Thursday, October 28, 2010
First Teaching Impressions...
I taught my first English classes this week!!! It was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. We began adult English classes last week on Wednesday, but when we got there, about 20 kids had shown up for classes too. So, on the following Monday we split up the class and put 14 years and older in Jenessa’s adult class and then in my class ages 13 and younger. On the first day of class I was very worried about boring the kids, to be honest. The beginning of the first class was a little slow, but after I taught them a few songs and a few games the class started to go very well! In the first class I taught the students colors, basic greetings, the abc’s, and some parts of the body in english. Their favorite song was the body song, “Head and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes. Head and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes…” The first class had about 20 kids in it, but when I returned on Wednesday I had 36 kids. When I arrived on Wednesday all my kids ran to hug me and ask what games we were playing today and if we could do the body song again, and they really wanted class to be longer. We spent a lot of Wednesday reviewing what we talked about on Monday because there were so many new students in the class. I made the mistake of having an activity outside in the middle of class and it was really hard after I took the kids back in the classroom to reinstitute some order to the classroom. So, lesson learned, games and overly exciting activities and songs will be done towards the end of class. I really, really hate lesson planning, but the actual teaching part is a lot more fun than I gave it credit for. Afterwards I was exhausted; kids take up a lot of energy! I think, in part, what makes teaching these kids so fun is that they want to be there and they want to know how to speak English. The doctor’s wife, just a few minutes ago, was explaining to me that to pay for English class is very expensive here, so when free English classes are offered people jump at the opportunity to learn something new. I love these kids already and I’ve only had two English classes with them! This is going to be so awesome! I pray that God helps my Spanish so that I can teach them better!
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Pictures
Sorry, pictures won´t be up for a while because I´m having issue transfering them from my camera to my jump drive. Hopefully I´ll get some more up soon!
Christmas in October
Well, this week has been pretty slow, but we’ve kept busy cooking meals and keeping the houses clean. We got a new skillet this week! Rachel’s parents sent a brand-new grande sized non-stick skillet. It was the most amazing thing ever! We just stood there stirring the potatoes around and watching in amazement because we didn’t have to use all of our strength to scrape the potatoes off the bottom of the skillet. Non-stick skillets are one of my favorite things right now. I also got two packages from home this week! It was pretty much like Christmas. I think the muffin mixes and the cute little pink box my mom sent me were my favorite things. It’s so much fun to get boxes! I also got a few letters, and I love those so much! It makes you feel more connected with people back home. The rainy season as now begun here in our part of Peru. That’s a lot of fun. Lol. The first big storm gave our kitchen a good drench because the rain came in through the windows, so the second time wet nailed an old plastic table cloth to the windows to prevent water from coming in. The manual labor team has been working hard this week to put up a house for the cows because we will have some baby cows here soon that will need a place to stay away from the dogs.There also building a little house for hammocks, that will be a fun place to hangout for sure! Have a good week and God bless you!
Friday, October 15, 2010
October 15, 2010
This week, hmmm, a word to describe it. Okay, maybe three words, recovery, change, and slow. Everyone seems to become recovering pretty well from the events that happened last Friday. For some it’s still a little hard to sleep at night and sometimes you feel like someone is watching you, but we are able to talk about it as a team and help each other out. Because of the robbery on Friday we are making a lot of rule changes here at the base. As of right now, I don’t really have a defined job because the mobile team that I was a part of is being reevaluated for safety. There are three girls on the mobile team and so we need to figure out what would be the safest way to do our jobs, so in about a week we’ll find that out. A few other changes such as curfew have been adjusted as well and more lights are going to be installed at the base. So, this week to keep myself busy I’ve been helping to do a lot of cooking and cleaning. The first two days this week we had to reorganize our dental boxes and re-sterilize all of our instruments, but the rest of the days we’ve cleaned the houses really well and prepared for our visitors that we are going to have next week! It’s also really exciting that they’re coming because they are bringing boxes of stuff to replace the stuff that the girls had stolen last week!
In my cooking adventures this week, I learned how to make Locro. It is a fairly popular Peruvian dish that is chockfull of vegetables. It’s made from sapallo, which is a yellow pumpkin/squash, and then after it’s broken down into a puree with sautéed garlic and onions you add potatoes, carrots, peas, and celery. After those are cooked you add a little bit of milk and about a cup and a half of crumbled cheese and then pour it over rice! It’s soo amazing! It’s a very good dish.
