Hi all,
Who ate entirely too much for the Holidays?? I did!! Oh well, that's what New Year's Resolutions are for. I hope you all had a wonderful break and are now refreshed and ready for the second half of the year.
It's tough to believe that I've been in Ayacucho now for almost six weeks. Sadly, my time here is drawing to a close. It sure has been fun, though. I work at La Casa Hogar de Los Gorriones (this means, "The Home of the Sparrows") five days a week, and we often have a lot to do on our days off given all of the holiday celebration. In the Casa Hogar are 27 children, from ages 3 to 22. It can get pretty rowdy at times, but we're always having a lot of fun!
There are three groups of kids: the Lupes, the Pequeños, and the Grandes. Each day I work with one of these groups. The Lupes require a lot of time and attention. These children all have mental and physical disabilities, so they need a lot of help just to do many of the activities we take for granted (like walking and eating). But the Lupes like to have fun just like any old kid! Some of our favorite activities are putting together simple puzzles, playing hide-and-seek, and playing on the merry-go-round.
Pequeños are between the ages of 3 and 6, and all are boys. As you might expect, the pequeños can also get quite rowdy! They actually share a set of bedrooms with all the girls in the casa. Imagine being six years old and having to share a room with your fifteen-year-old sister, sheesh. Now imagine having to share a room with seven other brothers and sisters! It can sure get crammed sometimes. Anyway, the pequeños love to play with their cars. They also enjoy when I chase them around like a zombie or, before bedtime, playing "This little piggy went to the market...."
The last group is the Grandes, who are between 8 and 22 years old, though most of the kids are 8-12 years old, the same age as you guys! When we´re not goofing around in the Casa, we loooooove to go outside and play volleyball. And, I´m proud to mention a new favorite activity: frisbee! We haven´t quite gotten to the point where we can play an actual game, but some of the kids can throw really well. They enjoy running as far away as possible to see if I can reach them on my furthest throw. That can be risky, because we play on a pretty narrow street, and the frisbee can go over a wall into one of the neighbors yards. Then we have to bang on the door to ask for it back.
I live in a hostel, which is a lot like a hotel. Many of the other volunteers rent rooms in a house not far away. In the morning we eat breakfast together. Usually, it´s just bread & butter, bananas, and tea, but I often can´t resist buying a mango, because they are so delicious here. For lunch we eat at the Casa, usually rice and a veggie-type sauce with a little bit of chicken or fish. I´ll talk more about traditional Peruvian food in my next post. For dinner, we take turns cooking at the volunteer house. It´s fun but, for me, stressful, because I´m a terrible cook. Last time I had to cook we made an "American Breakfast", scrambled eggs with pancakes. Most of the volunteers here are from France and Belgium, so they´ve never had pancakes before! Because you can´t buy maple syrup in Ayacucho, they ended up putting sugar and lime juice on the pancakes and rolling them up like a crêpe. It´s actually quite tasty this way. Do you know what a crêpe is?
New Years was a blast! We had a party at the volunteer house for all the kids, complete with balloons, dancing, and plenty of french fries. After the party, we walked to a lookout about 15 minutes away and watched all of the fireworks over Ayacucho as 2009 came to a close. It was pretty cool to have such a good view of the entire city.
OK, gotta run and get my shoes fixed before my big hike to Macchu Picchu. See if you can find a little information about Macchu Picchu; it´s one of the 7 Wonders of the World!
Hasta Pronto,
Kevin
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Thursday, December 3, 2009
...And I'm Off!
On jaarama!
Well, I promised you I’d tell you where I was headed next. The winner is…{drumroll}…Peru! Today I’ll leave my house for the airport at 6 a.m. There’ll be one quick stop in Mexico City, and then I arrive in the capital Lima at 12:30 in the morning! Sheesh, that’s late.
See if you can find Peru on a map. Is it North or South of the equator? What countries are Peru's neighbors? On what continent can you find Peru? It will be an exciting time. Peru is very rich with history and also very beautiful. The Andes Mountain Range passes right through it. Many of the mountains in this range are taller than the tallest mountain in all the Rockies!
While I'm there I will be volunteering at an orphanage in a town called Ayacucho. Ayacucho is in the center of the country, so I bet you can spot it if you look hard enough. The elevation is 9000 ft! Have you ever heard the word elevation? Maybe you can use the internet to find the elevation of Indianapolis.
And the official language of Peru? I’ll give you a hint: I won’t be speaking Pulaar there anytime soon. What time of year do you think it is right now in Peru?
