¡Vamos al campo! (let’s go to the country side!)

On Saturday I headed to La Ladrillera for drawing class #2 and it was a lot of fun. The time flew by and afterwards the kids were excited to head outside to play again. They are lucky because most kids in Chiclayo don’t have this privilege as there is only ONE children’s park in the whole city!

[Side story: I went to the Children’s Park yesterday afternoon before my ensemble rehearsal. It is a decent park with playground equipment and many plants and flowers, but it could use more open space for children to just run around and be kids.

Yesterday’s ensemble rehearsal was thoroughly amusing. At one point, the seven of us laughed so hard to the point where we couldn’t even breathe–Marcos, our violist, is a very humorous soul who keeps us entertained with his wit and unique attitude towards life. And at the end our maestro gave us free tickets to see his students play a Suzuki methods violin concert next week–I am already excited to see the future musicians of this city play the violin!

When passing the childrens’ park when we were taking a convi back towards the city centre, we saw a marinera (local dance) rehearsal (click here for pictures) happening in the park. I was happy to see that the park is at least used for something when kids are no longer allowed in it (6pm), but I can’t help but feel bad for the tens of thousands of kids in this city who are seriously deprived of play areas…)].

Ah, yes, pictures from La Ladrillera (after the drawing class)…

Bags of rice produced in the fields and the mountains to the east in the background.

Meet Ricardo and his cow!!
This was Ricardo 30 minutes prior with his drawing, inspired by a leaf cut out of recycled wrapping paper…

Below are a few of the other drawings, also inspired by the wrapping paper I brought. The only guidelines were that they each had to choose one scrap of wrapping paper, glue it as they felt would be best to their paper and then fill up all of the remaining space with colour–no white space allowed! That last guideline was the hardest for the kids to follow, but they managed just fine and created some beautifully unique works…

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On Sunday I headed with the other Canadian interns and two Peruvians to the Señor de (Lord of) Sipán archaeological site, about 35km east of Chiclayo. This was not an Incan site, but rather one of the Moche (Mochican) culture. It dates to about 300 AD and was discovered by Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva in 1987, but unfortunately many of the originally artifacts were stolen (only some have been rightfully returned to Peru).

What an adventure we had out to the countryside to visit the ruin site, about an hour on a very bumpy bus ride through hundreds of hectares of sugar cane, a sea of green in a dusty desert climate…

I was thrilled to come close to mountains and enjoy new scenery, open landscapes which are not crowded by buildings or people. I could have stayed out there all afternoon, but I had to return to lead a youth/children’s session in the late afternoon, so our visit was brief.

Here are some of the local farm animals enjoying the juice of some sugar cane that had fallen from the huge trucks, followed by pictures from the visit, first in the museum and then at the ruin site.