Welcome to the Family

Hey friends. It's been a while since a post and I apologize for that. To remedy the situation, here's a new post! I promise, photos will be coming soon. So anyway, I want to talk about family. Specifically about how when you move into a small town in Peru, you inherit a whole bunch of family. Let me explain what I mean.

What I've found is that rural communities in Peru are not so different from rural communities in the States. Town meetings are announced on a loudspeaker and around mid-afternoon, the shepherds come in from the fields with their lambs to keep at home where it is safer. Everybody knows everybody and everybody greets each other in passing on the streets. It's not an impersonal greeting, instead it is always "Tio (or Tia), buenas tardes." And this is what I mean by inheriting the family. I now have a town FULL of aunts and uncles. To some of the older ladies, they'll even call out, "Mamita, como estas?" And my new extended Peruvian family is definitely looking out for me. Now I find that when I am walking around the streets I greet the ladies with a "Tia, buenos dias."

Since starting my summer school/camp, I've also inherited a few kids - let's call them cousins since their moms are my aunts. And they are a bundle of enthusiastic energy, ready to learn and play whatever I throw their way. The classes I'm giving are now 3 days a week from 9:30 to about 12:30 and to give it a name, it's Environmental English. Because I want to talk about nature but to get people to show up, I offer to teach some English too. If they words happen to be nature-oriented, well, that's just how it goes. We've talked about water and played water games, and we talked about garbage and did a town cleanup. They were so excited about the clean up that they asked to do one every week. And that is why the class is now 3 days a week. The third is purely activity and it's clean up the town and set aside the recycling day. We also did a day of art projects with recyclables and a day where we talked about the seasons and natural disasters. That ended up being really fun because we did a natural disaster obstacle course on the playground. In the next few weeks we'll be playing in the garden, talking about animals and taking a few hikes. So those are my cousins.

And now for my kids. Don't freak out. They aren't human but they are definitely babies. In a moment of pity and as a sucker for cats, I've adopted two kittens. They are from the town over and the owner of their mom was going to kill them if they didn't have a home (that's their form of controlling the pet population) and so I offered mine. So now Cora (short for Corazon) and Messi (short for Mezcla and as an homage to the soccer great) are slowly (really, very slowly) learning how to use the litter box and currently sleeping on my lap. They are good company for me and a good topic of discussion with the rest of my family in town.

So now you know a little bit more about the family I've been plopped into and understand a little bit about who I'm encountering in my day to day. I hope soon to get some pictures up for you to see. I hope everyone in the snowy snowy north is staying sheltered and warm. Blessings.