Week 3
This week really flew by. I’ve been here for nearly a month now… sheesh! After recuperating from a short spell of GI (an extremely common theme for all of us trainees) I spent the past few days in classes and on field trips…literally! On Tuesday the business volunteers shadowed some of the local farmers. I’ve included the entry from my personal journal for the day (below) since it was a pretty fun experience. Thursday we traveled to a near by elementary school to connect with the kids and learn about their schooling and life in general. I sat in on a culinary class. The school offers 4 paths including food, crafts of some sort, computer tech, and one other that I can’t remember. I had a great time chatting with the students. I was really proud of myself because I was able to carry on a fairly normal conversation with them.
Today I traveled to Lima with my Spanish class. Lima is about an hour away by bus. There we explored Miraflores, a very touristy district, ate lunch in Chinatown and ended the day in the center of town. Tonight I am attending my first major fiesta. It is the celebration of Virgin de Carmen I went to mass earlier this evening. It was a pretty unique experience…a bit different than I am used to! The party is about 100 yards from my house, so I don’t have much choice but to go. My family is really into dancing….so this could be interesting! But life here is really all about integration, so I’m pretty much open for any sort of cross cultural experience.
One more note: if there is anything that you’d like to know about Peru, or what I’m doing etc, please e-mail (RyanENelson@gmail.com) me or comment on the blog. I’ll be sure to add any info that is of interest.
Regarding the host families here (to answer your question, Devon), they are compensated 20 soles per day. This comes out to about $6 a day. It’s a lot of money for the families. My family actually rents the house I am living in just so they can house volunteers. To give you a few example of the cost of food and such here, I went vegetable shopping with my host mother a week about and we bought a huge bag of veggies..over 15 kilos.. for just under $4. Not too bad. You can also travel to Lima from here for under $2. You can eat at a nice restaurant for $7, or more local restaurants for $3. Some things are pretty expensive, however, such as electronics. An average desktop computer cost around $700, but is not nearly the quality that you find in the US. Most purchases are paid in weekly installments. There is a pretty high interest rate, so the item purchased ends up costing a lot of money.
Today we met at the center at 6:30am. It was much more difficult to wake up at that time [than our normal starting time of 8am], as it is much colder. We drove past Santa Eulalia to a small community farther north. My fellow trainee, Joy and I spent the morning with a man by the name of Ricardo. Our first task was to carry fire wood from his house to his field. Or course I tried to carry as much as I could, so that we would have to take fewer trips. It was pretty heavy. Little did I know we would have to walk half a mile down the road to his field. My arms were just about to fall off by the time we finally arrived.(we had to make 3 more trips, but were able to use a wheelbarrow.) After we had carried all of the wood up a steep hill of gravel and up two flights of stairs, we took a tour of his ‘fields’. It was more like an orchard. He had a lot of trees…avocado, mango, banana, cherimoya just to name a few he also had other crops like maize, lemons etc. He picked us each a few avocados and mangos for the road. After the tour, we sat down and enjoyed some Inca Cola and galletas (cookies). It was a much needed break. Next, we had to spit the wood…the Peruvian way. He had three metal stakes and a large hammer. He hammered one stake in, and then the next just a bit further down the log…it took over 20 minutes to finally split the log…talk about laborious!! It was really interesting, though to realize the difference in our thinking. If I had attempted his method, I’d have quit probably 5 minutes in and looked for a better way to do it. He, however, would have spent hours on it, if that was what it would take. The whole time I was thinking about more efficient ways to take care of the task. I caught myself in my first cultural ‘clash’. I think it is going to be very interesting working with the people here. I feel as though we will both learn a lot from each other. But anyway, after the first log was spit, I took an axe, which he chose not to use for whatever reason, and started splitting other pieces while he still wailed away with the stakes. I cut 4 or 5 pieces by the time he cut one…I beat the native… yay me.
Today I traveled to Lima with my Spanish class. Lima is about an hour away by bus. There we explored Miraflores, a very touristy district, ate lunch in Chinatown and ended the day in the center of town. Tonight I am attending my first major fiesta. It is the celebration of Virgin de Carmen I went to mass earlier this evening. It was a pretty unique experience…a bit different than I am used to! The party is about 100 yards from my house, so I don’t have much choice but to go. My family is really into dancing….so this could be interesting! But life here is really all about integration, so I’m pretty much open for any sort of cross cultural experience.
One more note: if there is anything that you’d like to know about Peru, or what I’m doing etc, please e-mail (RyanENelson@gmail.com) me or comment on the blog. I’ll be sure to add any info that is of interest.
Regarding the host families here (to answer your question, Devon), they are compensated 20 soles per day. This comes out to about $6 a day. It’s a lot of money for the families. My family actually rents the house I am living in just so they can house volunteers. To give you a few example of the cost of food and such here, I went vegetable shopping with my host mother a week about and we bought a huge bag of veggies..over 15 kilos.. for just under $4. Not too bad. You can also travel to Lima from here for under $2. You can eat at a nice restaurant for $7, or more local restaurants for $3. Some things are pretty expensive, however, such as electronics. An average desktop computer cost around $700, but is not nearly the quality that you find in the US. Most purchases are paid in weekly installments. There is a pretty high interest rate, so the item purchased ends up costing a lot of money.
Today we met at the center at 6:30am. It was much more difficult to wake up at that time [than our normal starting time of 8am], as it is much colder. We drove past Santa Eulalia to a small community farther north. My fellow trainee, Joy and I spent the morning with a man by the name of Ricardo. Our first task was to carry fire wood from his house to his field. Or course I tried to carry as much as I could, so that we would have to take fewer trips. It was pretty heavy. Little did I know we would have to walk half a mile down the road to his field. My arms were just about to fall off by the time we finally arrived.(we had to make 3 more trips, but were able to use a wheelbarrow.) After we had carried all of the wood up a steep hill of gravel and up two flights of stairs, we took a tour of his ‘fields’. It was more like an orchard. He had a lot of trees…avocado, mango, banana, cherimoya just to name a few he also had other crops like maize, lemons etc. He picked us each a few avocados and mangos for the road. After the tour, we sat down and enjoyed some Inca Cola and galletas (cookies). It was a much needed break. Next, we had to spit the wood…the Peruvian way. He had three metal stakes and a large hammer. He hammered one stake in, and then the next just a bit further down the log…it took over 20 minutes to finally split the log…talk about laborious!! It was really interesting, though to realize the difference in our thinking. If I had attempted his method, I’d have quit probably 5 minutes in and looked for a better way to do it. He, however, would have spent hours on it, if that was what it would take. The whole time I was thinking about more efficient ways to take care of the task. I caught myself in my first cultural ‘clash’. I think it is going to be very interesting working with the people here. I feel as though we will both learn a lot from each other. But anyway, after the first log was spit, I took an axe, which he chose not to use for whatever reason, and started splitting other pieces while he still wailed away with the stakes. I cut 4 or 5 pieces by the time he cut one…I beat the native… yay me.
posted by Ryan Nelson | 11:38 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home