A Day of Meetings, Service & Peruvian Dancers!

Thursday, January 27, 2011

** PPA **

Written by: Volunteer Greg

Another morning awoken by a pleasant phone call from our wonderful group leader, Françoise. Usually I am unaware of the day’s events due to a short attention span myself, but this morning I was pleasantly surprised to shake the hand of Bud Philbrook, the Co-Founder and President of Global Volunteers. Bud was a very generous and gracious man. He started off by thanking us all for our support and continued to speak of some global issues and his ideas of improving them. Bud believes that the importance of temporary volunteers is huge, and if only 1 percent of the developed world were involved much of the issues such as 400 million starving children could be immensely improved.

The short trip to the PPA was quickly followed by our time with the 4-6 year old girls. They seem to really be in their own mindset when working on arts and crafts. As I assisted the little ones gluing and coloring I attempted improving my very limited Spanish vocabulary with Violeta, the young girls teacher. She seemed to enjoy this, for she was also trying to improve her English as well.

I later made my way to the 15-year-old boys and played some more soccer with them. They go hours on end in the hot sun playing game after game; their endurance is impressive and far superior to mine. When we finally took a short break, the young boys and I noticed a fair amount of smoke coming from across the street, and realized that the mental institution had a small fire in need of attention. We watched as they put out the fire, and I continued to improve my Spanish, by the boys pointing to the fire, smoke and firemen.

The young men began to open up to me a bit more. Last week they pointed out some of the graffiti to me, and said that it was bad, and they hadn’t a clue that did it. Today, they began showing me it as artwork and also explained their methods of not getting caught. They clearly are in need of more attention, because it seems they are pretty much on their own for the majority of the day, as most staff is focused on the younger ones.

Rosa, who is the president of the women’s volunteer association sat down with us and updated us on some of the current issues. She explained how many of the teenage girls have begun developing some signs of depression.

Dinner was great, and I especially enjoyed the cow tongue. Dinner was followed by a show with Peruvian dancers. My favorite was the scissors dance which consisted of two men dancing with scissors clapping to a beat simultaneously dancing even on their heads!

I went out salsa dancing with Frank, a new acquaintance of mine from the front desk. He has been extremely helpful and even gave me some tips on salsa dancing. I definitely have much room for improvement.

So till next time!