Monday September 14 to Thursday September 17 - Peru Week 5, Leaving Urubamba

My final few days in Peru have been rather quiet ones as all of the other volunteers in Urubamba have left to visit another town for the week. There have been a few other new volunteers to arrive this week and I’ve had a few drinks with a new guy named William who is coming in to teach English at another school. I’ve not wanted to go into too much about my experience with my school as he is just beginning and if somebody told me what would happen the first week I was in Peru, I might have bailed. But he is close to my age and it has been hard not to say anything when he asks me what to expect, so I tell him a little bit without going into a lot of details and provide a few suggestions on what I think he should do at the school. I got somewhat annoyed at my professor this week too and those of you who know me, know I sometimes have a hard time keeping my mouth shut.

This week the school is having exams and my professor decided to have oral exams for around 400 students and he wants me to help. I have no problem with this but I do have a problem with not being told how to grade them and not being provided any materials to do it with. It is all rather subjective so I have to wing it on my own and decide what is good and what is not. Add in that he asked me to do each student in 2 minutes or less and this was rather absurd I thought and there was no way I could spend just 2 minutes per student doing this. To be honest I think he wanted to have oral exams so that he did not need to prepare anything for the tests.

The 5^th grade class (high school seniors) had to give me an oral biography of themselves in English and I had to drag some of them through it and often if I asked a question I got back nothing more than yes or no. The 4^th grade just had to memorize vocabulary words and for some reason they thought all they had to do was spit them out. So when I asked them to tell me what the word was in English when I gave it to them in Spanish, a lot protested that they did not need to do this.

The Glorious General Ollanta

If I were the professor I would have flunked around 80% of the students I tested, as it was very clear many did not prepare at all. And these were among the easiest exams I have ever seen and they still should have failed miserably. However, I did not feel that it was appropriate to do this so I dragged as many as I could across the threshold that was finally set for them to pass or fail. But even then there were still a few who even I could not pass doing this.

I am glad to find out on Wednesday that the first few days William has spent in his classrooms have been very good for him and it just reinforces my belief that I just had the bad luck on getting in a rather disorganized school.

On Wednesday I decided not to teach at the school and just concentrate on getting my stuff ready to go. Laundry, packing, close out paperwork at the Projects Abroad office, etc. Besides I did not want to rush out without being able to spend a little more time with my host family and have time to properly say good bye to the people in Urubamba before I left. As I have said before I don’t like good bye and prefer to think of it as until we next meet, but the reality is I won’t see many of these people again.

I had a little time to simply relax after lunch with Norma, Yaki, Nelio and Gabriel, my host family. Norma in particular has been great the past weeks and I don’t know how she keeps everything up. I bought a Quena flute while here and Gabriel took a liking to it, I probably need to wash it off from the amount of times he has been spitting into it, and since he liked it I picked up a cheap one for him before I left. He was happy with it and I joked that it was good that he did not really know how to play it, but strangely, the compass I left behind seemed to bring him the most pleasure. I don’t know why I had a compass, I just found it in my backpack when I was looking for weight to shed, and he seemed to like it equally as much if not more than the flute.

Wednesday afternoon I had a cab to Cusco as my flight out was at 5:30 the next morning. Project’s Abroad has arraigned a taxi for me and there is a volunteer social the same day in Cusco, so I head in with a few new volunteers in Urubamba. That evening we are learning how to cook Ceviche and there are a bunch more new volunteers in Cusco who join us.

Ceviche is raw fish marinated in lemon juice, but I tasted what they call lemons in Peru and I think they are a lot more like a Key Lime than a lemon. They are also green and not really yellow. Raw fish does not turn me on, any raw meat does not turn me on, but I’ve put worse into my mouth while on Peru. I still don’t dig the idea of raw meat but it was quite good and rather spicy, which was not something I anticipated.