Last Wednesday at school, Nina and I were told that the next day we would not be doing any teaching. Instead, the school was having Día de los Maestros (Teachers´s Day) and the kids would be putting on a show for all of the teachers. That next day when we showed up, most of the kids were all out on the soccer field and basketball court, and a few kids seemed to be working around the actual school building, putting up decorations.
For about the first hour and fifteen minutes, we spent time playing with all of the kids while the program was getting set up. I still have not gotten to teach the formal rules to American football to the kids, but that day I did bring the rubber football that I purchased at the major local outdoor market in town, Mercado Molina. So for most of that time, I tried to teach the kids how to throw a football. Given their love for soccer, most of the children were a lot better at learning to punt the football, rather than to throw it, but they gave it an enthusiatic effort.
Once the courtyard was set up, all of the kids got in their assembly lines, and the program began. The entire thing was MC´d by primarily one of the older boys, which was pretty impressive. Two of the first acts involved a student standing up in the middle of the courtyard and dramatically reciting a very passionate poem about how highly they thought about their teachers. One was done by a boy, and the other by a girl. The two kids poured their hearts out to the group of teachers, and the whole time I was thinking how you could never get a middle school student in the United States to stand up in front of their entire school and do something like that.
Next, the kids set up a table and chairs and randomly drew the names of the three teachers to come up and participate in a trivia contest. The teachers were dressed in their normal nice clothes, and each time they got a question wrong, the children popped balloons full of confetti, and sometimes sand, over their heads--another thing that I couldn´t picture happening in the U.S.
After the trivia game and couple other contests, a group of boys and girls came out in full, traditional native costumes, and began performing a dance for the teachers. It was very interesting to see the children doing something traditionally Peruvian, and they came back for a second dance later on during the program. The second dance was pretty odd because it included a part where the boys and girls, each probably around 12 years old and paired up for the dance, began fake beating each other. The boys fake slapped the girls, and the girls fake slammed the boys against the ground. Watching 12 year olds act out domestic violence in front of their enthusiastic teachers is a pretty surreal experience.
The students, then, decided to get Nina and I more involved in the festivities, and we were brought to the middle of the courtyard to play a game of musical chairs with three other teachers and the principal. Clearly the crowd favorites, we had our respective hype crews in the crowd chanting our names. Sadly to say, but probably for the best, I finished second, losing to the school principal.
The next event I was selected for was a speed eating contest with two of the other male teachers. For the record, it wasn´t really a fair contest and I came in second place again. We each got to choose between a selection of types of fruit to eat, and this gave the teachers an unfair advantage. Since Americans are advised to stick to eating fruit with a peel, I played it safe and went with the clementines, which I had to then peel during the contest. I lost to the guy who chose the small bananas (those were selected before I got my pick), but still beat the teacher who was taking his sweet sweet time with some carrots.
The last game that we were involved with was a paired race where you tried to race across the courtyard keeping a balloon between you and your partner´s stomach without using your hands. You were supposed to pop it at the end, but Nina and I had the proud distinction of being the only team to not make it that far before dropping it.
The morning ended with the kids taking all the teachers to a classroom in a back building, giving us cake and juice, and teaching us a dance to some popular song on Peruvian radio. I have plenty of pictures of the morning on my camera, but unfortunately no way to upload them on the internet cafe computers. I´m trying to take a few pictures on my iPhone and upload them to Facebook when I can catch a wifi signal in my house. However, they are not any photos from the day on my phone, so those likely won´t be up until I get back. That´s all for the post today and should get things current through last Thursday. There will be a post or two in the next few days about the incredible weekend excursion five of us took to the towns and Incan ruins in the nearby Sacred Valley this past Satuday and Sunday.
-Scott
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