The Past 2 Weeks

Hey guys,
Hows everyone been? I hope those that are at university are enjoying their new found freedom and havn't hospitalized themselves in the alcohol fueled week that is Freshers lol. For family and friends that are yet to reach university or are way past it I hope that you are all well and in good health.

I don't really know where to start with this blog so i'm just going to recap on events that are stuck in my head from the past 2 weeks as I promised this blog wouldn't be as long as my last.

On the 25th September it was Dani's 8th birthday, I drew him a Naruto card which he was absolutely chuffed about and Rachel and I bought him a Ben 10 hat which he now wears proudly around the orphanage and to school. The weather got absolutely horrendous in the evening and there was thunder and lightening echoing over the vast mountains making it a perfect scene for a horror film. The rain seemed to have stopped around 8pm in the evening at the arrival of Alcides and his wife. As they got out of the car they were carrying what seemed to be the Pan for dinner but as we joined them in the dining room Rachel and I realised we were VERY wrong. Infact in the bag was around 17 pieces of quarters of grilled chicken and 30+ peruvian potatoes and a few bags of Ahi, which is a green peruvian midly spicy nutty sauce. This was all washed down with coca tea and followed my an immense 'manzana torta'.This was the best meal i have had since being here and i completely raped the chicken bones, it reminded me a bit of nandos back home, oh how i miss nandos :( and curries and fish and chips and sunday roasts AND mummys cooking, the funniest thing is the thing i miss the most about england (Other than family and friends before you start crying) is FOOD, and i never thought food would be that big of a problem but boy how i miss good food.

Okay so more about the week. Rachel and I have been paid our first monthly installment of our "pocket money" from project trust. We get paid 260 soles which is around £60. This might sound a lot of money and enough for a month however when you take into account minimum wage here in peru is 500 soles we get next to nothing which is quite ironic as Anastacia who thinks we have tonnes of money and asked Rachel and I for 50 soles, actually gets paid the same as we do just a bit less. To live in Oropesa i guess its enough money to get by but there's no luxeries invovled and means we sort've just have to deal with the food as we can't afford to eat out every month let alone every day. So Rachel & I's trip to Paddys Pub in Cusco will have to wait :(, when that day comes i will personally order an english breakfast AND a roast dinner.

Last Friday Rachel and I took a trip to the super market in cusco, since we have only been shopping in Markets so far it was amazing to have everything under 1 roof. The purpose of the trip was to get rachel some shampoo and conditioner and for myself to get food to cook for the boys today (Sunday) as all the adults have gone off to vote for their elections and have to go back to their home towns to vote which in Anastacias case is a 7 hour bus journey away. So the cooking well this was interesting, i managed to season the chicken and everything all in great time and it looked immense. However as there is no actual cooker here we had to use the bread cooker which involves burning wood etc. There are no windows in the kitchen which actually makes no sense there is only a door and so the room got unbelievably hot, stuffy and horrible. My eyes were burning, my chest felt so tight and i couldnt spend more then 2 minutes in there. So the rest of the cooking had to get put on hold which meant a huge delay in lunch time. I then had to do the rice which didnt come out as planned purely for the fact i seemed to have put in too much water so it looked a bit mushy looool, however it was good tasting mush and the boys all loved it. They all want me to cook again which i would happily do however with the cost of cooking it will be a once every 2 months type of deal lol. It was quite ironic as well that i was feeling terribly ill that day and so only ate 2 chicken wings.

The other week Fran from LAFF (Latin American Foundation for Future) http://www.laffcharity.org.uk/index.html
came to join Rachel and I at Azul Wasi. She was one of the people who actually help set up Azul Wasi a few years ago and so is back again after winning the Vodophone world of differnce competition so now gets paid a full salary whilst out here in peru for a year!! shes only staying in azul wasi for around 2 weeks and is leaving this sunday however she is only staying in Cusco so not too far away at all. Fran has tonnes of plans for Azul Wasi to make it more sustainable etc and so it is definitly a great time to be involved with Azul Wasi. Fran is also going to be looking at other charities to get a partnership going with so Rachel and I will be following her on a few of those, especially to the Young mums one, there are girls with babies that are no older then 11 years old, its ironic coming from a country that bans sex education in schools.

I was at the nursery last week which i really enjoy. The first day was really over whelming as i had tonnes of kids running up to me but as soon as i was in the class it was great. They started to sing a song to me asking how i am and were all really excited with me being there. Rachel and I are in 2 differnt classes rachels with the younger ones whilst im with the olders ones and have carmen rosa and Milan in my class. At first all the quick firing spanish confused me but you get used to it and i understand the kids and they understand me. They were all amazed by my hair and would run up behind me trying to pat it which made me laugh. Oh yh i forgot, the first 5 minutes of me being there a little girl tried to rip my nose piercing out, she was asking " can you take it out" i said no then she decided to try for her self, on that note i ran to my bag to put it in there, which lead to more questions on my return "where has it gone" to which i replied, " i have no idea" loool. There is one boy in the class Dariel who i have came to know quite well, my first meeting with him was when the teacher shouted to me, go and get dariel he ran out of the class. To which i did, flung him over my shoulder and brought him back in a fit of giggles. After seeing how immensly fun i was he stuck to me like glue. Talking of glue he enjoys eating it and putting it in his hair and sticking scicssors to his hair also. Dariel sort of gets left to his own accord a lot of the time, he's a kid who in the UK would be assigned a teachers assistant but they just dont do it here and so i have assigned myself that job. Ive been able to get him to do the work however the teacher isnt much help when she just tells him the work is wrong, or its ugly etc and for a child who hates doing the work in the first place, shouldnt he get some sort of recognition that he at least sat down and down the work? There is one girl in Rachels class who is absolutely horrible, she pinches you and scratches you and is just a horrible little girl, im glad im not in that class!! However there are a lot of little sh*ts in my class i must say, mostly the girls 2bh, boys i can handle they're easy but the girls are just sooooo annoying loool. Always want to touch you, jump on you, colour you in etc etc. Theres this one table of girls that are like old women already and take around 40 minutes to stick some paper into the lines of numbers as they sit there having a mothers meeting, very funny.

