Trujillo and Troublesome Kids

I just want to tear my hear out! The kids are insane. They're all very cute (tanned skin and big brown eyes), and there are some absolutely adorable ones that I just want to cuddle all day, but there are some right monsters too. The worst little terror, who barely listens to me anyway, has just discovered that I'm ticklish, so there goes the tiniest fragment of control over him I might have had.

I'm working in an instution called "La Benificencia Publica de Trujillo", and to be honest I'm still trying to figure out myself exactly what it does. I was told before I came that it was a home for abandoned an orphaned children, and the description of my project was "community work with orphans". But of some 150 children in the school, very few "internos" actually sleep there, and those that do only stay during the weeks and return to their homes at the weekends. All of the children have homes to go to then, even if they live with aunts and uncles. The majority live with at least one of their parents. It seems to me that the Benificencia takes children whose families cannot afford the time or money to look after them properly outside of school hours (if they are of school age). It provides supervision, food and showers for the kids during weekdays, and all children up to the age of about 12 are catered for. I've asked several people on different occasions about how the Benificencia works, but I've struggled to understand the answers correctly, and have received different answers each time! So I'm working on it...

The kids are split up into two halves: those of school age, and those too young for school. The latter group are subdivided and cared for by year group, whilst the older ones are divided into two groups depending on whether they go to school in the mornings or in the afternoons. (There seem to be two sessions in Peru: 8am - 1pm or 1pm to 6.) In the mornings, Nicky (another English volunteer) and I both help out with the older kids, whilst in the afternoons she tries to teach English to the 5 year olds, whilst I help out with the other bunch of older kids. The mornings are dead easy, as the kids are fresh and calm and work pretty quietly. The morning teacher is nice (despite having bad headaches everyday), and the kids are too, generally. When they get bored of their homework, or finish it, they come and play with us and laugh at our English and attempts at Spanish, and I entertain them by raising my eyebrows, rolling my tongue and whistling into my hands. Their amazement makes me feel less useless for being unable to roll my Rs. Being called "Señorita Lucy" is quite nice too.

The afternoons are much more exhausting. I basically help the full time member of staff, Señorita Magdelena, supervise about 22 kids ranging from 6 to 12 with their lunch and showertime, then help them with their homework in class. I'm not so fond of Magdelena. She treats me rather like one of the other kids that she has to deal with, and speaks to fast for me to understand. I feel like I'm in school again having things yelled at me that I don't understand. She doesn't seem to have much pacience for the kids, and shouts angrily at them a lot. She's lumped me at the back of the (riciculously huge) classroom with the 3 naughtiest kids, and I have to make sure they finish their homework by hometime at about 5.

Vanessa isn't that bad, she is quite conscientious and clever and would work on her own. But she plays up when the other 2 start. And basically they never stop. Lucero is infuriating. She can be quite quiet and keep herself to herself, but she has the attention span of a goldfish with ADD. She just stares into space after writing one letter (they've got handwriting practice), and then counts how many more pages she has left to fill. Giancarlos is undoubtedly the most monstrous child I know. He is unbelievably insolent, I'm actually glad I can't understand all the bad words he uses to talk back at me. He continuously fights with the other kids around him, breaks the leads of his pencils, steals and hides others' stationary and tries to piss me off. I'm still struggling with commands to tell them to behave, sit down and do their work or their parents will get mad, but even when I do say it right they ignore me. Aaaah!

Sometimes I'm told to dictate to the kids who don't have homework at the same time as supervising the terrorsome three, which is just impossible. They seek attention all the time! What makes it worse is that the kids' abilities are so different. Even of those that are in the same grade at school, some can spell and write quite long words whilst others can barely read the most basic of words. The less able kids just copy off the more advanced ones, understanding nothing. They all plead "enseñame", or "ayudame" (teach me, help me), but when I try to help the ones that don't get it, the others get bored and start fighting. There are a few really cute good kids. Juan is 10 I think, one of the interns, is very studious and wants to be an engineer when he grows up. He always finishes his homework, and comes to me to learn some more! Unlike the other kids, who just wrap themselves round me and smother me in kisses when they're feeling affectionate, he's quite shy and just comes to sit next to me. A couple of the kids have picked up on some English words and repeat them in high pitched voices playfully when I'm around. "Okaaaaay, hello!" They all want their names translating into English...

