cage :(

The students and some of the staff

The location of a previous orphanage related to ours--it was closed and the land sold soon before Father Joe passed away

Peruvian "mosquito" bites.. not hives.. on a good day :)

With Paloma at a home for the elderly in Oxapampa that Father Joe also started

In Paracas--El Candelabro--120 meters long

Penguins, sea lions, pelicans, penguins, penguins, penguins, pelicans.. oh my !!

Our trusty 4-passenger Cessna pilots, in whose hands I decided to put my life for an hour :)

The sand dunes and our crazy tubular vehicle!! One of the last pictures my camera saw :(

update from an invalid--the written half :)

The last two weeks (has it been two weeks?! Sorry..) have been absolutely crazy. Because of this, I'll just be updating on our eye mission that we had a week ago. Unfortunately, the pictures I'm posting aren't mine (so they're not as awesome as they could be ;) ) because my camera is currently out of commission (it got filled with sand when I was sandboarding last week.. more on that to come next post). At the moment, I'm writing from my bed, where I've spent the last 3 days (59 hours so far, not that I'm counting, or going crazy, or anything), trying to kick a stubborn tummy bug's butt with amoxicillin.

So anyway, eye mission. To summarize it all, it was an emotional rollercoaster, complete with a few bumps here and there. The volunteersr from the states came on Saturday night--a group of almost 30 people from Minnesota and Wisconsin, ranging in age from seniors in high school and college kids upto 68-year-old retirees traveling outside the country for the first time. The way the mission works is that ahead of time, a bunch of tickets (enough for 600 per full day of work) had been given out to residents of the really poor (if you've ever been out of the country and seen another country's "poor," imagine that times a few) areas of Lima. Each ticket has a day and either "morning" or "afternoon" on it, so we're supposed to get 300 people each part of the day, which should give us enough time to eat lunch and be able to take a bathroom break without totally backing things up, right? Right. Jess and I figured out, though, that the people at the gate had been letting in hundreds of extra people without tickets, so we ended up with a few VERY long 12-hour days..

So on Sunday, we set up in the morning and got ready to start seeing people in the afternoon. Throughout the main building of the orphanage we set up stations. Once people made it in the front gate, they'd wait outside under a tent and get their basic eye history and address if they had one (most of the time it would just say "Lurin," the town most of these people were from) written down on a card they'd bring with them to every station inside. Once someone got inside, they would first wait to read some eye charts, then go to the autorefractor room, then to my room, which is where most of the eye doctors were, to get their final prescription. Finally one of the kids at the orphanage would usher them down to the dining room, where we had thousands and thousands of donated glasses, to test out a few based on their prescription. It was an unbelievably long process for these people--those that were coming in the morning would be lined up outside the gate at 6am (we didn't start seeing people until 8:30 most days), then they'd wait in the hot sun for half of the morning, and then spend hours inside waiting between stations. And some of these people that came were so old or so blind that they couldn't walk, or mothers with a bunch of young children, so as hard as it felt for me to be standing on my feet for 12 hours each day, I can't imagine what it was like for all of them to come so far to wait and wait.. and wait..

None of the doctors or volunteers handing out the glasses really spoke Spanish, so we needed a bunch of interpreters, which we ended up getting from one of the universities in Lima. This ended up being really neat, because apparently in the past (this mission has been going on for 10 years), there have never been enough interpreters, so three doctors would be sharing one interpreter, if you can imagine how slow that might be. I was interpreting and also in charge of that back room, so it was fun meeting a bunch of kids my age and bonding over the interpreting experience (none of us knew a whole lot of technical/medical words in the other language, so we'd help each other figure them out). One of my favorite parts of this whole interpretation aspect is that often, and English-Spanish/Spanish-English interpreter wasn't enough. Quite a few times, people came in that were Quechua (indigenous people from this area, Bolivia, northern Argentina..) and didn't know enough Spanish (if any) to communicate with us. So I learned quickly that one of our staudents that had just graduated from the orphanage spoke Quechua, and he'd come over when we needed him, and we'd set up an interpretation line of Quechua-Spanish, Spanish-English, and then back again. Which of course, being the language nerd that I am, I totally geeked out over. :)

Apparently, all in all, things went a lot more smoothly than they've ever gone in the past, thanks to my friend Jess, who found out the day we started that she was not just in charge of the interpreter any more, but of the entire eye mission. (Surprise!!) The poor girl ran around like a chicken with her head cut off all week, but despite a few hangups, did an absolutely amazing job. On Friday, our last day (another half-day), I was left in charge as Jess had to run into Lima to deal with some travel agent issues, and was confronted with the problem that half our staff was certain it was a half day, and the other half (the one that was letting people in the gate) was certain that it was a full day. It was pretty exciting (aka, terrifying) to be responsible for solving that problem, without being able to contact Jess! Hahaa.. Anyway, it was so neat to see everything come together--the kids at the orphanage were so excited to help out, that sometimes we'd have more than we needed. Other kids would help out in the kitchen, bring water and snacks outside to the people waiting in the sun, and just in general, hang around asking every 10 seconds if they could help with something.

