Dr. Tony´s house

Yesterday we left Lima for the Hogar San Fransisco de Asis, an hour from our house in Delicias by taxi. It´s in a suburb of Lima called Chaclacayo, which is a much nicer residential area than where we´ve been living. There are large, pretty houses and quiet streets to walk down to the park/playground. The house seems chaotic when you first go in, but it´s actually very well organized. There are cooks, nurses, and laundry people there, plus volunteers from the US and Ireland, to run the daily life of 61 young people from newborns to people in their mid-20´s. About half of the kids are from Lima, the rest are from various parts of Peru, and all of them need medical treatment in the city´s hospitals, which they wouldn´t be able to afford or get transportation to if it weren´t for Dr. Tony. They are all adorable. My Spanish is improving quickly from hanging out with them. It´s fun because we don´t have to police the kids too much; there are nurses to do that, so we mostly just play with them, take them to the park, bring the babies downstairs from the nursery to play, etc. The kids all have chores, and they keep the place quite clean, sweeping and washing the dishes after every meal. Everybody has a job to do. Those who can walk do the sweeping, those who can´t, dry the dishes; the older boys pick the little ones up out of their wheelchairs to carry them upstairs, and almost none of them do much whining or complaining at all. It´s really amazing. The house is absolutely full of religious pictures and statues, and Dr. Tony leads the kids in prayer before every meal. It´s encouraging to look at a picture of Jesus with kids when I feel overwhelmed... it reminds me that just being there for them is one of the most valuable ways I could spend my time. The kids liked my guitar playing and one of the boys kept requesting songs by Greenday, Coldplay, Dido, and Alanis Morrissette. ¨Feliz Navidad¨was the only song we all knew and could sing together. Not that all of them were there listening, of course--the house is too big, and the kids wander off and amuse themselves during their free time.

All of which takes my mind off the fact that the accomodations are less comfortable than in the nuns´house. Catherine and I share a room with Terri, a Belgian woman who has been working there for a year and who snores like nothing I have ever heard. She´s very sweet and knows that she keeps people up at night, so she´s offered to sleep in the clothes-storage room, which is actually bigger than our room and has a mattress... we feel bad kicking her out, but we also want to sleep at night. The room is smaller than a single dorm room at Maryland and has a bunkbed and a twin bed and not much room for anything else. The mattress and pillow are pretty lame and the shower doesn´t always have hot water, but then again my towel is big enough to wrap around me and we don´t have to stand in a bucket. So whatever, I´m learning to chill out and go with things--something in which I definitely take my cue from the kids.

Catherine and I are going to start some informal English lessons for the kids who want to learn. A lot of them do. It´s fun to be in a bilingual house where actually only three or four people are really bilingual; the volunteers speak English, the nurses and cooks and kids speak Spanish, and Catherine, Tony, our Belgian roommate and I can go either way. Somehow, though, the rest of the people manage to communicate through the language barrier. It´s also great to have the adult society of the volunteers (with their great accents!) who all eat together after the kids have had their dinner. They´re good at taking sanity breaks, such as Dr. Tony´s daily coffee break at 4 pm.

Catherine is beating me mercilessly at the cockroach-killing, so I´ve decided to stop keeping count. There aren´t any at Dr. Tony´s house anyway. I forefeit with a score of 3-6.

Llama count: still 0. Cows grazing on the side of a rather large highway next to a car mechanics shop: 1.

p.s.--There are mountains around here that are huge, bare, uninhabitable hills of brown rock and dirt. Very starkly beautiful, especially when the mist lifts and the sun or stars are out.