School Teaching

Today was our first day of teaching in the schools. My group teaches one class each of students in first through sixth grade. Our topic was nutrition, and our main goal was to help the students understand that it is really important to have a balanced diet that contains all of the food groups. The Peruvian diet, from what I have experienced so far, is really heavy in starches and proteins. However, a lot of the time there aren’t enough fruits or vegetables. We prepared a set of foods on note cards and had the students come up to the board and place the foods in the correct groups. Something I found interesting was that a lot of the students viewed rice and potatoes as proteins. To combat this, we decided to define grains and carbohydrates as foods that provided the body with energy. I really felt that cleared a lot of stuff up, as the students better understood the impact of the different foods on the body.

The younger kids had a lot of trouble focusing, and I felt that a lot of the time went towards telling them to listen rather than teaching them about nutrition. However, when we got the upper grades, I noticed that the kids were much better behaved. Additionally, many of the students were really into learning the English words for the foods they were placing into categories. It was really rewarding to see the students frantically copying down all of the English words into their notebooks, even if they weren’t really paying attention for the rest of the presentation.

After our time in the schools, we came back to the office for lunch. Every Monday, we have a required reflection session with some of the staff from ProWorld. There, we talked about our experiences over the past week and about our personal highs and lows. From the office, I went directly to El Molino, the black market in Cuzco.

I have got to say that El Molino is really amazing. They have literally everything that you could ever want, form clothes to food to electronics. Since I am going on the Chicon hike in 5 days (yikes!), I decided that I would look for a hiking backpack and some cheap hiking shoes. While hiking backpacks cost about $200 in the United States, I was able to get a great one in El Molino for only about $50. The hiking shoes were also really cheap, about $20. From these purchases, I realized that El Molino was going to be my best friend for the next six weeks in Cuzco. Perhaps I will look for other useful items while I am here…

Spanish class today was much better than last week, since I didn’t have to do a ton of grammar exercises and instead got to work with the preterit tense and had more oral conversations. In the next couple of days, I will be working with some of the more advanced tenses in the Spanish language.

Tonight was really relaxed again, since I came back and then played UNO for a while with Jordan and Luis. We then watched the Thunder-Mavericks game together. Luis is really interested in how basketball works, since he is much more familiar with soccer. Being able to explain the rules to him and how everything worked was really cool for me, as I felt that I was helping him to become a basketball fan. During the game, I also felt like seeing how much stuff I could fit In my new hiking backpack. I was amazed by its seemingly endless capacity, as it is almost three times bigger than my normal backpack.

I also had another interesting discovery today. I was packing the backpack when Luis saw my powdered Gatorade. He was really curious as to how that worked, since Gatorade is somewhat of a specialty item in Peru. Furthermore, he told me that he had never seen powdered Gatorade before. I guess that I had thought something like that would be available everywhere, even if it is more expensive and harder to find in some countries. It was really funny to watch his, Violeta’s, and Margarita’s reactions when I told them that you could make a glass of Gatorade with only two spoonful’s of the powder and a glass of water. They were truly amazed, and asked me if I could send some of the powder to them overseas (sounds like a plan!). After a long and hard day, I realized that it was really late, so I just went to bed.