Voluntary Work
Having finished learning the rudiments of Spanish we headed into the big wide world of work to put some of the language into practise.
George
headed off on his own project painting a mural at an orphanage and the
rest of us caught a bus to the outskirts of Cusco to an after schools
club where we helped with homework and games. The children were aged
from about 18 months (coming with their older brothers or sisters) to
about 15.
I concentrated on
the maths – square root was not a word I had learnt! Grum helped with
the Spanish homework – I’m not convinced who was helping who! George,
when he joined us after missing 2 days at the painting, knuckled down to
maths with some of the least able, Jack was the main man at drawing and
translation and Jed was everybody’s best friend! – spending most of the
time playing games and football. English games were taught and enjoyed
and a performance of
Abiyoyo enthralled and scared the youngest and made the older ones
laugh. We spent about a month here and Jack and I went back for a
further week at the end of our time in Peru.
For a different
week we went into the mountains to a small village where
another
after schools project had been set up purely by volunteers. This was
designed to help with homework but also to help teach English, again the
children were great and we had a lot of fun and free time enough to go
walking in the mountains and visiting an even more remote school where
there was no power, water or sewage and the children only spoke the
local language of Quechuan, our conversation was fairly limited!
I think the pictures of the children speak for themselves and tell how much fun we had and how welcome we were made.
(click the side arrows to view more thumbnails and click the thumbnails to view an enlarged version)
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The setting for our work at Amas
