This weekend I made a mad dash into Chivay to shower and do
some market shopping. Upon my return, Gray had appeared at the house after
another adventure into the mountains. This time, he had been traveling with the
first team to voyage the amazon river from it’s birth here in the canyon to its
far away basin (a new mouth of the amazon was found about a month ago only
about an hour’s hike from Madrigal).
He helped Don Juan move the pigs from our house here, to a
pen on the more Southern side of the city so that Doña Juana and I can plant a
vegetable garden where the pigs were here at the house.
Last week, before the
VALE party, I needed to bounce into Arequipa Friday in order to get the
rest of the world spices and cooking supplies. While I was there, I saw a sign
for a book festival. Extremely curiously, I went to pick up a brochure to see
what it was all about, and a woman working the stand ended up giving me an
entire calendar of the event as well as directions to the location at the university
on the outskirts of the city. As I flipped through the schedule I found a
familiar name. Javier Arevalo is a Peruvian author that gave peace corps
volunteers a lecture on Peruvian illiteracy about a year ago. I had met with
him, personally, following his lecture in lima to run the VALE program by him.
He had given me some fabulous suggestions and clued me in on an NGO he is
starting to get inexpensive books to rural communities. As I am wipping out my
phone to give him a ring friday, I see that he is speaking at that very moment
at the festival. So, Gray and I jump in a taxi and arrive in time only to catch
the end of his presentation to high-schoolers on how to take advantage of a
library. He calls me up to the stage when he finishes speaking and we chat
about the program for a bit. In this time he encourages me to buy as many books
as I can for the Madrigal library that very day at the festival not only
because it is probably the only time I will see such good quality books in
Arequipa (which is true, most books you find here are illegally printed
copies), and a portion of the profits would be going to a small community
library, a community that looked strikingly like madrigal. As Gray and I
already had our return tickets to Madrigal, we had to re-game-plan. We decided
it was possible if he did some of the grocery shopping while I book hunted then
we could meet at the same bus termimal this afternoon that we deboarded this
morning.
I ended up buying two large boxes of ‘starter library books’
for Madrigal from the Vale budget; About 50 3-10 year old books and about 50
books for adolescents and adults. The kids books are full of interactivity with
pop-outs and see through human bodies as well as a really lovely bedtime series
with short stories with beautiful illustrations. The teenagers got a horror
series as well as Peruvian authors short stories series that has the quechua
languange thrown in here ad there. Then there is a reference section that I
really focused on art, a dictionary with Aymara, Quechua, English, Spanish,
French, and German translations, and then some random sciency selections. The
point of everything being as fun as possible.
So, this week’s theme is, “Do I like to read?”.
The kids come in the room and I have their reading level books
set up on a table under a thin blanket. I hand them each their own personal
copy of the book El Principito, and we curl up on a donkey blaket (that’s all I
got), and read a chapter. Here the author traveling through space described the
little prince on his tiny planet pulling every weed he could find. We discuss
all the symbolism involved from everything starting as a seed and growing, to
taking care of our planet, to removing all the weeds from our lives so we grow
healthy. Then pictionary. There is this special leg up Peace Corps Volunteers
have here because these children don’t know games that you or I have known
since childhood. I explain the rules of pictionary, and they begin to draw
topics from a bowl. Of course we had things like “seed” and “weed” and
“planet”, but then I threw in some nasty verbs like “explode”, “to take care
of”, and then adjective: “night time”. They did great, and loved it. This fed
into an activity where they drew their lives as a tree. With their roots
exemplifying their influences, their face in the trunk, then their attributes
in the branches. This was a good self esteem exploration as well because they
were instructed to ask their neighbors about their attributes. I have to admit,
that went well. The little 3 and 4 year olds had trouble with the idea of
influences, so I used the words, “What is important to you?” when helping them
write out their words. My favorite was Norma’s response, “My mom, my birthday,
and dancing.”
Upon finishing their projects the books were unveiled and
they all returned to the blanket to read for hours. I was so busy reading to
the little guys book after book I wasn’t able to take any photos. Just picture
it:
Corner of a cement room
Sitting on a donkey blanket
With not only a circle of children, but little ones climbing
over my shoulders
As I read them the first book they have ever read for fun,
“Where is my egg?” where a mother condor searches for her lost egg (kind of the
opposite of the well known, “are you my mother?)
As a mountain of books piles up next to me ‘to-be-read’
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