So apparently I'm an urban legend...

So a fellow volunteer, whose mastery of spanish is a little better of mine, was telling me about an urban legend they have around these parts of a man they call pishtaco (not sure how it's spelled but it sounds like fish taco with a p). It's my understanding that parents use this legend to scare their children....if you're not careful the pishtaco will get you or something like that. The legend tells of a man that will suck the eyes out of children and use their fat to power rockets and modern factories (the belief is that nothing that technologically advanced could exist without the use of human fat, kinda silly). Unfortunately for me this pishtaco is supposed to be tall, white, with blue eyes, blonde hair and a red beard....and that's an exact description of me. Now this legend isn't extremely prevalent, but I find it humorous to chalk it up to the legend when children shy away from me, rather than the natural timidness that many people have around here.

Legends be damned, it still hasn't stopped me from working with a few groups of kids. I gave two charlas (brief sessions with educative theme) to a couple groups of kids about the importance of nutrition and variety in the foods they eat. It's fun working with smaller groups of kids (I crashed and burned pretty good when I tried to teach english to a class of almost 40 kids). But the trick is figuring out games or...pretty much tricks...to get them to participate in the lectures. As mentioned above, until they get to know you, many people here have a natural timidness. This doesn't bode well for a charla where I am attempting to get participation, or even responses to very easy questions. I would ask a girl, 10 or 11 years old, what her favorite food was, and the reaction about 60-70% of the time is to blush and turn her face away or start giggling with her friends. I know my spanish is still a long way from perfect, but I'm positive that it was understood by everyone. It seems that every volunteer that I have spoken with quickly noticed how different the children act here, the natural leadership and assertiveness that seems to be fostered in young folk in the US seems to be absent here at times. This is frustrating because all of the techniques that I have used with working with kids, be it swim lessons, boy scout camps, or whatever, don't work as effectively here. A game of jeopardy worked pretty well with nutrition-oriented questions, but I will have to get creative with other activities in the future.

We've had a rare couple days of sunshine and I've been taking advantage of the opportunity to wash some clothes by hand up on the roof of the house. I'll be out and about in the town later, but gotta always watch the sky so I can take off towards home and take down the clothes on the line before it starts raining, or just hope that the host family will do it for me.

This weekend we will be celebrating the fiesta of carnival in the capital of the department, Cajamarca city. It'll be great to see some other volunteers, get together to speak english, eat some pizza and take a break from our communities for a couple of days. I believe that I have mentioned this celebration in previous posts, but it involves the youth of the city taking to the streets and engaging in a huge water balloon battle for an entire weekend. A couple people have started the festivities early and a majority of the street corners near the plaza in my town have boys sitting and waiting with balloons for some unsuspecting victim.

All in all things are going very well here, I am looking forward to the end of summer vacations for the kids, which will hopefully allow me to get a youth group together to do a couple activities, and hopefully coordinate with a couple US high schools for some cultural exchange activities. I'm still pretty healthy, had a small cold during the week last week after a few interviews with rural families who had children with colds, thinking I might have caught it from them. But I feel pretty lucky if that''s all I've got to complain about on the health front.

Alright, I'm off to get some work going, hope everyone is doing well back in the states!!