So I suppose I should probably address the quotes that will be littering my blog titles from time to time. Occasionally I will be able to explain the significance, but mostly it’s just my homage to some of the crazy things I hear all day. I don’t know if all PST classes are like this, but mine could have its own sitcom. I suppose I could also apologize for the fact that most of the quotes won’t make sense, but the truth is half of them didn’t make sense the first time, so …..
Thursday started out like a normal day in Peace Corps PST, with four hours of Spanish class! We had lunch in the garden around noon, but after that things got tricky. It’s a project called Mission Impossible. They divided us into teams and sent us into Chosica, on our own, to conduct interviews with whoever we could find in the streets. My group was Amanda R, Nick and me. Each group was also given a type of business that they needed to find and ask questions about how it works. My group went to ferreteria (hardware store) where we had to ask, among other things, about the prices of padlocks and whether they sold cement by the kilo. I’m pretty sure the woman though we were crazy, but we got all the info. After the ferreteria we had to ask questions about the education system in Peru, because they want us to become familiar with how things are generally done. We happened to walk past a school as they were letting out for the day, so we stopped to talk with one of the teachers. Next thing you know, we’re in the main office talking to the promoter of the school for almost an hour! So the scary thing is that the groups were roughly divided so everyone had a least one person from the “higher” language classes, except that I was the highest level in group….which made me pretty uncomfortable going into the assignment. We ended up doing really well though. I didn’t have anyone else to hide behind and Amanda is really close to my level, so we worked it out. AND the guy said he could understand us just fine! Wahoo! After the school we also talked to a lady selling ice cream (we wanted a snack) and the girl that worked behind the counter of a farmacia. I can also happily report my first embarrassing language mistake :-P When we were talking to the ice cream lady we were trying to ask questions about the system of discipline in Peruvian schools; we used the wrong word. Only after we asked about “el sistema de castigas,” received a horrified look and a lecture about human rights did we realize that we had just asked this woman if they beat the children in Peruvian schools. Oops! After each interview we would sit on a bench to discuss what we thought we heard and write down notes. We also took a few minutes to laugh at our own absurdity; pretty sure it’s the best way to work through feeling awkward.
After completing our assignments we all met up in the park and got stared at for doing so. A large group of a Americans is something of a curiosity in Chosica :-P We broke up into smaller groups for dinner and afterwards a few of us went to the Plaza Vea, basically a Peruvian Wal-Mart. Excellent! We then successfully found our own way home from the city, another confidence boost!
That night my group decided we would also interview our host parents for the project and I found out that the school we had gone to that afternoon was actually the school that my host brother attended, so I got all sorts of info to add to our presentation. The conversation ended up with me helping Julio Caesar with his English and him helping me with my Spanish. We took turns writing questions down in a notebook and then answering them. Then Piero, the 3-year-old, brought in his little cuaderno and we drew some pictures and talked about the names of vegetables. Might be the best day yet!
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