Sports Week and Oxapampa

Our second week in school was a little hectic. Wednesday and Thursday were sports competitions in Huallamayo with multiple schools. At my school only second and third grade had class. I went to third grade both days and made progress with that class and the teacher which was nice. All of the other grades returned on Friday but we had high school sports championships at our school that day so it was still a little hectic. I worked with the fifth graders but there was no power in the school so they could not charge the computers. We used grabar to conduct interviews. The children interviewed me and Alli and we interviewed them as well. They then took photos with us and we showed them how to put the picture into escribir and write a story about the picture. The stories were hilarious. They went something like this. "I am here with Rebecca in Aquimarca. Rebecca came here from the United States. She is teaching me everything about the laptop. Alli smiles a lot and so does Rebecca. They are tall and have big noses. Rebecca sings songs, dances, and plays soccer with us..." I was laughing so hard. I am going to go back and get a copy of all the kids documents.

Yesterday we took a very uncomfortable 3 hour taxi to Oxapampa. Oxapampa is a really cool town in the Andes with German decent. The Germans settled here in the 1800's and there is still a lot of German influence although they almost all speak spanish. We went to a German pub last night where the locals were all speaking Spanish but sang a couple old German drinking songs, it was pretty cool. The people are also much lighter skinned then the Peruvians we have seen in other parts of Peru. Oxapampa is about 1800 meters high so it is much lower and therefore warmer than Paucartambo. It is more like the jungle with mountains in the background. We took a tour today to a river where we hiked up to an awesome waterfall. We went under the waterfall and the water was soooo cold that I got a brain freeze just from the water hitting my head. We then hiked up the side of the canyon to the top of the waterfall and continued hiking to many cool little bridges. When we returned we ate lunch at a typical Oxapampa restaurant where we had grilled meet including chicken, pig, chorizo, and lamb. It was amazing. I also found, which might be the highlight of the day, an ice cream bar with peanut butter and chocolate filling.