Day 12

So today when I got to El Refugio at 10, I realize it's Sunday and they're all at church for another 1½ hours. Oops. I should start remembering what day it is. With some time to kill I went to the park nearby and sat under a really nice tree, and decided to write down some spanish words I had heard that morning in my notebook. I have a language-learning notebook, where I write down new words and phrases etc. It's the second half of my old diary (thanks to Rebecca Price I have an awesome new red one. anyways, really not important). Instead of studying Spanish I ended up reading my diary; the quote from The Importance of Being Earnest comes to mind, "I always keep my diary with me, one must always have something sensational to read on the train." Basically, I read about my life from November to December last year. Would you like an excerpt?

"Icecream.... glaaarghlgr *drool*"

Sensational, is it not? I also took a walk around the block to the grocery store just to see if I could find it -- good thing I did because otherwise I might have gotten lost. At 11:30 I walked back to El Refugio and everyone was back! Yay! Doris had thought that I wasn't going to come today, because people don't usually come and work on Sundays, but it's not like I have anything better to do, and I can't remember what day it is anyway. She was really happy about my appearance though, because she was about to leave to Huancayo with a couple of the children to talk to Samuel's (an adorable 2 year old boy) aunt, and she said if I could come and look after the kids while she talked that would be great. Okay! Samuel comes from a really harsh background -- his mom is handicapped and mentally at the level of a 9 year old. Doris likes to keep in contact with the kids' families which is wonderful. Huancayo is in the outskirts of Lima, and is the poorest place I've ever seen. Driving away from the city, the houses were getting more and more rundown with crumbling brick walls and trash everywhere. The landscape outside of Lima is all the same -- mounds of dirt. Dust. But taking a second look you can see tiny little houses scattered across the hillsides, some painted in bright colors to brighten up the view, and that is Huancayo. We drove up the side of the mountain on a tiny little dirt road that reminded me of roads in PNG, minus the mud, into the streets of the town. There we found the house of Samuel's aunt, but she wasn't there, only some other woman who lives there as well. There had been some miscommunication, and they didn't really know where she was. So that was pretty sad, for Samuel (well, he's still pretty small and didn't really understand why we were going there) and Doris who had some legalistic stuff to discuss with her... but I'm really glad I got to come and see this part of Lima. The contrasts between our lifestyle and theirs... it's a little painful. There were some poorer areas in PNG too, but not like this. In PNG at least there was water, and there were plants and the jungle. Here the earth is dead.

This is a really bad quality picture from my phone that I got driving away, but you can sort of see what it looks like. I should post pictures of the place I'm acctually at eh... another day.