We spent the entire afternoon of Day 4 visiting student center PE-359. This project was near the city center of Huancayo. We were met by another large welcoming committee of students and their parents. Check out the little guy in the handmade flag shirt - ingenious! Obviously I thought that was a great idea, but in reality it's pretty cool that they likely made that for our visit to their church. If I had cell service I would've signed up for Twitter just so I could tweet the last picture. #spellcheck
When we first walked inside from the church the band on stage started playing some music. We danced in circles with some of the students before finding our seats. After the dancing everyone else joined us in the chairs. I'll be posting a video of this (and other videos from this day) in my next post. As we experienced at the other churches, the main pastor greeted us to his church through a translator. This particular time the translating was done by a member of the in country Compassion staff, Soledad. I think she was the communications specialist for Peru.
After our warm welcome the church kid band played a couple of songs for us with a variety of instruments. The music was dominated by the pan flute. A couple of the guys played the "heck" out of their pan flutes and you'll get to hear it in an upcoming video. At the end of our visit to this project we were given a treasure of a gift. Either the band or others at the project had made us each our own fully functioning pan flutes with the words "Huancayo" and "CDSP-359" written nicely on one of the longer parts. Each tube on the flute was labeled with the correct note (e.g. Do, Re, Mi, etc.).
We walked around this center for a couple of hours, stopped by each classroom for a demonstration of their work. We saw a couple of demonstrations of silk screening (and were given these t-shirts when we left), a photo and video "studio" complete with adjustable lighting (we left with a copy of our photos), another cosmetology room, and a computer lab.
The computer lab was used for many things, but one of the uses was for writing stories (and learning how to type). The kids below had all written stories for us. They read them aloud while the translator told us what they meant in English. A few of them had printed out their stories for us to take home with us as a gift. I couldn't help noticing that a lot of the girls were around Julia's age...and how this would be exactly something she would do. I also couldn't help noticing a small pocket of younger boys (Jonathan) huddled around another computer. They had started playing a computer game.
Towards the end of the day our group was getting pretty tired. I found myself taking extra long bathroom trips and lingering in the halls instead of interacting with a bunch of children in a classroom. All of the travel and social stimulation has used up my introverted energy bucket. I shot the two pictures of the local area while loitering in the hallway. A few minutes later a un-visited classroom door at the end of the hall swung open. Out poured dozens and dozens of young kids. It was pretty funny to watch. They were all pushing, shoving, and trying to get around each other to give us hugs. I don't have pictures of myself getting "hug mobbed" because I had the camera and because I was trying my best not to fall backwards from the weight of all the kids. You can see one little girl in white in the picture below. She gave both Ben (pictured) and I very long hugs. As in like she gave us a hug for what seemed like a hour but was probably more like 30 seconds..more like a snuggle.
We gathered once again at the bottom of the building in the sanctuary for some more music, goodbyes and gifts. Since it was a long day and we had to catch a very early flight the next morning, we all had dinner back at the hotel and hit the hay pretty hard. This concluded the first part of the trip - the part where we visited the children. Our flight the next day back to Lima, followed by a long layover, and then on to the ancient Inca capital of Cusco was the start of the adventure part of the trip.