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So I`ve been slacking a bit on the blog…  Not my intention, but these things happen.

My initial impressions of Urubamba, my accommodations, and volunteer work were all pretty much on the positive spectrum.  The Nexos Voluntarios (NeVo) volunteer house is really perfect in my opinion, sitting right at the base of a mountain.  It has a nice kitchen/dining room, a living room with a great computer and fast internet, an upstairs with 2 bedrooms (I have my own), and a full bathroom upstairs and a half downstairs.  Pictures of the house and my first couple weeks in Urubamba can be found here:http://picasaweb.google.com/scottwood83/WelcomeToUrubamba?feat=directlink

Currently, I`m sharing the house with two other people, Samantha from England/Australia and Yasmine from Morocco.  Both are very nice and the three of us get along well.  Another volunteer, Jean Gabriel from England, came the week after my arrival and is living in a homestay.  He is here for the same amount of time as me and we are working on one of my projects together.  More about that in a minute.

Urubamba the town consists of about 13,000 residents (although you would think it`s much, much smaller if you just strolled through town – families are pretty spread out with farms and so forth).  It`s somewhere between 9,000 – 10,000 ft. elevation, but despite being up that high it is engulfed by towering Andean peaks.  The scenery here is really something special.

So initially, the plan was that I would be working full time on a reproductive health education project.  That would entail me teaching numerous classes at a local school, preparing the lessons, etc.  As much as I was eager to do this work, part of me still really wanted to become involved in some of the environmental projects here in town.  After speaking with Conny (volunteer coordinator), she assured me that they could accommodate my interests.  So we worked out a schedule that allows me to split my time between environmental work (mornings plus a bit) and R.H. education (afternoons).  Since Jean Gabriel would be working on the environment full time starting my 2nd week, we decided that I would just begin when he arrives.  So week 1 was fully R.H. education.

But week 1 didn`t exactly start until Tuesday…  Apparently about once a month or so the farmers here in Urubamba get a bit rowdy and hold a (usually somewhat destructive) protest.  The big issue for them is that there is currently an effort to privatize the water supply in town, which will in turn put a hefty pricetag on their water usage.  This is an issue that I`m interested to learn more about as I`m not sure if it`s one of the big multinational companies trying to come in here solely to make ungodly profits at the expense of the community (which I assume is the case as I know it happens a lot in South America), or if it`s another type of plan.  All I know is that when they protest, they block all roads between Urubamba and Cusco with giant boulders, and it`s not generally a good day to leave the house.

So I took my first official day to read some materials from NeVo and the United Nations Population Fund (who NeVo partners with on the R.H. project) and begin to prepare for class.  Samantha has been volunteering with the R.H. project for 8 months now and plans to stay until June, which puts her roughly a month or 2 shy of a year down here.  Since she is very much in the swing of things at the school, I basically shadowed her for the first week and helped out where I could in class and with lesson planning and other work.  In each of our classes, I took a few minutes to introduce myself to the kids and gave them the opportunity to ask me any questions they wanted.  Questions were generally about my family, if I have a girlfriend, wife, and/or kids!!, what I think about Urubamba and Peru, my favorite sport, color, food, etc.  Oh, and thanks to Samantha, who I somehow told about my brief acting career, I began receiving questions from kids about whether or not I had ever been in a movie (coincidence? I think not.).  So, yes, I have officially signed my first autograph, as incredibly absurd as that is, and I now seem to have developed a type of celebrity status among the kids of this town.  I can`t walk down the main street without hearing my name being yelled by a screaming pack of 12-year old girls, or a ¨Profie!¨ (short for Professor).  There´s definitely no hiding my glistening white skin, so I guess I`m just going to have to get used to it.  It`s now even to the point where teachers at the school and other random Urubamban residents are asking me about it.  I tell everyone how minimal my 3-day acting career was, but I think they just want to believe what they want to believe.  I suppose there are worse things you can get an initial reputation for in a situation like this, so I´ll take it as it is.

