Today was wonderful, I started my volunteer placement with my friend Victoria, from Ascot in England, at the home for the elderly. We were both meant to work at the wah wah wasi with the little children but decided to spend 2 weeks with the old people because they rarely get visitors and they absolutely loved us when we went to visit them. Not many people choose to volunteer there, so they only get to see people when they go by in the afternoons, so when we spent the day there and saw how happy it made them we decided to spend 2 weeks with them.
Their faces lit up when we walked into the home, and they kept yelling out gringas, gringas!!. Its a big building, pretty new and very clean with lovely outdoor courtyards where the elderly sit all day. Its run, charitably, by nun's who sometimes go to the market in the mornings to beg for food when they have nothing for to give the elderly. So i think they are absolutely over the moon that Victoria and I are there for 2 weeks helping out with the cooking of lunch and helping the old people smile and enjoy their day.
We spent the first 2 hours chopping vegetables to help get ready for lunch, using very blunt knives! We were asked to chop the veges (in spanish cos obviously they dont speak english! And we got the drift) into very small pieces which we did, but they came back and told us it was way too big and it was bad! Haha, they weren't mean about it or anything but told us to try harder to make it smaller. And i mean we were cutting green beans into the smallest pieces you've possibly seen! After we finished helping prepare the lunch, we spent the next few hours with the old people doing activities. We did some singing and had some colouring in sheets which they absolutely loved! We also took a bottle of hand cream with us and massaged their hands, which they also loved, as they couldn't believe how smooth their hands were after! It was such small things but just us being there was enough to make them happy. They were chatting away with us in Quechua (native Andean language- not like spanish) so we can't understand them, but we nod and smile and say 'si' and it makes them happy :) Its amazing how such small simple things make a difference.
After placement we went to visit 2 mountain villages, Quinua and Wari. Quinua was the original Ayacucho back in the day when the spanish occupied Peru. But when the war for independance from the spanish occured, they decided to move the town Ayacucho further away, which is the town I am living in now. Quinua is a beautiful village with lovely arts and crafts, and an amazing monument at 15,000ft (above sea level) which commemorates the war. I also managed to see a dog wearing a coat! It was very cute, it was cheetah coat, which i thought was pretty hilarious considering we are in a very remote village!
We then went to Wari, a small area with a museum and some beautiful ruins from the Wari people- about 1500years ago! They have only discovered about 1% of the ruins and it was absolutely amazing. It was like discovering another civilisation- we saw the human sacrifice stone, a mass grave and an ancient set of passages. The department of Ayacucho (its a district and a town basically) are waiting on money from the government to help fund the archeological dig to discover more of the ruins. Just amazing.
xoxo millie
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