Summer in the Sacred Valley: Finding My Stride

The sign outside our school.

The last couple of days have been absolutely awesome in terms of getting a lot of work done during my service projects in the morning. On Thursday, Hannah and I taught two classes on air pollution and reviewed numbers in English with our students at 711 school, followed by another productive one-on-one Spanish class with my teacher, Miriam. For the first time, I felt comfortable in front of the 25 fifth graders who are more than capable of making a white dude with average Spanish skills feel like an idiot. Be that as it may, we did a cool activity with chalk and vinegar to demonstrate the effects of acid rain, and they were excitingly memorized by the little bubbles in the cup.

In between our two classes, I got to go play soccer outside with the kids. Granted I quit the sport after my friends' moms stopped handing out oranges at halftime (circa 1999 according to Warrior Nation Sports Blog ancient archives), I had a blast just running around with the kids, finally feeling like an equal rather than an outsider.


Kids playing at recess.

I went home to lunch, then trekked back up to the non-profit office, which sits at the base of a steep peak with a cross on top of it. David, another environmental teacher at 711 from Duke, hiked with me up to the cross in our best time yet since we've been here, hopefully proving our readiness to to get up to the 17,000 ft. glacier this weekend.

This morning, Hannah, Emily, David, and I met Ameriko, our supervisor at the farm, at 7am ready to melt in the boiling greenhouse again. To our liking, Ameriko threw us a wildcard and told us we'd be making liquid fertilizer. The recipe was somewhat similar to my sister's, Meaghan's, first attempts at chicken stir fry.

It called for:

1. one wheelbarrow of cow shit
2. 2 kilos of fish heads
3. 3 kilos of chicken guts
4. 6 liters of Chica (Peruvian corn beer, we'll get to that at a later date)
5. banana peels
6. alfalfa
7. peas
8. water
9. brown sugar
10. yeast
-let ferment for three months, apply to soil, and in no time you'll have plants yielding bigger and brighter fruit than the occasional gems at Stew Leonard's.

After we collected all the materials from the local market (save the cow feces, which required a simple shovel job), we got to mixing and matching.


Stirring up a pot of the worst smelling soup I've never had.

We finished up on the farm around noon, and I've spent the majority of the afternoon preparing for our hike this weekend. Below are some pictures from our work on the farm.

Not even Mr. Kach could cow tip these monsters in his day. If you look closely into the mountain in the background, you can make out a "711" carved into the mountain. Schools do this in Urubamba as a symbol of academic pride.