For me, the whole point of coming to Lima was to kick off the start of my gap year and to do something on a grassroots level, instead of just theorizing in a classroom. I signed up with the American organization Cross Cultural Solutions, or CCS for short, which is a large-scale volunteer-placement organization operating in countries like, but not limited to, Peru, Thailand, Guatemala, South Africa, Ghana etc. Specifically, since women's issues is a subject close to my heart, I signed up to do something along the lines of women's empowerment. The placement that I got though was slightly different; apparently I will be teaching english to elementary/high-school students for the next 3 months. What I would love to do though is maybe ask the teachers to do some sort of gender-studies class, and break the boys and the girls up during a class-period once a week. If that happened, I could talk to the girls about what they believe their roles in life are, and hopefully show them that they are not limited to merely being only wives and mothers.
However, I still need to talk to the program manager about this.....
Today was my first day, and since I wasn't given much of a structure of what to do, I basically just observed a a first-grade class-room setting.... to give you a rough idea of how this was, there were 35 six-year-olds in the room who were all jumping on top of me... hahahaha. On another note, the volunteer house is really cozy. There are about 15 volunteers in total in the house, and we are fed breakfast, lunch, and dinner there. From 8 until 1:00 we work at our placements, at 2 we have lunch, and the afternoon we pretty much get to ourselves.
Fun Fact: There are these weird Peruvian crackers that are advertised all over the placed called ForTuna, and at first I was like ewwwwwww what a gross name to name crackers, even if they ARE designed to be eaten with tuna fish. I think I've finally figured it out though -- The name means "Fortune" in spanish. *REVELATION*
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