About three days a week I go up to the countryside to teach English, conduct interviews, or film a documentary. Those days the morning is considerably longer, since we leave early and get back late, just in time to have lunch and take a short rest before going back to work in the afternoon. However, the tempo at work is not quite the same as in Finland, and I have taken the liberty to make phone calls on Skype, upload photos on Facebook, and write e-mails while supposedly working.
First and foremost, I teach English at two secondary schools near Cajamarca, in Cushunga and in Chamis. Below, the Chamis school building, brand new (no running water, indoor toilets or electricity, though).
There are no textbooks to bide by, and what comes to the study plan, I have been given a free hand. On one hand, very liberating and inspiring, but on the other hand, quite challenging. There is a lot of preparing to do, since I cannot just show up and tell the pupils to open their workbook on page 56 and start with exercise number 2. Of all my groups, only the Chamis second graders knew a little something to begin with, so with all the rest I started from scratch.
At first the pupils were a bit intimidated by my participative methodology. What they are used to is copying quietly what the teacher writes on the board. My goal is to get them to relax and to open their mouth, so we sing, play games, act out small sketches. And if we have some fun in the meantime, all the better! Thanks to the English School preschool, I know hundreds of children’s songs, and have been drawing on that repertoire. Head, shoulders, knees, and toes seems to be the pupils’ favourite up to now.
Little by little, the pupils have grown a lot more active and brave. Now they are eager to practice what they have learnt: once they spot me climbing up to the school, they all shout “Good morning, teacher! How are you, teacher!” I have even got some of the students to call me “tú” instead of the more formal “usted”, which in Peruvian schools is surely unheard of.
Compared to Finnish teenagers, Peruvian secondary school kids are incredibly well-behaved, respectful, and motivated. Few children in the countryside have the chance to continue in secondary school, and I have the feeling that my students are quite conscious of that. What bothers me, though, is that about one in every 15 pupils is a girl. Poor families in the countryside apparently do not see the point in sending girls to secondary school, since all they will become in life is mothers and housewives anyway. Below a picture of the Chamis first graders, no girls among the group.
Every school day takes up a lot of time. I leave Cajamarca together with the other teachers at 7:20 a.m. by taxi in order to arrive at the school at 8 or 8:30, depending on which school we are going to. There are apparently no traffic rules regarding the maximum number of passengers, or at least they are not effectively enforced, since we are usually between 9 and 11 in a normal 5-seat car: two plus the driver in front, four or five in the back seat and three in the trunk. Add bumpy and winding roads, and you probably understand why the morning car ride is not my favourite part of the day.
After four classes, it is time to head home. I return to Cajamarca on foot: two hours from Cushunga, one and a quarter from Chamis – walking at a fast pace, that is. I like the return trip a lot better. Walking is good for you, and the scenery is magnificent. Every time I come across another wayfarer, we greet each other. Sometimes people are curious to know who I am and where I am from, and we stop to chat for a short while.
Besides teaching, I have been busy translating documents from Spanish to English and Finnish, transliterating stories, helping out at the office, and writing articles for the book that is to accompany the Turvallinen maailma – Un Mundo Seguro photo exhibition. Below is a picture of some of the primary school kids I interviewed about family relations.
Next week I plan to go watch how the Fiesta de San Juan (24th of June) is celebrated in Chamis and conduct some interviews to write an article on communal feasts.
My most recent project is filming a documentary on some mummies that have been found up on the mountains in Jamcate, 28 kilometres from Cajamarca. For the time being, they are stored at the local primary school. That means that they have been dumped on a table in the storage room – no glass cases, no air conditioning, no fences. The mummies date back about 500 years, and they are extremely well preserved: you can still make out each toe nail. The locals are building a museum for the mummies, and the idea is for the documentary to be a kind of advertisement for the museum. I have already climbed up the mountain (4.000 metres above sea level!) to film the caves where the mummies were found and the breath-taking scenery.
Next up is filming the mummies, which slightly freaks me out, because I fear it involves actually touching the 500-year-old corpses and arranging them in photogenic positions.
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