Where's Grayleen?

My twenty six hours starts mid flight to Lima, Peru at just past midnight on Friday night. Over the previous hour of our flight from Bogota, I’d had a marvelous chat with Deanna, a special education teacher from northern Virginia. Deanna was heading to Lima along with her hair dresser, Erika, and a group of Erika’s clients who have all been helping Erika in her support of a boys’ orphanage here in town. They are visiting the children and gaining a better understanding of the needs of the orphanage.

Hanging out

Start the timer when I admit to Deanna that we still haven’t figured out the very small detail of knowing where we’re going to spend the night after we land in the dead of night in a completely foreign city. Perhaps we’ll sleep at the airport. Deanna asks Erika, who knows more about the area, to advise us and Erika doesn’t miss a beat in offering to let us stay with them on the couches at the house her parents own in the area. We accept, of course! A bit later Erika comes back and suggests that we stay instead at the orphanage – they have a private guest room and the logistics made sense in terms of us fitting into the minibus heading that way.

Ready for lunch

Upon landing, we head through customs with our new friends. They each have 150 pounds of checked baggage which is all donations of clothing and toys for the orphanage. Our job is to each just walk along next to someone in order to increase the human-to-bag ratio for the entire group. Jennifer gets stopped by customs and fined (apparently it’s not copacetic with the customs folks to bring in huge bags to donate to orphans) but is through no worse for wear after fifteen minutes.

Aileen and I end up in the minibus with the group of four orphans who’d come to greet Erika and her friends for their 1am arrival, Miguel who is the director of the orphanage, and another of the tutors for the kids. The kids hum and play the Beatles song “Yesterday” on the recorders Erika brought for them. One of the kids asks Aileen what the word “yesterday” means in Spanish and it takes us a minute to match the word up with the song they are playing. This is all pretty surreal. We arrive at the orphanage, Santa Maria, around 3:30am and are shown to one of the nicer rooms we’ve stayed in during our trip. I fire up the computer, mostly out of habit, and discover a working, unprotected wifi connection. I tweet about my crazy night and pass out.

Enjoying an orange that Erika brought

We’re greeted by a knock on the door and the promise of breakfast at around ten in the morning. We head out and meet up with Miguel who leads us across the courtyard and to the kitchen. He pulls out some bread (baked by the boys at the orphanage), jam, butter, and coffee and sits down to chat while we eat. Aileen’s high school Spanish pays off and she is able to tell Miguel all about us. Miguel listens intently and asks many clarifying questions. He says that he’ll later tell the children about how studying hard and learning about computers can open doors for the future. Role models are always in short supply at an orphanage.

Look at those skills!

Aileen and I spend the morning meeting the children, playing with them, and taking a grand tour of the orphanage. The boys are particularly excited to show us the animals they keep: horses, dogs, and pigs. Aileen is particularly struck by how much attention the kids seek; even kids at that age where we expect them to be ‘too cool’ for adults are constantly reaching out to hold hands, get a hug, want their picture taken, and are hanging upside down from the jungle gym shouting, “Look at me!”. Personal attention is also in short supply at an orphanage with 130 boys ages 5-18 and only 8 adults. Erika and gang show up around lunch time and we spend the afternoon taking a more formal tour and learning about life on the orphanage. Miguel tells us we’re welcome to stay for a week, six weeks, or however long we like for no charge. We’re tempted, but there is so much we want to see and do in Peru so we decline.

Lunch of rice and chicken was quite tasty

After finding a nice hostel and a few much-needed hours of down time, we head out to meet up with Erika, Miguel, our other new American friends, and Erika’s Peruvian cousins for dinner. We have a great dinner and learn a lot more about Erika’s work with the orphanage (e.g. she’s already traveled five times to Peru this year to visit “her kids” at the orphanage).

Erika and "her" kids

What comes next is perhaps less surprising that our time at the orphanage, but those who know me understand it’s way outside of my comfort zone: we head out to the discotheque! Simply put, the music is blaring. I feel the beat pounding through my body. Oh boy! We stay and dance for hours. OK, I, as Aileen put it, “moved a little” while other people dance. The people watching is enthralling and the music, um, very, very loud. Around one in the morning the “model show” starts and we watch male and female models show off various crazy outfits for the crowd and professional photographers.

At 2am we arrive back at our hostel and wake the guard to let us in. I’m exhausted but truly enriched by twenty six unexpected hours. Thank you Erika, Deanna, Jennifer, Ann, Miguel, and the boys of Santa Maria for a very special experience!

More pictures here.