Last night was a lot of fun because we had a nail painting party! I scrubbed my feet in a bucket with a spa scrub that mom had bought for me and then Miss Rachel so kindly painted my toes! It was so fun and a very pampered feeling. Lol. I think four of us got our toe nails painted and our eyebrows done last night. Lol. It was so much fun, but of course as soon as we walked outside again our feet were dusty-dirty. Not much else happenin´right now! Have a happy Sabbath everyone!
Sunday, October 10, 2010
2 weeks worth of blog...Sorry everyone!
September 29, 2010
Wow! What a day! We started our first major clinic campaign this week on Monday. The way that they work is that: for one week the whole team here at km 38 goes to a place and runs a medical clinic for one week, than for seven weeks after that Stephanie, Rachel, and me will live in that area. Stephanie and Rachel will be teaching public health to the community and I will be teaching English, music, and art in one or two of the public schools. During that time the bible workers will be holding evangelistic series and us girls will be running a vacation bible school. Our clinic for the two weeks is in Pucallpa itself, so Rachel, Steph, and I won’t be roughing the living conditions quite yet. The clinic we’re doing right now, the dental team is on their own. The dentist left back to the States yesterday.So far we have been doing pretty well. Yesterday I pulled a canine, but I broke the crown and had to dig the root out of the gum. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Some situations get a little tough, but by the grace of God we manage to get every tooth out that needs to come out. It’s amazing that here in Peru, getting your teeth pulled out is just a part of life. By the time your 12, it’s pretty normal to already have one or two of your permanent already pulled. We pull, so far, about 15 to 25 patients’ teeth in a day. Some of them want up to five teeth pulled at once! Beside pulling teeth, today I learned how to give someone a shot in the butt and how to scrape an infected burn wound so that it can heal. Today, we had to close the clinic early because there was a fire at the house.
October 3Well, 4 days later it has finally rained.Wednesday started the first night of four night of fires. We’re so tired!Friday night we had two fires and Saturday night as well. We get one all put out, and an hour or two later we see or hear of another one. Last night’s was the worst.It was the closest fire to the houses and it started at two in the afternoon and finally was put out at ten that night. Safe to say most of the property here at Km 38 is black. We were at the church near the clinic in Pucallpa when it started yesterday, fortunately there were people here to fight the fire, but they definitely needed the ten of us who were in Pucallpa. Unfortunately we didn’t know about it until we got back at around 6, but even with the extra hands it still took us four hours to put it out. They told us later that it only took a few minutes for the fire to wrap around the backside of the houses and into the cow pasture. At one point the fire actually circled around the people fighting it and they had to fight their way out of it. We have a huge tank attached to a tractor that we fill up when a fire starts and we grab all the buckets we can get our hands on to carry water to the fire. We also stomp out a lot and use shovels to put some of the fire out. We’re exhausted after four days of this. A lot of the time we didn’t get to bed until one or two in the morning. We’re so glad that God sent the rain.Clinic wrapped up nicely.The people who helped us were so awesome! The doctors saw anywhere from 120 to 175 patients in day and the dental team saw around 20 to 65 patients in a day. It was so busy, and we couldn’t have done it without our helpers. I am definitely becoming more confident in pulling teeth, but at the same time I’m still a little afraid of hurting someone. The people here think that I’m a doctor! I keep thinking that I have ten more years of schooling before that happens. Some of the teeth we pull down here are teeth that in the states the person would have been sent to an oral surgeon to have taken out. Poor Chris this week, at least two or three days all the extractions he had were difficult ones. One day it took him a half an hour to forty minutes for each of his patients. The kids that we see are so cute, and so brave! Most of them sit there very quietly and don’t even cry as we pull their teeth. Granted, we give them anesthetic, but extractions are still pretty scary things for a nine-year-old. I was cleaning a lady’s teeth and she had the cutest little one-year-old.She was lying on her stomach on her mom’s chest and as I was cleaning she was peering into her mom’s mouth, very curious as to what I was doing. Also, on Tuesday a girl of about 4 years old asked me to come outside and take a picture with her, but when I got out there her mom had her recite a speech/poem to me and then she sang two songs to Hanna and me. After that I had a baby given to me to take a picture with and one or two other kids. Lol. Guess, it’s not every day that you have so many gringas in one place. Hehe. We spent Sabbath with the church members who had helped us all week and they fed us lunch. I think that down here in Peru I have had the best chicken I have ever tasted in my life! I don’t know what they do to it, but every time I’ve had it, it’s been amazing! I eat so well down here, and I’m learning how to become quite the cook with certain foods. Still haven’t figured out how to make muffins from scratch, maybe I’ll just wait until I can get a mix. So far we’ve made pizza, biscuits and gravy, cinnamon rolls, tostadas, and a bunch of other yummy stuff. Tonight, I’ll be packing my bags because tomorrow we head up the river! That should be quite the adventure! I’ll keep you posted! God bless!
