Busy week

Hola everyone...

Today is our first day off after one seriously hectic week... We started with meetings with Warmis to discuss our work with them. We have one agricultural day a week, one dance choreograph lesson a week (we have 5 dances and 5 songs to do for the festival!) and we do education workshops on Satudays in groups of 2 to various rural destinantions with Warmis co-ordinators. We visited these on Saturday just to get to know the people, and we were split to work with women or children. Most of us just watched lessons, but I was put in a room of 16 very small Peruvian children with a load of crepe paper. They all just stared at me as I attempted to gather together my few Spanish words. I spent the first ten excruciating minutes praying for some kind of miracle, and to my relief another of Warmis staff members came to to the meeting who knew just enough English to know what I wanted to tell them and to sort me out. Phew.

We have also been given alot of church work. We are completely in charge of the Friday night youth service called Alfa. We did a load of invites and took them out into Cajamarca and handed them out to young people, and we did our first one on Friday, and despite difficult circumstances we had a very large turnout and it went really really well. We had around 25 people and we spent the evening doing silly games as a first session.

We´ve discovered the mall this week to, so we´ve been stocking up on comfort foods and spending evenings with 8 spoons and a large tub of ice cream. We had to wake at ten to 7 Sunday for the morning service (at 7 - luckily we live right next door to the church) as Cajamarca as having a cycle race organised by Warmis and Jesua (our church). It was a big national event and people were really getting into it (more lycra than is ever necessary for a Sunday). Andy and Rob took part inthe race which was 60 laps of the square, which is about 100m square. They got lapped after 5, and were flagged out! It was all topped off with Alice having to hand the prize money to the winning cyclist, beating Miss Cajamarca into handing out 3rd place.

Sunday lunch was dominated by being given a chopped chilli on a plate. All of us decied to have a go for the sake of it and went for a huge chunk. Apparently the screams could be heard for miles as we all made for taps and any source of water we could find. I have honestly never tasted anything like it, and even downing two big bottles of pineapple yoghurt would not make it go away. Silly European pallates.

We have just had our first day off and spent it at the swimming pool (well, more the sauna). All of us feel so clean after 2 hours in it! Now we are off to the mall to see Slumdog Millionaire and eat pizza. yum.

Ciao, Joel