A Day in the Life - Peru
“We would lazily get out of our bunks at about 8 in the morning, shiver to the bathroom and quickly eat our breakfast meal of bread and jam before walking up the rocky road in the morning heat to the project site, waving ‘hola’ to the villages on the way up.
The group split into the ‘teachers’ and the ‘builders’ each morning and afternoon, respectively painting, playing games or teaching basic English to the school kids; or moving rocks, laying bricks and cement and trying to build a wall.
The work was eased by the sunny weather and the daily snacks the teachers would feed to us in the playground, while the kids bothered the guys with endless games of football and the animals strolled past us on their way to the mountain fields.
It was an idyllic setting and the work was challenging with the basic tools that the local builders were using. By the end of the day a pretty solid wall had formed where the ditch once was. The evenings were usually spent huddling together round the campfire playing scrabble and cards.”
Susie Chadborne, mad teacher, Llupa, Peru
"A day at Mario Salome Ferro, a boys orphanage in Cusco, started very early with us tumbling out of bed as the bell goes at 7am to groans and cries of, ‘it doesn’t matter that I’ve not washed in 4 days does it?’ We only felt very slightly guilty that the boys had been up for over an hour doing chores. Breakfast consisted of bread and coffee or lumpy porridge drink but was made almost gourmet by the addition of Fanny Jam. (Just in case you were worried Fanny doesn’t stop at just jam but makes many other delights including the speciality Fanny Fish!)
Our main work at the orphanage was refurbishing an enormous games room and also three bathrooms, taking the initial three cold showers to ten hot ones – quite a feat for 12 non-plumbers! Despite looking quite solid the games room was actually like something from the middle ages, held together with a combination of mud and straw. Plastering a wall while balancing on dodgy scaffolding is so far removed from sitting at a computer in England and it feels amazing to be trusted with such a job, despite more of the plaster going on us than on the walls! Some Madventurers spent 5 weeks being white as a cloud. In the bathrooms you could get a bit more violent using the sledgehammer (carefully)! Towards the end of the project we were able to get more creative and painted a massive jungle mural on the wall, wrote out the astrology of the planets, and a speech by Mandela.
America’s streets are meant to be paved with gold. Cusco’s streets are slightly different; namely urine! We once saw a woman in full Peruvian dress whip down her pants and have a quick wee on the side of the road, and whilst stopped at an infrequent red light a small boy banos-ed all over our taxi. This aside, our new home of Cusco is an absolute delight, despite and in fact because of its quirks. It’s one of the friendliest and most beautiful towns in the world.
Where else would you be able to hop into the boot of a taxi, squeezing 10 of you into a 5 person car and it still only costing you 2 soles (20p). Working back in England seems a lifetime ago as we are cast back in time to our 5 year old selves, participating in water fights with the local residents at carnival time. The psychologist at our orphanage told us that ‘to work with children you have to be a child’ so we’re just doing as we were told – some of us found this very easy!
In South America things will always be done manana and normal rules like wearing hats when horse-riding are thrown out of the window. We will always remember the screams of Carlea as she rode up a rocky path on a horse too small for Barbie. Before we came to this country we heard a vicious rumour that they drove on the wrong side of the road to us Brits, however it appears there is no side and taxis, buses, llamas and cows seem to go at break neck speed taking a lucky dip and often beeping loudly when playing chicken with oncoming traffic.
No where in the world have we felt more glamorous (even without a shower for 3 days) as people swarm around you pulling at your clothes and mysteriously knowing your name as they try to sell you anything from food to finger puppets. One way to avoid purchasing said finger puppets is to request a squirrel or a badger, so remember that when ‘no gracias’ no longer works."
A day at Mario Saolme Ferro
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