October 10, 2010
Well, we just ended a very exciting week. We went up river this last week to do some clinics in various town along the river. The clinics all went fairly well, and we helped a lot of people. The interesting parts of the week, however, did not occur during clinic. Tuesday we began our adventure up river starting from the Peru Projects launch in Pucallpa on two small boats. In reality, they were more like canoes just twice as wide. At first it was okay, but then we started going up a smaller river with shallower water. I think we got stuck on at least four different logs and it felt like we were going to capsize way to many times for my liking! I don’t think I’m much of a boat person. It was just a little too stressful trying to keep the boat balanced so that it wouldn’t flip.The first night we spent on the river was very scary for me. First of all, I don’t have a tent, so that meant that I had to sleep outside, which isn’t so bad except Peru has some unusually large bugs. Fortunately, I brought a mosquito net so I set that up between two tents and laid my sleeping bag on the sand. The mosquito didn’t stop my little visitor that night, though!We had just gone to bed and I was laying there looking at an incredibly clear sky with millions of beautiful stars when I heard this hissing sound. I think my heart stopped, literally. Then, I felt something moving under my sleeping bag and thought, “Seriously! A snake?” I was a little scared, and I took my fist and smashed whatever it was through my sleeping bag. Then I thought, “okay, good, I got it.” Not five minutes later, I here that hissing sound again! So, I quickly asked the guy sleeping a foot away if I could borrow his flashlight. I turned it on and starting peering around my little mosquito net tent and right next to where I was laying was this humongous beetle! It was about two inches long and it made hissing sounds! I grabbed my shoe and tried to smash it, but its exoskeleton was so hard that it didn’t work so I rolled it onto my other shoes and it took me three tries before I killed it in between the two shoes. I had a very hard time getting back to sleep after that. I did a thorough search of my area for more big bugs, but didn’t find any. I didn’t fall asleep for at least another hour. I told God that I couldn’t take any more bugs for that night. At least big scary ones. The next morning made up for it a little bit because I woke up to the most beautiful sunrise I have ever seen in my life! As you looked over the river, there was jungle on either bank with fog rising up through it like a cloud. And then the clouds in the sky stretched long fingers spreading a brilliant pink color across the sky and then reflecting it on to the river.Little boats were heading out and coming back from a night of fishing. It was beautiful!The next nights we were in a different town and we were able to stay in a school, which made the creepy crawly situation much better to deal with. All in total we did four clinics in four different towns over a period of three days.
Friday by far was the most eventful day. We started to travel back to Pucallpa after breakfast that we cooked over a fire that morning and we were about 3 or 4 hours away when one of our boats got robbed! Apparently, when we were passing one little port on the river, there were two guys that saw our boats and started to scope them out. About half an hour down the river our two boats were separated. My boat was a ways ahead of the other one and we had pulled over to a little island so that one of the girls on my boat could use the bathroom.While we were waiting we saw this very fast boat speed by after slowing down close to our boat.Immediately our driver knew what had happened and started heading towards our other boat. We found out that our boat had been robbed at gunpoint! They took everyones´ valuables off the boat and took three huge backpacks full of three of the girls things. One girls passport was stolen, all of their camaras and all of their money. They asked where the other boat was and if there were soldiers on it, and our doctor wouldn´t answer them, but they forced him to and he said that it was far away and had angels guarding it. They laughed at the angels part, but then the driver of that boat said that we were armed. We think that they found us in the second boat, but saw the five guys on the boat and assumed it was guarded. We are so grateful that God protected the lives of everyone on the boat even though things were taken. They are things that can be replaced. Right now everyone that was on the boat is working with the police here in Pucallpa and working on insurance and getting a new passport. Please pray that the process goes smoothly! Everyone is safe and processing everything that has happened. Thank you for your prayers!
