Monday we went to a town called Puerto Malabrigo. It’s the site of PCVs name Erin and Keith and it’s about 1 ½ hours out of Trujillo. This town is also a surfer town. Actually it’s in competition for the longest left handed wave(?) in the world. Now I couldn’t begin to tell you what that means, but all the surfers talked about it like it was something to be excited over :-P That morning we went to the health post to look around and meet up with the dentist. From there we all went to an inicial school (basically Peruvian kindergarten) to watch the dentist give a charla about dental hygiene. After the talk we took all the kids to brush their teeth and then used a Q-Tip to apply fluoride gel to their teeth. The kids were SO cute and it was going great until one of the little boys puked on Kerry. Apparently some of the kids didn’t think the fluoride tasted too great ha ha ha. After the dentist’s talk we went over to the special education school, they’re called CEBEs here. The director of the school gave us a presentation over the work done in special education schools and the problems faced by the special needs population. Very few schools in Peru practice inclusion of special needs students and many towns don’t have CEBEs, so there are a lot of special needs children who “fall through the cracks,” so to speak. It’s unfortunate, but improvements are being made. After the presentation we got to spend time with the students in the CEBE. We actually hung out with them while they brushed their teeth as well; Erin is a health volunteer, so this is a project of hers. The students were amazing! Sadly at lunch Erin told us her take on the CEBE director. Apparently she puts on a pretty good show during presentations, but she’s a bit of a problem herself. Erin tried to get a grant to do a project at the school, but the director wouldn’t give the appropriate information because Erin wouldn’t agree to use the money to buy a cell phone for her. Also at the beginning of the school year Erin went with the director out to neighboring pueblos to find students who might need to attend the CEBE. After telling the parents their students could attend and that the municipality might even be able to help with the cost of traveling to the school; the director turned the names of those students in to get the money from the government but the students never came to the school. Overall we were much less impressed with the director by the end of lunch.
After lunch we went to the beach to meet up with the surf school. The kids have to clean up parts of the beach before they are allowed to go out and surf, so we cleaned with them. A few people from out group actually put on wetsuits and got in the water with the kids, the rest of us hung out on the beach in the sun. Back in Trujillo that night we got pollo a la brasa for dinner. It’s one of the most common dishes I’ve seen and its super tasty. After dinner, Lindsay and I decided we needed another cup of coffee so we stopped by our little coffee shop again. I had already forgotten how nice it was to sit and chat in coffee shops, that’s not really part of small town life in Peru. Hmmm…..maybe I’ll change that. I could have coffee hour with the older kids at my site. I need to keep that in mind. After coffee I went back to the hostel to work on my lesson plans for the next day.
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