Day 6

20-10-09

What an amazing day! Although it didn´t start out that way as it seems the cockerel serenading the community at 3am was NOT a one off! He´s just on the other side of the wall beside which I sleep so his cries were piercing. It says a lot as I´m usually a heavy sleeper and I have been known to sleep through fire alarms and on one occasion even an actual fire. I couldn´t face another shockingly cold shower this morning, so my Mama Ule boiled some water for me and I washed myself from out of a bucket. Lovely.

It was our first day of building today and I´ve been put in a team with Jack and Yas. The three of us are going to build a lady a new toilet and silo tank in 10 weeks, having no experience whatsoever....easy! The house we´re working on is barely a shack; flies everywhere, thick nasty stench in the air, and hardly any room for the woman and her five children, her husband who comes home at weekends, and the baby she´ll be expecting any day now! Today was more of a gardening job as we had to replant all of her plants from one side of her garden to the other so as to prepare the area for building. We killed a few in the process as we weren´t graceful enough with them. We felt really guilty as her plants are like mint and other herby things which of course she uses for her food. Anyway, after we replanted some of her garden, and killed the rest, we had to break up all the soil and level it. The builders drew out rough guidelines on the soil so as to ensure we didn´t burst any waterpipes with our pik-axes. Well, guess who burst a water pipe? Whoopsy! Although, to be fair, I stayed inside the guidelines, so it was partly the builders fault for putting them down wrong! So anyway I freaked out major style, however when on of the builders returned he didn´t seem to stressed about it at all. Got to love the Peruvian laid back attitude. So after we wrecked that poor woman´s garden and destroyed her water pipe we left for lunch back with our families.

Carla (our 12 year old little sister) was just back from school. The other night she was telling me about her favourite soap: "Al Fondo Hay Sitio" the cheesiest thing I´ve ever seen. She´s got a magazine for it that requires her to buy and gradually collect 212 stickers to fill her magazine in order to be entered into a competition where the prize is to go visit the set and meet the cast! So when she came in from school she ran into my room, shared some fudge with me and showed me the latest stickers she´d got for her magazine. I heped her put them all in; one she already had so she gave it to me. You only get 5 stickers per pack so I´m going to buy her looooads when I´m next at the market. I love Carla. She´s soo kind natured and a wonderful sister to Nicole (her 8 month old baby sis). I get my first Spanish lesson tomorrow so hopefully I will learn more conversational phrases to I can converse even more with Carla and tone it down on the mime side of things.

After lunch we attended our first music and circus workshops. Music was amaaaazing as the kids performed folk songs on guitars, panpipes and drums which were large hollow boxes on that they sat on and smacked with their hands. They´re all so talented! One young girl who we´ve all become good friends with over the last few days, got up to show us how they dance. She then came over and pulled me up to the centre with her! Yes indeed utterly embarassing, but Jade and Millie also got pulled up so it wasn´t so bad!

For the circus workshop, we got taught how to juggle. I´ve pretty much/almost got the hang of it, I just need to practice now. A few others went on stilts. Funniest thing I´ve seen since I´ve been here. Yas lasted 2 seconds before he plummeted face first into the sand! He was like Bambi on ice...but on sand obv. Ironically they were more like workshops for the volunteers rather than for the kids!

A fun fun fun day all round! When we got home we had dinner at the same time as our Papa Salvador, which doesn´t seem to happen very often as he always works til quite late. He´s very nice and makes good effort to converse with me and Millie even though he knows no English. He said he was very pleased with my gift to them which was Scottish shortbread. After dinner we sat and watched "Al Fondo Hay Sitio" with Carla.

I love it here.