Potato

I have eaten more potatoes in four days than I have in my whole life. The food is very good, don't get me wrong, but I had no idea there was such potato insanity. Yesterday's meals were bread and jam for breakfast, potato soup with noodles and potato curry with rice for lunch, potato soup with noodles and fried potato cakes with rice for dinner. Potato doesn't even look like a word anymore. On a more important note, I have been volunteering with the kids for the past two days. Most of them are just like average children, they are excited, loud, and sweetly manipulative. There are a few that are clearly struggling with their circumstances at home, so it has been difficult to help them or even befriend them.

On the first day, I quickly learned the verb ''prestame'', meaning ''give me''. These kids are obsessed with having objects. For example, I wore some earrings the first day, and this little girl started smiling and complimenting me, and then said ''prestameeee'' as she slowly took them out of my ears. I also have to keep a close watch on any classroom things like pencil sharpeners and scissors. Because my Spanish isn't great, the program leaders put me with the six year olds. They are unbelievably cute, but are incapable of focusing. I'm expected to make sure they finish their homework, which consists of filling up pages of graph paper with numbers or cursive letters. I am starting to run out of ways to motivate them, because it IS really boring work. I started getting really desperate yesterday, saying things in Spanish like ''the 5s need you'', ''please continue with the 5s'', and ''5s are important for life''. It doesn't help that their homework is occasionally bizarre. One girl had a sheet of paper that said ''horizontalmente"  and a bunch of math problems like 23432 minus 14563. So instead of stacking the numbers and easily subtracting, she was trying to do it in her head and missing every one. I tried to teach her verticalmente, but she said her teacher wouldn't like that.

My favorite part of volunteering is when the older children need help with their English homework. I am the only person in the building that speaks English, so it is actually a useful skill for the program, and it really helps my Spanish when I try to explain grammar concepts. I finally start my Spanish classes today, which will be a huge help for the areas I am struggling with. This weekend I head to Machu Picchu with another volunteer from Portland. Pretty kooky!