A Day in the Life

(Pic: Top, My bedroom. Bottom, Me teaching.)

Your alarm goes off at 6:00 or 6:20 depending on whether you´re showering that day. You put on your iPod (and thank goodness you brought it...music is that perfect little piece of home when you need it) to play Soul Puppet or Ingrid Michaelson or John Mayer, and brush your teeth using a bottle of water. Swipe your face clean with one of the cleansing towelettes you brought. Throw on a dingy pair of jeans--it´s about time to do laundry--a t-shirt, your fleece, sneakers, check the 4-by-4 inch mirror to make sure your bed-head isn´t shockingly horrendous, grab your bag stocked with survival necessities plus the day´s lesson materials, and head to breakfast. Carla has prepared scrambled eggs, and there´s always bread with butter, and coffee--the coffee here is amazing.

You have a brief conversation with her, but still can´t kick the frustrating feeling that you´re stuck in some foreign film, devoid of much-needed subtitles. What´s the conflict? What are these characters deeply like? How do they find their resolution? Someday you´ll look back, and you´ll know. But for now, you finish your breakfast, express sincere gratitude, and walk five blocks to the Projects Abroad office where you meet up with three other volunteers and hop into Edgar´s cab. His son isn´t sleeping in the trunk today, but the seats are soaked with water...hm...the windows must have been left down during last night´s downpour.

You don´t mind the one-hour drive because it´s good thinking time and good picture time. You always rest your camera in your lap, prepared to snap a shot of the ever-changing landscape. Of the perfect patchwork in the quilted sea of hills, rolling off into lazy grayness. It´s different everyday and the beauty astounds you. Unfathomable how the weather can entirely change the look of the same vast plot of land. It all depends on the way the sun filters through the clouds, sporadically illuminating patches of green, or the way the cloud cover hangs low in the air, casting a diffused light over it all. Bright sunbeams pour down on the Andes, and their snow caps, a glowing beacon between land and sky, invite you for the hike of your life; but when a canopy of clouds hangs around them, swirling in close, all you can see are the jutting, jagged peaks, and they warn you to stay away, to stick to the road and the green grass. Everyday is like you´re someplace new and no photograph can do it justice. You marvel. You wish you could print pictures from your memory; or that you could look around and breath it all in and never exhale.

When you arrive at the school, you briefly greet the other volunteers who´ve traveled from towns besides Urubamba, then make your way into class, scheduled to begin at 8:30. Today you´re teaching them about hobbies, to like and to dislike, and reviewing the human body vocab. You teach them Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes and then sing it all together, choreography included. Everyone loves it and it´s so fun, it´s hard to stop laughing. After the half-hour break, from 10:30 to 11:00, the class breaks up into groups and you sit with your section of six (there are 18 in your class), talking about hobbies, which inevitably leads into other conversation. But it doens´t matter--they´re learning English and you´re learning Spanish.

Class is out at half past twelve. All the volunteers walk together to the usual cafe, enjoy a coffee and some lunch for an hour. Then you all walk over to the Cusco Projets Abroad office, which is a cute, miniature Harry Potteresque house with violet dining room walls. You and Monty and Julia prepare the lesson for the next day, which can take anywhere from one to two hours. By four o´clock you´re about ready to head back to Urubamba. Somehow, it´s always five by the time you´ve reached the bus terminal.

You´re home by seven and starving. Generally, you eat dinner with Alejandra and Camila in the pizzeria because Carla is in the kitchen rolling dough for the next order and Marco is still at work. It´s hawaiian pizza tonight. The hawaiian pizza here is like none other, with pineapple that tastes like it´s just been cut open, big fresh chunks in every slice. Again, you express sincere gratitude before heading upstairs to the apartment.

Tonight you have enough energy to spend half an hour drawing with Camila and french-braiding her hair. Then, you journal, read a chapter of Luke, and hit the lights by ten. Tomorrow will be much the same, and yet entirely new.