Yucay- English

Since I last updated you about Yucay, Mandy and I have been going out there and teaching English to some children. We met a family, the Puma family, and they immediately asked us to come back and teach English to some local school children. We began going out there on Saturdays to teach. The students varied. They were anywhere from 5-11 yrs old and mostly boys. We had one girl come the first day. Some of them could only come once because they would have to work for their parents on Saturdays but we had a good steady group of students.

Our typical day would be to leave Cusco at 8:30 am and get on a bus for a couple of hours. Now I’ll admit, these rides were pretty entertaining. My favorite was one day Mandy and I were sitting in the first seat and as we pull out of the bus place, this lady gets on and stands right in front of us. She immediately starts singing… huanyo (pronounced wino – and that’s what it sounds like). It’s bad. And I confess, I can’t sing at all so I really have no room to talk but this type of music is just unfortunate. She continues singing for some time. After she was done she went around the bus collecting money. She wanted us to pay her for singing to us!! I’ll also confess that I could not keep a straight face the entire time she sang. I’ve since repented. Once the bus ride ends, we are in a town called Calca. From here we have to get on a combi (mini van type). These can hold up to 25-30 people and are not built for anyone over 5’3”. After about 30 minutes, we arrive in Yucay at 11:00 am. We go to the Puma’s house and start teaching the kids. We would usually teach for about an hour. When we finish teaching we start walking to the next town, Urubamba. It’s about a 2-mile walk. We would usually get a snack and then start the hitchhiking back to Cusco. I say hitchhiking because that is really what we did. It’s a very common thing to do here. Usually we found something pretty fast. Most of the time they were vans coming back from dropping tourists off. They had to get back to Cusco so they would just pick up people along the way. All of the transportation would cost about $3.

The days were usually pretty eventful and entertaining. The kids we taught were precious and such a joy to teach. They wanted to learn. I mean they were there on a Saturday. We really loved going out there and spending time with them even if it wasn’t for very long. I won’t be able to go out there anymore before I leave Peru. It was truly a blessing. Please pray for the students;

Israel, Paulino, Rene, Donato, Alejandro, and Misae and the Puma family; Javier and Doris.