Happy St. Peter's Day!

Today was the festival of St. Peter, also Carash’s Patron Saint. A smaller community that’s close to San Marcos. I was invited numerous times to the party but somehow sharing beers, staying out in the cold, and getting hit on by drunk men wasn’t jiving with my 102 degree fever so I stayed at home. :)
I went to the Aldea Infantil (The Baby Village, haha) which is like an orphanage but also a home for children whose parents are in extreme poverty and they have been deemed incapable of taking care of their children. I did a talk on good communication skills and did the activity that I’m sure many of you know where one group writes directions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then one person does it as if they have never make one before in their life. AND, worked out exactly like it should have! Slowly I’m figuring out how give instructions more clearly (ironically, during the communication charla, right?) Anyway, it’s difficult because you have to get the verbs exactly right, which is pretty impossible for me to do. So, what I do to make up for it is give example after example until I finally see the light bulb go on. For example (hehe), “If you said take the break and put the jelly on top, without specifiying to open the bread bag or opening the jelly container, then you would just put the jar of jelly on top of the bread bag…” Followed by light bulbs, followed by a correctly played activity. Score!
THEN, I had a meeting with those wonderful girls from ALMA who I’m trying to start that young women’s leadership group with. I got two of the ALMA girls and one friend. Super. Ok, I had planned a meeting for about ten to fifteen girls for the ALMA girls to share their experiences at the workshop and then focus on what we want our club to be. As you might be noticing, this is hard to do with ONE new girl and only two thirds of the ALMA girls. Jeez. So, again, we had a make-shift meeting in the plaza to figure out what we were going to do. But, unlike every other meeting, I came with a more concrete idea of where we were going and gave them my example of a youth group in Masac that made their own little business selling food and ended up earning enough money to go to Trujillo. They were excited about traveling and thought that this would motivate more girls to be interested in the club. Also, they can learn how to set up a small business, do some simple accounting to figure out how much they are going to make for a profit, etc. This will elevate their self-esteem and should help them to believe in themselves as young business women and also that they can set a goal and reach it. (If we reach it, that is….) So, now we have another meeting next Tuesday and we shall see. Hopefully this will attract more girls and we can actually get started. Thank you to volunteer Gracie in Masac for the phenomenal idea!
As I was walking home that evening from the plaza to my house, I ran into Ruth, who I hiked to Carhuazcancha with, and we started talking about the club that I was trying to form. She wanted to be a part of it, and I said, “Well, I want to start a Women’s Association too, how would you like to be in that??” So, this started a conversation about what themes would be good to discuss in a women’s group and the topic of mental health came up, so now I’m in the process of doing my homework given to me by the community: looking up the small business manuals that Jane gave me to start up this young women’s group and look up information on mental health to work with the hopefully forming women’s association. All very exciting indeed.