Friday March 16, 2012

It´s the end of week two. I´ve had breakfast, done a wash in the kitchen sink. organized all the supplies for this mornings class and now I have a half hour to write before we start to lug the art supplies uphill to school.

This has been a tough eye opening two weeks. We´ve had four power outages, one lasting for over two days. Yesterday, there was no water in Aucapata for the entire day. We also had the teachers protest which shut the schools for three days. This turned out to be really really great for me since I had time to paint and I just taught one big class every afternnon between three and sixthirty.

Yesterday we had our first day at Charaj. Luckily we got a ride there with Don Manuel at 8 am. The school yard was full of moms and dads and kids. The moms wore small round light brown hats, black ponchos with red trim and multicoloured wool skirts. The men wore short pants, with a comerbun, a poncho over a shirt and the traditional knitted andes hat with earlugs. Unfortunately, they wouldn´t agree to let me take their pictures and so the ones I got I grabbed at a distance.

The kids were overwhelmed with the pastels and paints. Noone wants to mess up new supplies. From 12 to 2 the kids have lunch and two of the moms came with big wool bundles and set up our lunch. Everything was in pots with lids, fresh cheese, omelettes, salsa, rice, boiled potatoes. It was served on tin plates with a big spoon. Poor Jim was reluctant to eat because of his worries of Gringo stomach and his preference for cookies and pop for lunch, but I just smiled and told him to eat!
The mom´s sat on the floor to serve and of course wouldn´t consider eating with us.
Everyone is comfortable on the ground except for me. I miss sitting in a comfortable chair.

After lunch we hiked about a half hour uphill to the road, where we sat (and I painted) for two hours waiting for the bus. Eventually we gave up and walked the two hours home before it got dark. Luckily for me, most of this walk was gently downhill.