What's sad is that a few of the kids, I've just discovered, are way behind in their understanding compared to the progress of the other kids in their grades at school. One girl today asked me to help her with addition and subtraction of two-digit numbers, but when I tried to help her I realised that she doesn't even recognise the written form of numbers greater than 10. It turns out that there are a few kids like this, whose schoolteachers seem to neglect them, or fail to realise how behind they are. A Peruvean volunteer and I are trying to help them catch up, by 5 in the afternoon, after having been at school since 8am, the kids are in no mood to learn any more. I've got a challenge now though, so I hope I can figure something out for them. Explaining language and numbers is difficult enough in English though, how am I going to cope with my feeble Spanish?

To be honest, life in Trujillo is pretty boring. I'm living with and being fed by a host family again, who are really nice. They are Monica and Jaime, in their late 30s, and their 2 children Karen, 12, and Valeria, 6. The girls are lovely. Valeria has some kidney problem, she had an operation when she was younger and has to take pills every day and see the specialist in Lima every so often. I think it may be to pay for her treatment that the family takes volunteers. Jaime is one of 11 brothers and sisters! He originally comes from somewhere in the jungle, his pictures are cool. He also has an incredibly attractive (and tall for Peruvian standards, which means just about bigger than me) brother of 22, who is sometimes around when he's not army training back in the jungle. Monica's parents live in the same block too. It's huge - and they're building more. Right outside my window, and they start at 7am every morning! Nicky and I have the 2nd floor apartment to ourselves, which is nice. It's basic though, a radio but no TV, so we have to amuse ourselves. Nicky is lovely. She's 24 and from Bournemouth, and when not in Peru works in a psychiatric hospital. So she's got loads of fascinating stories about the patients. She's been here a week more than me. When she arrived she knew no Spanish whatsoever, whilst the family know next to no English, so she's been having lessons every day too. It's still very basic. She must have been so bored before me, and dinner table conversations must have been dire! Unfortunately she's not mad keen on practicing Spanish either, so I'm having to speak English way more than I should be to keep improving my Spanish. I might try helping teach her but I don't want to appear patronising!

Trujillo itself isn't that exciting. Way too much traffic (about 80% of them delapidated taxis), lots of people, plenty of street children selling sweets, and heaps of tour companies wanting business. I'm not a huge fan of cities, I'm getting a bit bored of it. There's a nice central plaza, and the food is wonderfully cheap (you can get a 3 course lunch for about 75p), but that's about it. I've been out running a few times, but have resigned myself to morning laps round a piddly little park about 5 minutes from the house, because I'm getting sick of the leery men who feel obliged to hiss or make some comment whenever us Gringas pass. Being a gringo isn't always great. I think the bar we went to on Saturday saw us as a great opportunity to get rid of their fake banknotes they'd not been careful enough to check. It worked, now I have a souvenir of Peru's false currency. It's a pretty good imitation, but the paper's starting to split, so I don't think anyone would be stupid enough for us to fob it off on.

But there are a few really cool places to see around about. There's a good beach a 25p bus ride away, which is more touristy with surfers and bars and souvenir shops. It's famous for the fisherman and their long thin canoes made of straw, which are pretty cool. There are 2 important pre-Copnquest archaeological sites close by too. Chan Chan is a huge ancient city, whose remains even today are quite impressive, though most of it has been eroded by weather, man and time, and is being reclaimed by the the desert. Without considerable reconstruction it's hard to envisage what it might have been like. More interesting, I think, is the smaller site of Huaca de la Luna y el Sol (the Moon and the Sun). They are two large pyramids, in the grounds of a now ruined city, that are still being excavated. They were religious and ceremonial sites of the Moche people, where sacrifices to the gods were made in the hope of a good harvest, for example. Thanks to the nature of their construction (every 100 years or so the Moche people conmpletely filled up the current layer of their pyramid and constructed a new temple on top) with lots of painstaking work it has been possible to unearth the original full-scale internal walls within the pyramids, and the genuine colourful murals with which they were decorated. So you can more easily imagine how things might have been.

That was last weekend. This weekend I really want to get out of the city and into the mountains, but Nicky's not a big exercise person so I'm not sure she'll be keen on hiking. I'd like to go to Cajamarca, the site where the Spanish Conquistadors met with the last king of the Incas, Atahualpa, and betrayed and then murdered him, before massacring his people. South American history is pretty violent, it helps to put the naughtiness of the kids into perspective.