Wow! What a day! We started our first major clinic campaign this week on Monday. The way that they work is that: for one week the whole team here at km 38 goes to a place and runs a medical clinic for one week, than for seven weeks after that Stephanie, Rachel, and me will live in that area. Stephanie and Rachel will be teaching public health to the community and I will be teaching English, music, and art in one or two of the public schools. During that time the bible workers will be holding evangelistic series and us girls will be running a vacation bible school. Our clinic for the two weeks is in Pucallpa itself, so Rachel, Steph, and I won’t be roughing the living conditions quite yet. The clinic we’re doing right now, the dental team is on their own. The dentist left back to the States yesterday.So far we have been doing pretty well. Yesterday I pulled a canine, but I broke the crown and had to dig the root out of the gum. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Some situations get a little tough, but by the grace of God we manage to get every tooth out that needs to come out. It’s amazing that here in Peru, getting your teeth pulled out is just a part of life. By the time your 12, it’s pretty normal to already have one or two of your permanent already pulled. We pull, so far, about 15 to 25 patients’ teeth in a day. Some of them want up to five teeth pulled at once! Beside pulling teeth, today I learned how to give someone a shot in the butt and how to scrape an infected burn wound so that it can heal. Today, we had to close the clinic early because there was a fire at the house.
October 3Well, 4 days later it has finally rained.Wednesday started the first night of four night of fires. We’re so tired!Friday night we had two fires and Saturday night as well. We get one all put out, and an hour or two later we see or hear of another one. Last night’s was the worst.It was the closest fire to the houses and it started at two in the afternoon and finally was put out at ten that night. Safe to say most of the property here at Km 38 is black. We were at the church near the clinic in Pucallpa when it started yesterday, fortunately there were people here to fight the fire, but they definitely needed the ten of us who were in Pucallpa. Unfortunately we didn’t know about it until we got back at around 6, but even with the extra hands it still took us four hours to put it out. They told us later that it only took a few minutes for the fire to wrap around the backside of the houses and into the cow pasture. At one point the fire actually circled around the people fighting it and they had to fight their way out of it. We have a huge tank attached to a tractor that we fill up when a fire starts and we grab all the buckets we can get our hands on to carry water to the fire. We also stomp out a lot and use shovels to put some of the fire out. We’re exhausted after four days of this. A lot of the time we didn’t get to bed until one or two in the morning. We’re so glad that God sent the rain.Clinic wrapped up nicely.The people who helped us were so awesome! The doctors saw anywhere from 120 to 175 patients in day and the dental team saw around 20 to 65 patients in a day. It was so busy, and we couldn’t have done it without our helpers. I am definitely becoming more confident in pulling teeth, but at the same time I’m still a little afraid of hurting someone. The people here think that I’m a doctor! I keep thinking that I have ten more years of schooling before that happens. Some of the teeth we pull down here are teeth that in the states the person would have been sent to an oral surgeon to have taken out. Poor Chris this week, at least two or three days all the extractions he had were difficult ones. One day it took him a half an hour to forty minutes for each of his patients. The kids that we see are so cute, and so brave! Most of them sit there very quietly and don’t even cry as we pull their teeth. Granted, we give them anesthetic, but extractions are still pretty scary things for a nine-year-old. I was cleaning a lady’s teeth and she had the cutest little one-year-old.She was lying on her stomach on her mom’s chest and as I was cleaning she was peering into her mom’s mouth, very curious as to what I was doing. Also, on Tuesday a girl of about 4 years old asked me to come outside and take a picture with her, but when I got out there her mom had her recite a speech/poem to me and then she sang two songs to Hanna and me. After that I had a baby given to me to take a picture with and one or two other kids. Lol. Guess, it’s not every day that you have so many gringas in one place. Hehe. We spent Sabbath with the church members who had helped us all week and they fed us lunch. I think that down here in Peru I have had the best chicken I have ever tasted in my life! I don’t know what they do to it, but every time I’ve had it, it’s been amazing! I eat so well down here, and I’m learning how to become quite the cook with certain foods. Still haven’t figured out how to make muffins from scratch, maybe I’ll just wait until I can get a mix. So far we’ve made pizza, biscuits and gravy, cinnamon rolls, tostadas, and a bunch of other yummy stuff. Tonight, I’ll be packing my bags because tomorrow we head up the river! That should be quite the adventure! I’ll keep you posted! God bless!
