This morning, the children had fish soup for breakfast - very few of them needed encouragement to eat, which was great to see! When we got back to class, I was given the honour of holding up a clown face with holes in the eyes and mouth, while the children aimed balls through the holes. I'm glad in a way that their aim tended to be off by a long shot: consequently few of the balls managed to hit me! After that was more playtime (i.e. tying shawls and putting baby dolls in them, pretending to eat the girl who was hiding in the toy oven while she squealed with laughter, telling the little ones that we don't hit our friends, etc etc), then came work of drawing over jagged lines, then cutting along different jagged lines - today I truly learned that 3 year olds have very very short attention spans, and a few times their eyes were watching the windows while their pencils went straight off the paper and onto the table. Bless them. We stayed in the classroom for lunch - one girl was very stubborn and refused to eat her fruit, so I tried the aeroplane trick - it didn't work. I then found something that did make her open her mouth: the theme from 'Jaws'. Goodness knows why that came in my head, but she opened her mouth and finished her fruit eventually. We live and learn.
In the afternoon after a lunch of lamb steak with potato and rice, Hilda and I went to town and bought wool and knitting needles. I'm trying to take up knitting again (bearing in mind I've given up a fair few times, to say the least), hopefully this time I'll stick with it for a while longer. We met one of Hilda's friends on the bus back to the house, and she later came round with knitting annuals from the 80's to lend to me - some of the patterns seem quite nice, others I could tell were before my time (writing that, I feel almost old!). The rest of the evening was spent with Hilda teaching me and Yesy, then over some bread and milk I kept going, and soon it was 10pm, the latest I've been awake while in Huancayo (apart from when we volunteers went to see 127 Hours), and I had to stop and sleep at that point.
On the bus back to my house, Juliana told me that she'd been to observe Sonia at work - she does physio on children too ill to leave their houses. Juliana said that many of the children she'd seen were practically feral, neglected by their parents and consequently not growing well. One boy, she said, had been locked in a dark room for much of his life. Couldn't the government do something, I asked? They could give help and assistance to the families, such as Sonia being there. But the children still lived in the same house? Couldn't they live somewhere else? Only if the parents were ill or dead, came the answer, otherwise it was the parents' responsibility to raise their children. I nearly cried at hearing that. Can this change? How?
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