January: meh……

                So if you couldn’t tell by the title, January probably won’t be #1 on the list of things I fondly remember when looking back at my Peace Corps career. It wasn’t bad, it was just frustrating. I spent the first two weeks going round and round with my town municipality to get the summer classes started. Summer classes here aren’t like in the States where you have to go if you’ve failed; it is just a chance for the kids to have something to do during the break. I had started talking to them the previous November and if they would’ve let me I’d have happily planned the entire thing……but no. They told me we would do it later. “Later” ended up being two weeks after the classes usually start and the first week was really spent getting the schedule sorted. Blerg. It turns out that I really enjoyed the chance to work with all the kids, so I just forgot about my municipality and focused on the students. I taught English classes to elementary school students in two of the schools in my district and had about 80 kids all together. I don’t know how much English they’ll actually remember, but we had a lot of fun trying.

                The last weekend in January the Ancash PCVs had an event called Camp ALMA. ALMA is a three day girls’ camp that the PCVs try to do each year in each department. Our focus this year was on the environment so our camp was ALMA Verde. We did nature walks, talked about conservation, did recycled art crafts and even had a fashion show of clothes made entirely out of recycled goods. It was a great weekend and all the girls really seemed to enjoy themselves. A lot of these girls never get the chance to see other parts of the department and meet people from other small towns, so they had a great time seeing a new place and meeting new people.