October 10, 2010
Well, we just ended a very exciting week. We went up river this last week to do some clinics in various town along the river. The clinics all went fairly well, and we helped a lot of people. The interesting parts of the week, however, did not occur during clinic. Tuesday we began our adventure up river starting from the Peru Projects launch in Pucallpa on two small boats. In reality, they were more like canoes just twice as wide. At first it was okay, but then we started going up a smaller river with shallower water. I think we got stuck on at least four different logs and it felt like we were going to capsize way to many times for my liking! I don’t think I’m much of a boat person. It was just a little too stressful trying to keep the boat balanced so that it wouldn’t flip.The first night we spent on the river was very scary for me. First of all, I don’t have a tent, so that meant that I had to sleep outside, which isn’t so bad except Peru has some unusually large bugs. Fortunately, I brought a mosquito net so I set that up between two tents and laid my sleeping bag on the sand. The mosquito didn’t stop my little visitor that night, though!We had just gone to bed and I was laying there looking at an incredibly clear sky with millions of beautiful stars when I heard this hissing sound. I think my heart stopped, literally. Then, I felt something moving under my sleeping bag and thought, “Seriously! A snake?” I was a little scared, and I took my fist and smashed whatever it was through my sleeping bag. Then I thought, “okay, good, I got it.” Not five minutes later, I here that hissing sound again! So, I quickly asked the guy sleeping a foot away if I could borrow his flashlight. I turned it on and starting peering around my little mosquito net tent and right next to where I was laying was this humongous beetle! It was about two inches long and it made hissing sounds! I grabbed my shoe and tried to smash it, but its exoskeleton was so hard that it didn’t work so I rolled it onto my other shoes and it took me three tries before I killed it in between the two shoes. I had a very hard time getting back to sleep after that. I did a thorough search of my area for more big bugs, but didn’t find any. I didn’t fall asleep for at least another hour. I told God that I couldn’t take any more bugs for that night. At least big scary ones. The next morning made up for it a little bit because I woke up to the most beautiful sunrise I have ever seen in my life! As you looked over the river, there was jungle on either bank with fog rising up through it like a cloud. And then the clouds in the sky stretched long fingers spreading a brilliant pink color across the sky and then reflecting it on to the river.Little boats were heading out and coming back from a night of fishing. It was beautiful!The next nights we were in a different town and we were able to stay in a school, which made the creepy crawly situation much better to deal with. All in total we did four clinics in four different towns over a period of three days.
Friday by far was the most eventful day. We started to travel back to Pucallpa after breakfast that we cooked over a fire that morning and we were about 3 or 4 hours away when one of our boats got robbed! Apparently, when we were passing one little port on the river, there were two guys that saw our boats and started to scope them out. About half an hour down the river our two boats were separated. My boat was a ways ahead of the other one and we had pulled over to a little island so that one of the girls on my boat could use the bathroom.While we were waiting we saw this very fast boat speed by after slowing down close to our boat.Immediately our driver knew what had happened and started heading towards our other boat. We found out that our boat had been robbed at gunpoint! They took everyones´ valuables off the boat and took three huge backpacks full of three of the girls things. One girls passport was stolen, all of their camaras and all of their money. They asked where the other boat was and if there were soldiers on it, and our doctor wouldn´t answer them, but they forced him to and he said that it was far away and had angels guarding it. They laughed at the angels part, but then the driver of that boat said that we were armed. We think that they found us in the second boat, but saw the five guys on the boat and assumed it was guarded. We are so grateful that God protected the lives of everyone on the boat even though things were taken. They are things that can be replaced. Right now everyone that was on the boat is working with the police here in Pucallpa and working on insurance and getting a new passport. Please pray that the process goes smoothly! Everyone is safe and processing everything that has happened. Thank you for your prayers!
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