Padre Chupa

Back to civilization! Hello everyone!
I´ve spent the last week at a little school in a village about an hour out of otavalo into the Andes mountains. It was foggy and rainy every day, tipical of a humid, ecuator climate, but extremely relaxing and enjoyable and overall a blast!!
My group consisted of me, and four of my other group members. We had to pack in all our own groceries to cook meals on two stovetop burners in a skillet and two pans. we had exactly 5 spoons and 4 plates, and 6 cups. it was an adventure in cooking, to say the least! but we survived. and it was fun too! We made burritos for our last night there, family style, and i think i made the best quac of my life. All fresh ingredients, that I bought for under 4 dollars. Including 3 avocados. Woot woot!
Ok, enough about food, although the planning and cooking of meals did dictate a lot of our time there. For the first day at the school, Thursday, we helped the kids with their ¨technology class¨which consisted of hoeing and planting a field for avas, or beans. It was a good activity to try to get to know the kids. The boys were the most outgoing, and spoke the most spanish. The primary language in the village was quechua, and spanish was a second language for most, that they learned in school. I helped for about an hour one day teaching the little tiny kids spanish words like-casa, perro, hermano, madre, carro. It was an experience. That afternoon, after school was over at around 1, we all relaxed and sat around outside and read. This would be a common theme for every bit of downtime we got.
The two teachers of the school, Pilar, and another one whose name i never got, but I made her a burrito!, left that afternoon with an ¨hasta domingo!¨(see you sunday!) we all kinda looked at each other after they walked away and we like...did they really just say Sunday? uh oh...Sure enough, next morning, 20 kids show up, and no teachers...anarchy broke out almost immediately, with the older girls ransacking our room, looking for the keys to the room with the food, which they found, and made oliver twist porrige. then they started asking us for cookies, which were also in that room. that´s when nick finally put his foot down. No Galletas. Then, a mom showed up, didn´t say ANYTHING, just looked at the kids with a stern face. Almost immediately the party broke up, the girls frantically cleaned out the porrige pan, the galleta box went back into the room, the little kids put the toys back in the classroom, and everyone went home. 1.5 hrs after the chaos started, it was over! And we spent all of halloween laying in our sleeping bags outside, under a overhang, in the rain, reading, napping, talking, and jamming out to nick´s ipod speakers. My "rando" genes even agreed with this plan, because I wasn´t feeling super fantastic as I think I had a little bit of a bug.
The next day, Saturday, we visited a family from the villages house, and helped them milk cows and pick beans. That afternoon, the village came to do a demonstration for us of what was going to happen on Monday in the cemetary, on the Day of the Dead, or El Dia de los Defundos. It was almost all in Quechua, except for the prayers, which were in Spanish, so I didn´t really understand much, but it was still an incredible experience. Every family came and brought a crazy concotion of beans, potatoes, greens (which tasted like grass..), avas. Then, they did a whole ceremony where they´d fill up a little bit of their food, and hand it over to another person, who´d dump it into a bag they had, and then hand the bowl back. this didn´t really make sense at the time, but in the cemetary, this means that you send a kid over to another family with food, sort of like paying your respects. Or, if you visit a family, they give you a bowl of food, and you have to eat it all, or the spirits will come get you. To sidestep this, most people have a bag they dump the extras in, which they feed to dogs later. Anyways, after they finished passing food around on saturday, they set out 2 long towels on the ground, on which they put a huge pile of potatoes, beans, avas, greens. then, after a few more words in Quechua, everyone got down on the ground, sitting in a circle, and chowed down! It was actually pretty good! I was really excited to be a part of this. It also cemeted our welcome into Padre Chupa, the community we were in, which was incredible in itself. Every day after that, we´d have someone come to check on us every few hours, ask how we were, if we were cold (such a common question here. seems like everyone is always cold when it´s under 80 degrees), and why we were napping outside. Nick and Jack slept outside the first few nights, and all the people in the village thought they were nuts. We didn´t learn why until we talked to Pilar again on Monday though. Apparently, the devil comes out at night. So, they moved inside ,so as to not step over cultural boundaries.
Sunday, we went into Otavalo to restock groceries, and that morning, me and a few others wen ton a hike about 40 minutes outside Otavalo at a lake, i don´t remember what it´s called. It was super steep, super muddy, and super fun. That afternoon we did laundry, I had a shower for the first time in exactly a week, even though it was cold, and had a good dinner with our little group, plus Brit. Then Monday, it was off to the cemetary for the real dia de los defundos. It was almost exactly like the demo we got on Saturday, but a gajillion times more crowed, and with a bazillion people, all in traditional dress. It was incredible. I could´ve sat there all day and people watched and talked with our friends from the vilalge and eaten about a ton of potatoes, but sadly, we had to go back to the school before nightfall.
The next 2 days at the school were fun, and a little sad. I played pato, pato, pato sesnil! with the little kids, and tried to teach them Red Rover (mistake!), and Jack pulled the monster out and had kids on top of him all the time, and yesterday we made bread, which i hope doesn´t make me sick, which the kids treated like playdoh. Overall, a fantastic week out in the middle of nowhere. We didn´t learn about the election results until the next morning, because that was only time international news came through the fuzzy TV, and we all celebrated all day yesterday.
I´m back in Otavalo now for a week of language school, which is, for a change, in the afternoon now, from 230 to 630. I´m staying with a family with an abuela again (hooray!) who asks me how i like my eggs and if I´m cold, all the time, but she really makes me miss my abuelas. I´ll let you know how the market goes on Saturday, I made a list of all the stuff I want to buy! Everyone have a good week!
Besos,
Katie