The school itself is a secondary school called General Ollanta and is only about a 5 or 7 minute walk from my house.  The grades are Year 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 and ages range from about 11 to 17.  Each ¨Year¨ is broken up into A through D or E (with the ¨A¨ classes supposidly containing the brightest students, and the ¨D¨/¨E¨ classes needing a bit more attention).  Classes are on average around 40 students per class (yea, quite large).  Going forward, since I am now just teaching in the afternoons, I am focusing entirely on the 2nd year classes (A through E) and am working with a teacher named Victoriano.

This week is the first week that I have fully prepared my own lesson plans.  I think it will be a learning process since I have already discovered that group work with kids of this age range is a hell of a challenge and requires waaay more time than I had anticipated.  But, despite the fact that my first lesson plan is not working entirely as expected, I`m having fun engaging with the kids in class.  Communication is still my biggest challenge, but I wasn´t expecting this work to be easy.  In addition to the R.H. classes, I have also been helping out with Art and English classes when possible.  Both are a bit more informal and give me a good opportunity to have a dialogue with the kids which I definitely think helps my Spanish.  In one of our English classes, we played the song Food, Glorious Food from Oliver (as it was a food themed day) and gave them a sheet of lyrics with some missing words to fill in.  Let´s just say that a class full of Peruvian kids screaming/singing ¨Fooood, glorious fooooood¨ might just be one of the highlights of my trip.

Last week I also began my environmental work with Jean Gabriel.  I`m working in an office at the municipality in Urubamba´s Plaza de Armas with a woman named Derling.  The majority of this project is focused around a new trashing and recycling initiative aimed at the entirety of the town of Urubamba.  In a few months, residents, markets, and businesses will be provided with various trash and recycling bins, and it`s my job to run an educational campaign to properly inform the community of this new process.  In order to help spread the word more efficiently, I´m going to be leading a group of students and other people (apprx. 200) in different marketing efforts aimed at educating Urubamba residents and business owners.  Much of this will be door to door informational talks, radio and television programs, and other advertising campaigns.  Since the town only has 1 trash pick-up truck, I´m also going to be working to assess the current collection route (i.e. riding in a dump truck from 2am to noon this Thursday) in order to find ways to improve its efficiency.  There are, of course, other side projects going on with respect to environmental work, but this will be my main focus during my time here.

This Saturday I went to observe one of the weekly radio shows that the kids present on an environmental topic.  In the future I will be helping to guide this project and working with the kids to develop appropriate topics and so forth.  Of course only one of the 5 kids ended up showing, so I was quickly shoved in front of a microphone with Jean Gabriel, and before I knew it I was giving a full-blown explanation of how Carbon Credits work… in Spanish… on live radio.  Now, I would like to think that I have a fair enough competence of this topic in a very general sense, but being put on the spot to explain it is a challenge.  Being put in that same position, but in a foreign language, and knowing that there is a pretty large audience actually listening at that very moment is a completely different story.  I can only hope that I didn´t offend anyone with my poor language skills.  A story nonetheless.

So outside of my volunteer work, I have also had time to see a good amount of sites in the Sacred Valley/Cusco area and do some other fun things.  I won`t go into too much detail since I feel I´ve documented these trips fairly well with my pictures, but basically I´ve had the chance to see Pisac, Tambo-machay, Puca Pucara, Qeqo, Saqsayhuaman, Ollantaytambo, and several museums in Cusco.  All these pictures are up in their respective folders here:http://picasaweb.google.com/scottwood83

Last weekend, I also caught a futbol (that´s soccer to us Americans) match between Cusco and another regional team (Bolognis or something?).  It was pretty uneventful with a final score of 0-0, but a bad futbol game in South America will generally beat a good game anywhere else in the world any day.  The talent is definitely there.

Ok, that´s all I have in me for now.  There are plenty of details that I´ve had to omit for my own sanity in writing this, and I know that the structure of this entry is all over the place, but I just wanted to get as much down as I could in an effort to catch up to the current moment.  I hope everyone is well.  I definitely miss my friends and family… and pizza… and Sierra Nevada beer.

Until next time,

Scott

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