I recently held a raffle for a blender. I was in dire need of raising money so that I could buy paint for a mural project. After running through the ideas of different fundraising ideas, the raffle seemed to require the least amount of work. Well turns out it was more work that I had originally expected. It’s harder than one might think to sell a S./1 raffle ticket during a town party, apparently S./1 can buy you a lot of candy for a whining kid. But after a long day I sold all 200 tickets, leaving me with a S./140 profit for paint! Score. We held the raffle and a woman who lives in a caserio without electricity won. Hmm, well yay she won…but now what’s she supposed to do? I think she only helped me out and bought a ticket because I’d be using the paint with her kids. She said not to worry, they’re supposed to be getting electricity by the end of the year (no matter that’s what they said last year as well…)
So a week and a half later I got a knock on my door. I was early in the morning, around 6am and Dona Julia wasn’t in town, so I wasn’t expecting any visitors. I opened the door and it was Jose, the son of the woman who won the raffle. “Good morning Yeni,” he said with a grin, “I was wondering if you could do me a favor?” I couldn’t think of a reason why not so I asked what the favor was. He pulled the blender out of a bag along with 5 bananas and a can of milk. “Can I use your electricity to make our juice?” Oh it was just too cute so I said “of course” and brought him and his supplies into the kitchen. We blended up the bananas and milk and then realized a fatal flaw in his planning. He’d biked the 20 minutes to blend his juice and forgot a leak proof container. After thinking for a few minutes I let him borrow a Tupperware of mine and he left with a big smile and his goods in a bag. An hour later he was back at the door with my washed Tupperware and a thank you message from his mother. It was just too cute.
Copy Cat
There is a girl in the 5th grade of Primary school who thinks I’m the coolest thing since sliced bread…and believe me, sliced bread is still a pretty big deal here in Peru. Her name’s Jenny (go figure) and she lives in one of our caserios on the other side of the river. Since her parents are somewhat worthless and her older sisters have long since left the house (well, the town for that matter) she has very little options for a female role model. Now normally I would have hoped a teacher, a neighbor, or another kid in the neighborhood could take this role model position off my hands—but the teachers are only there to receive their pay checks and could care less about teaching, all of her female neighbors never finished primary school, and the older kids hate school. So I guess I’m better than those options right?
Jenny’s always been slightly different from the other girls according to the teachers, she’s “weird” because she likes to play soccer with the boys instead of volleyball with the girls and she actually seems to enjoy math and science portions of her class (however lacking they might be at this school). So basically she was a girl after my own heart before I even met her, soccer playing math geek sounded very familiar to me being the math major tomboy that I am. So I invited her to my math tutoring class on Tuesdays, it’s usually for the kids who are behind in their classes from 1st to 4th grades but I figured I could find something harder for her to do. She’s now finished with her 5th grade math text (a whole 3 months before the school year ends) and has moved on to the 6th grade text.
This past week she showed up at tutoring sporting a Camo Fox Racing hat. Now I will say that this hat is most defiantly of the black market variety, but still, this girl had to have put in some hard hours looking for a camo hat in Peru. I’ve only ever seen mine and one in the airport when the NCSU students came through town. She walked in the door with a grin, trying to hold back her excitement to tell me about her new purchase, but finally gave in and busted out a “Look what I found this weekend in Chiclayo!” while smiling ear to ear. She made a point to show me that they even were the same type of camo—Yes people she made sure she didn’t get the army camo, she got the woodland camo print because that’s what’s on my hat…now that’s hard core.
Needless to say, I’m impressed even if it doesn’t impress ya’ll.
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