The worst part about the whole mission, though, was how bittersweet it was. For all the people we were able to help see for the first time in their lives (I'm never taking my sight or the medical care available to me for granted again), there were so many people we weren't able to help. The worst, WORST thing as an interpreter is to have to be the messenger and tell someone who just waited like 5 hours that there's nothing we can do for them, that we don't have surgeons who can operate on their cataract, that we don't have anyone who can give them a glass eye, that we know they are barely able to afford food for themselves so we're their only chance, etc.. It was awful. Seeing their faces just accept it made it worse. So, anyone out there, are you an eye surgeon?! ?! There was a 16-year-old boy with a cataract, and an even younger boy who'd gone blind in one eye from an injury and because he couldn't afford to get his old eye taken out and a glass eye put in, the area around it was slowly growing over his bad eye, so soon it will be too late to fix. I had to tell another kid's parents that their son was going to go blind.

We also had one dentist come to do basic checkups, pull teeth, and fill cavities, which here there are an endless amount of. (I'm never taking my dentist for granted again either!!) This was even more tricky to interpret for, so when I worked with him, I grabben one of the university interpreters, and I would figure out what the words the doctor was using in English meant, explain them to her, and then she'd try to figure out what the word in Spanish was to explain to the patient, and vice-cersa. The same thing interpreting happened here as for the eyes, except there were even less people in the dentist's office that we could really help--one 8-year old girl had 9 cavities and needed 2 teeth to be pulled (that was fun telling her mom). Another woman came in who had maybe four teeth left and said she was too embarrassed to smile because her mouth was so ugly now, and I had to tell her there was nothing we could do, since she can't afford the false teeth she needs, and our volunteer dentist doesn't have that kind of equipment here.. Here in Peru, it's really not uncommon to see people over the age of 25 with teeth missing. When one goes bad, it just gets pulled out. Most of the elderly people that came to the mission barely had any teeth left, so trying to figure out what they said in Spanish so I could interpret it was definitely a challenge!

But over all, it was rewarding. I heard about one man who'd told the volunteers that he didn't leave his house anymore because his vision was so bad he kept falling and hurting himself. When he finally got his glasses, he burst into tears and couldn't stop thanking everyone. So many people were flabbergasted by the idea of bifocals that when I explained how they worked they kept looking through one part, then the other, then back again, with such a look of amazement. There were two teenage sisters who had prescriptions so high, that our eye doctors had never seen anything like it before. Their whole lives, they'd never been able to see more than a few feet in front of them. We were able to somehow find a pair of the highest prescription glasses among the thousands that enabled them to read to the 3rd line of the eye chart, and they couldn't believe it. So cases like this, the eye doctor that threw Tootsie Tolls to all the kids in line, the interpreters and doctors laughing with each other, me and Sol in the dentist's office trying to figure out what the heck the technical dentistry words in our native languages mean, much less in each other's, and the "Gringos vs. Peruvians" soccer game on Friday afternoon with all the volunteers and orphanage kids, are the moments I like to think about the most.

An now, if you've actually made it this far (congratulations!!), here are some pictures as your reward. :)

update from an invalid--the pictures half :)

Casa Hogar--this is the main building where we hosted all of the stations

The line of people waiting to get in the line of people under the tent, waiting to get in the line of people inside..

Outside the front gate, waiting to get in

One of the interpreters with a woman testing out her new glasses


Me, one of the interpreters, and Dr. Jim with the most persnickety kid I've ever met--every method I've ever employed to entertain a child was put to use.. oh boy..


The two girls who'd never seen before, with their new glasses

Dr. Lane, who taught me all I know about contact lenses (and gave me a lecture about my contact habits).. haha

Our local Quechua interpreter, Silvio :)

Just a tiny fraction of our boxes of glasses

Dr. Steve, the man who coordinates the entire mission from the Wisconsin side