Second Day of Work

The real work of construction started today at Santa Rosa de Llanavilla School. Due to regulations and guidelines in Peru we were not able to work on the classroom foundation as we originally thought we would, as we are not qualified to do foundation work in Peru. Instead, we spent a majority of the day cleaning up the yard, prepping the vegetable garden, and demolishing old and incredibly rusty playground equipment with a pickaxe.

Cleaning the yard consisted of clearing away old rubble, garbage and rusty desks and chairs that had been left in the yard by the school for recycling. Cleaning this waste helped dramatically improve the quality of the yard. Getting the garden ready was a ton of work. We removed ridiculous amounts of sand across the yard in order to make room for the new nutrient rich dirt. This involved moving piles of dirt multiple times and lots of hard work. The highlight of the construction was easily the demolition of the playground equipment. This rusted out equipment was unusable for the children so we tore it out and attacked its concrete foundations, hacking them to bits until they were small enough to move from the construction site on wheelbarrows.

After the construction was finished the contingent split up for the night. One half stayed with the Peruvian Scouts at the school overnight. We had a great party/campfire where we set the evening playing charades and broken telephone in our limited Spanish, both of which ended in thunderous laughter from the Peruvians as we attempted miserably to figure out what they were saying in Spanish. We then did campfire songs where we copied the Peruvians on both the words they were singing and the dances they were doing. The most accurate description of Peruvian campfire songs would be very loud, very enthusiastic and very happy with a healthy dose of hip-shaking. It was awesome and it got even better when we played the Peruvian game “spider.” Spider is essentially a complex human pyramid where we jumped, climbed and supported other scouts in order to create a shape that ultimately, you guessed it, looks like a spider. It was tough to support the couple dozen people involved but it was the best teambuilding game I’ve ever had the pleasure to take part in.

Written by Daniel in (exceptionally) limited collaboration with Dylan.