The rest of that week i wasn't feeling well at all and was relativly bed ridden and so spent most of the time just organising my UCAS and personal statement for the hope that some University will accept me with my current grades. Its crazy, I didn't do that well or should i say my grades were terrible for year 13 yet i cant do anything to change them. Unlike some of my friends still in England who are able to retake modules I cannot which sucks. Ive put a lot on the line for Peru, including a place at Essex university so just hope that it all goes in my favour and I get accepted by some place or another.

ALSO this week i begun teaching dance, and by begun i literally mean just one lesson, i was meant to teach it every day up until the kids competition however ive been so ill i could only manage one day and its soooo irritating as it was big edwin who came out to ask if i would be able to help his class and he's been one of the hardest boys to win over. I really wanted to help as well.

As me and rachel have been feeling so awful yesterday we decided it was time we went to the hospital to get checked out. It was definatley an expensive trip. 60 soles for a consultation, 70 soles for the blood test, pee test and erm poo test lol and then another 125 soles for the drugsssss. As we had the blood test it was quite funny as the music playing at the time was thriller by michael jackson which involved all the evil cackling, great background music right? and then we were handed the pee and poo pots. The poo pot was literally a plastic drinking cup with a lolly stick and the pee tub was an actualy tub. So i put myself forward to get the deed done first but to no avail, I CANNOT POO ON DEMAND looool, rachel was more succesful and we was told we needed to wait an hour so we went to get something to eat to stimulate my bowels. We found this really nice little peruvian place and had fried potatoes with some pork thing called "Chincharon" or something along those lines. It was really tasty and was served with Ahi which is a nice peruvian spiced sauce however was a bit offputting by the fact it was served wuth lolly sticks lol. We ran back to the hospital as it begun to rain immensly heavily and i done the deed and we waited for the results.

The results came back that we both had Jardia a parasite, however rachels was more advanced as she has had it longer then i have, however i also have a urine infection which definetley is NOT sexy loool... So we now have the drugs HURRAH.. Rachel and i also found out we lost a lot of weight, prior to coming here i was 9stone 12lbs and i now weight 8 stone 9lbs, rachel couldnt remember exactley how much she weighed previously however she now weighs around 8 stone 6, and is skin and bones lool. If anyone wants to send us over some chocolate, sweets, cup a soup, biscuits??? It would be greatly appreciated loool

Hopefully we'll both be feeling a lot better and can get back to our normal routines as it does get boring just sitting in our room all the time.

Its Valerios 9th birthday today so i need to get going and start drawing his Ben 10 birthday card.

Sunday is the Oropesa Pan festival which wil involved lots of alcohol, dancing and bread so yayyy should be muchos amounts of fun I can't wait. I hope this blog was a lot easier reading lol.

Cuidado xxxxxxxx
Simply Signed,
Simply Compas

P.S: This is an extract from my diary about something harrowing i found out these past two weeks

Oscar wasn’t born as he was, he was born normally and his mother was a robber; a thief. She would always have Oscar with her on her robberies and when she would get caught she would threaten to kill Oscar if they tried to arrest her or take her in the police station. So she would hit his head against the wall numerous amounts of times which has now made him “mentally slow”. Oscar is someone that I find really hard to get on with, not even because he has learning disabilities or anything but purely because he is so unpredictable, he calls the younger boys mean names, steals there “chippies” and a problem is that he will call Rachel and I by the same names the younger kids call us which makes us not know how to react, should we answer to it? Should we not? I mean he is over 21 years old so it shouldn’t really be acceptable for him to call us names like “amiga cappucina” and “amiga chilindrina” (Rachel) as he doesn’t know boundries. The boys know when to and not call us by those names i.e at school but if we went out with Oscar would he understand that? I know it shouldn’t make me sympathise with him but it really does. Its such a horrible story to hear and any mother that would threaten her sons life for her own personal gain deserves to have her womb ripped out and that is just putting it nicely! I really wonder how and when Oscar will move on from Azul Wasi as Latin America in general let alone Peru don’t deal with people with disabilities well and so is there any way he could integrate in society. And is being surrounded by 8 year old children good for his future? Theres so many questions regarding Oscar and I just need to find the best way to deal with him but I guess that will come with time and also the advancing of my Spanish.