Mother's Day, Friends....and Guinea Pigs.

VEGETARIANS AND THE SQUEAMISH: SKIP TO PARAGRAPH TWO FOR YOUR OWN SAKES.

I'll cut to the chase. We ate guinea pig. It had been a long time coming, and Kira has been talking us through it (admittedly, not very persuasively: phrases like "crack open the ribs" featured). So we went and sat amongst many deft locals and ate a guinea pig each. I went for a deep-fried one, so if i squinted I could only 90% tell it was a flattened guinea pig. Sarah went for a roasted one, which was unmistakably a rodent from all angles, regardless of how much we shut our eyes. I'll spare you the details of the consumption, and the details of our mealtime conversation, save these two gems:
"You really learn a lot about the anatomy of a guinea pig"
and "Kira, I've nibbled the leg. Would you like the foot?" *Crunch* "Mmm, yummy!"





Anyway.

Mother's Day is bigger than Christmas. For well over a week we had various Mother's Day celebrations, or preparations for celebrations. During the morning church service we were outside with the kids, but that didn't stop the church leaders calling us into the service at the end to hug all the mums, who were standing at the front. But the funniest thing was without a doubt the Sunday evening Mother's Day service at church, where we began with a very interactive sermon by the church's president, during which we had to keep relaying various encouraging sentences to the nearest mother to us. The lady nearest us kept creasing up when we spoke to her, which we at first we put down to shyness, but in hindsight, was probably because the child in her q'ipi (multi-coloured, child-carrying sling) was not only not hers, but she was actually sub-20, unmarried, and childless. Age and life-stage of Peruvians is very hard to judge.
When the sermon finished, we moved our chairs into a circle, and the party games began. I'm not sure many gringos ever have the experience of watching Quechua women playing balloon games to win mother's day gifts (mostly tupperware, tea towels and place mats - no word of a lie: we wrapped them at the youth service the night before). The 'solteras' ('singles') in the room had a part to play too - we were given roses, as 'future mums', and also competed in some rounds of egg and spoon races. They loved watching the gringitas race across the room and back, spoons in mouths, eggs falling on the floor.
The evening finished with the two of us having to hold up the banner, which, after a slight correction of accent placement, read "Happy Mother's Day" (instead of "Happy Breast Day"), and people joined us for photos. It started with just the mums, but when we'd cycled through all of them, soon escalated to being everyone in the building, one by one. They also brought out a birthday cake, and sang 'Happy Birthday', which appears to be standard procedure at every celebration. I'll admit: we laughed twice as much and loudly as anyone else in the room, and that was only when we were about to burst from holding it in any longer.

On the plus side, that evening we left with the president of the church's number, and an invitation to our first church date! On Tuesday we went with a group to a church service, then went for a cafecito (little coffee) afterwards, where we laughed all evening, and got invited to go with them to Plaza de Armas, the main square, on Thursday night. We prepared a mugging plan on the way there, thanks to Jenny's warnings/stories (Sarah had all the valuables hidden in her secret coat pockets, the decoy purse on the outside one, and I would take the hits). It was as beautiful as they had promised us. We had a good laugh at all the gringos in the vicinity, and played a very intense game of stuck in the mud. Saz and I held our own, considering the altitude, for which the six natives had no sympathy. (I tried to explain that not everyone is born at 3300 metres but they didn't seem to get that as a concept.) They're now actively praying for us to stay here: when I told the 24-year-old president I quite liked my family, he told me to fly them over, and offered to find me a Peruvian husband, seeming unfazed by the time-restriction (6 weeks) and my criteria of preferable attributes (the most difficult to fulfill, of course, being "taller than me"), telling us how to say "how beautiful your eyes are -they are like stars" in Quechua, then asking if we wanted to marry a Quechua speaker...
We've been learning Quechua, to enable us to speak just a little bit to the patients in the hospital who don't speak Spanish, so we've been diligently practising it at all spare moments, much to the amusement of everyone on the buses. (Which reminds me - 'Sara' means 'corn on the cob' in Quechua, so we've taken to calling her the Spanish version: 'maíz'.)

There's not much to report from the hospital: it has been quite empty because a lot of the kids had gone home for Mother's Day. They might be back. One man tried to surreptitiously photograph us on his camera phone, but the shutter sound was hilariously loud. Oh, and one girl asked if I was Sarah's mum.

We're making progress with the kindergartens: We sang with them for half an hour on Friday. They loved it, and, for the first time, their excitement to see us was more evident than their fear! And our classes of 40 kids were as hilarious and unpredictable as ever: in the first, we told the teacher we'd take a group of six, expecting to end up with 10. Within 2 minutes of us leaving the room, we had all 40. The week after we had yet another new teacher, who had absolutely nothing prepared, so we turned our small group lesson into a full-class activity. Our Sunday afternoon kids' group is still super enthusiastic, and can't get enough of the singing. We're still waiting for our ears to stop ringing and heads to stop pounding. We were talking about the widow and the jar of oil, so we got the kids to write or draw what they wanted to pray for. One boy (7) drew a picture of some sheep and  an angel in some clouds. He explained "I don't want to be a shepherd anymore. So I want an angel to come and kill all the sheep so I don't have to be". He also gave me the biggest hug when I told him he could take his worksheet home...

Other highlights include performing onstage with an incredible Peruvian band, naming the church, and managing to get actual Sarah Stewart to watch Django. (She didn't even hate it!) We had a free house last weekend so maximised by toasting marshmallows on a fire of mainly newspaper (a short activity), trying some Cusqueña and having another round of Monopoly. I performed my first song (on the Fruits of the Spirit in Spanish) infront of an audience with a choir of Sunday School children. We've spent a bit of time with some Latin Link STEP teams that have been over this way, we've signed up to help clear the Sunday School builders' yard at 5am on Saturday (we thought they were joking. Joke's on us: they weren't) and it's been raining a lot, but other than that it's been business as usual: we're still getting hit on by every taxi driver, small children on the bus still point at us and shout "look, mum!", and we're still confused as to why they stare at me as much as the main event (the redhead to my right).

We're on for another church date and cafecito tonight. Sarah's been challenged to a sprint race. As soon as we have a day without anything bizarre I'll let you know.