Alright, time to catch a little shut-eye. I'll be dreaming about Christmas presents, I'm sure. Santa definitely makes a few stops in Peru.
Wish me safe travels!
Kevin
Well, I promised you I’d tell you where I was headed next. The winner is…{drumroll}…Peru! Today I’ll leave my house for the airport at 6 a.m. There’ll be one quick stop in Mexico City, and then I arrive in the capital Lima at 12:30 in the morning! Sheesh, that’s late.
See if you can find Peru on a map. Is it North or South of the equator? What countries are Peru's neighbors? On what continent can you find Peru? It will be an exciting time. Peru is very rich with history and also very beautiful. The Andes Mountain Range passes right through it. Many of the mountains in this range are taller than the tallest mountain in all the Rockies!
While I'm there I will be volunteering at an orphanage in a town called Ayacucho. Ayacucho is in the center of the country, so I bet you can spot it if you look hard enough. The elevation is 9000 ft! Have you ever heard the word elevation? Maybe you can use the internet to find the elevation of Indianapolis.
And the official language of Peru? I’ll give you a hint: I won’t be speaking Pulaar there anytime soon. What time of year do you think it is right now in Peru?
Alright, time to catch a little shut-eye. I'll be dreaming about Christmas presents, I'm sure. Santa definitely makes a few stops in Peru.
Wish me safe travels!
Kevin
Monday, November 23, 2009
Chez Leno
Here's a video of the house where I lived during training. Whatya think? If you need to see a bigger version you can double-click on it, and the browser will take you to YouTube.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
'Til We Meet Again
On jaarama! Tanaala ton?
Now I can say that and be completely confident you all understand me. How does it feel to know a bit of another language, spoken only in a little corner of Africa? I was happy to practice Pulaar with you, because it's easy to forget a language if you don't practice it.
First off, I want to send off a huge thank you to all of you for inviting me into your classroom yesterday morning. It was so much fun to share some of my experiences in Guinea with you. I can only hope you had as much fun as I did. Were all of your KWL questions answered? If not, feel free to pass your questions to Mrs. Lloyd, and she can pass them along to me.
Which reminds me...there was one question I couldn't answer yesterday: How many miles is it from here to Guinea? Well, I found a realy cool website that lets you calculate the distance between two places. Want to know what's even cooler? I was able to find both Clark Elementary and my little village of Bodie on the map. Ready for the number? 4888 miles! I know, I know. Huge, right?
Well, I'm not certain where my next travel adventures will take me, but I'll let you know as soon as I find out. Keep the people of Guinea in your thoughts and prayers, because they want to become a free country like America.
Until we meet again,
Kevin
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
July 15, 2009
Wo nu wali!
We’re going to have a little lesson in Susu, the local language of the town where we’re training. Wo nu wali simply means, “hi all!” It’s pronounced, “Whoa-new-wall-ee!” If you want to say hi to one person, simply say, I nu wali! (“Ee-new-wall-ee!”) The response? Simple. I nu wali!
I’ve been in Forecariah for two-and-a-half weeks now, and things are finally starting to settle down a little. We came here after a week in Conakry (“con-ah-cree”), the capital of Guinea. Conakry is crazy busy. Imagine a city of more than a million people without a single stoplight! The airport is really small compared to Indy’s. Normally, only one or two planes arrive every day. The day we arrived in Guinea, both planes arrived at exactly the same time, so the airport was absolutely packed. I felt like one of 200 sardines packeed into a can for five.
Forecariah has 14,000 people, and I’ll guess it has about 20,000 chickens, 5,000 goats, and 3,000 sheep. Everywhere around me are animals. Just outside the front gate of my house a goat and her two children are tied to a tree. Sometimes during dinner in the main room of my host family’s house, a chicken or two will stroll in to see if any food was dropped on the floor. We have one rooster at the house, and boy is he annoying! Between 4:30 and 5:00 every morning he likes to start screaming at the top of his lungs, and his pen just happens to be right outside my window. When the kids mock him, they scream, “co-ro-ki-co!!”
Every corner of Forecariah is alive with sounds. Mixed with the rooster’s crows at 5 a.m. are prayer calls from the mosque. Guinea is primarily a Muslim country, so at various times of the day I hear the imam’s (the equivalent of a Muslim priest) voice in arabic over a loudspeaker. Later in the morning the vendors begin selling their various items. My house is kind of far from any main road, so only food sellers pass by. On my first Sunday here, my host father purchased some buille (“bwee”) from a woman walking by, balancing a huge bowl on her head. Buille, tiny balls of rice in a sweet sauce, is commonly eaten for breakfast. At the market, street vendors balancing food bowls mix with a thousand others, selling anything and everything under the sun.
