First day of school

At the moment there is a massive teacher´s strike in peru. I went to school yesterday but not today or tomorrow. I guess the problem is that the government is trying to institute an exam for teachers and the teachers are refusing to take it. education here is pretty old fashioned. Yesterday they were tryig to teach the 3-5 year olds bar graphs with all of them sitting still and listening. most of them didn´t quite have the grasp of their numbers yet, so it was pretty pintless exercise. in the high school the kids have names rather than numbers.

This keyboard, byt hte way, is terrible, hence the multiple spellng errors.

Anyway, I am n a class of 18, 8 girls and 10 boys between the ages of 3 and 5. The twn is so poor it has no store, no telephone. I don´t know about electricity. The only reason it has a school is because it´s along the man road i guess there are zens of towns like this in the mountains that have nothing. I have a whole new set of vocabulary to learn, things like ¨stop hitting him¨and üse your inside voices¨ and and all kinds of other things that we just didn´t learn in spanish cass. i also need to learn "I think he just wet his pants" but I don´t think theteachers seem to care about that one.

The town is a ten minute bus ride--an insane bus ride-- from here, so it´s completely different. My town, Ollantaytambo, is beautiful. It´s the only functioning inca town in the andes--the streets have incan cobblestones, teh houses inca stone walls... it´s pretty incredible to think about the history.

Today the host family is takling me to get some sort of pass so i can get into places for free, including teh incan ceremony on friday that´s happening in the ruins. it´s the reenactment of ollanta, an incan warrior who fell in love with a princess. it has the usual ending. But it´s supposed to be a pretty spectacular event. I´m pretty excited.