My house is also filled with noise from day until night. I’m living with a family of 12, along with about 15 chickens and 12 little chicks. My 2-year-old nephew loves to test the strength of his vocal chords, as does his 3-year-old cousin. Of my seven brothers and sisters, two usually stay around the house on summer days to do chores (like washing the bowls and fetching water from the well). Four walls surround the two small houses the family shares, and tucked into a corner of two of the walls is a small little room with an iron-barred window looking to the outside. Several times a day someone will shout “cawn!cawn!”, the Guinean version of “knock!knock!”, looking to buy something from the tiny store. Jaqueline (13 years old) or Daniel (10 years old) will run over to the room and sell a pack of batteries, fuel for a lantern, or maybe a sucker. There aren’t many toys here, so young kids often play by just helping with the chores. My 3-year-old brother Benjamin spent 15 minutes last Saturday helping me wash a handkerchief as I scrubbed the rest of my laundry outside on a washboard. He finally decided he’d had enoughafter the rain began pouring down on us.
Gotta run. Can’t wait to share more with you. À la prochaine!
Kevin
Wo nu wali!
We’re going to have a little lesson in Susu, the local language of the town where we’re training. Wo nu wali simply means, “hi all!” It’s pronounced, “Whoa-new-wall-ee!” If you want to say hi to one person, simply say, I nu wali! (“Ee-new-wall-ee!”) The response? Simple. I nu wali!
I’ve been in Forecariah for two-and-a-half weeks now, and things are finally starting to settle down a little. We came here after a week in Conakry (“con-ah-cree”), the capital of Guinea. Conakry is crazy busy. Imagine a city of more than a million people without a single stoplight! The airport is really small compared to Indy’s. Normally, only one or two planes arrive every day. The day we arrived in Guinea, both planes arrived at exactly the same time, so the airport was absolutely packed. I felt like one of 200 sardines packeed into a can for five.
Forecariah has 14,000 people, and I’ll guess it has about 20,000 chickens, 5,000 goats, and 3,000 sheep. Everywhere around me are animals. Just outside the front gate of my house a goat and her two children are tied to a tree. Sometimes during dinner in the main room of my host family’s house, a chicken or two will stroll in to see if any food was dropped on the floor. We have one rooster at the house, and boy is he annoying! Between 4:30 and 5:00 every morning he likes to start screaming at the top of his lungs, and his pen just happens to be right outside my window. When the kids mock him, they scream, “co-ro-ki-co!!”
Every corner of Forecariah is alive with sounds. Mixed with the rooster’s crows at 5 a.m. are prayer calls from the mosque. Guinea is primarily a Muslim country, so at various times of the day I hear the imam’s (the equivalent of a Muslim priest) voice in arabic over a loudspeaker. Later in the morning the vendors begin selling their various items. My house is kind of far from any main road, so only food sellers pass by. On my first Sunday here, my host father purchased some buille (“bwee”) from a woman walking by, balancing a huge bowl on her head. Buille, tiny balls of rice in a sweet sauce, is commonly eaten for breakfast. At the market, street vendors balancing food bowls mix with a thousand others, selling anything and everything under the sun.
My house is also filled with noise from day until night. I’m living with a family of 12, along with about 15 chickens and 12 little chicks. My 2-year-old nephew loves to test the strength of his vocal chords, as does his 3-year-old cousin. Of my seven brothers and sisters, two usually stay around the house on summer days to do chores (like washing the bowls and fetching water from the well). Four walls surround the two small houses the family shares, and tucked into a corner of two of the walls is a small little room with an iron-barred window looking to the outside. Several times a day someone will shout “cawn!cawn!”, the Guinean version of “knock!knock!”, looking to buy something from the tiny store. Jaqueline (13 years old) or Daniel (10 years old) will run over to the room and sell a pack of batteries, fuel for a lantern, or maybe a sucker. There aren’t many toys here, so young kids often play by just helping with the chores. My 3-year-old brother Benjamin spent 15 minutes last Saturday helping me wash a handkerchief as I scrubbed the rest of my laundry outside on a washboard. He finally decided he’d had enoughafter the rain began pouring down on us.
Gotta run. Can’t wait to share more with you. À la prochaine!
Kevin
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